Finding Your Book Interrupted… By the Tablet You Read It On

Finding Your Book Interrupted… By the Tablet You Read It On

March 6th, 2012

One of the most irritating experiences that I can think of is being interrupted as I’m trying to concentrate. When I sit down to read a book, I don’t want my focus shattered every few seconds or minutes by dazzling whizbangery. Apple, though, wants to turn reading into an experience akin to watching an episode of The Three Stooges. BONK! BANG! Slap! Nuck. Nuck. Nuck.

Sorry iBooks, Paper Books Still Win on Specs

Via: New York Times:

Can you concentrate on Flaubert when Facebook is only a swipe away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy while Twitter beckons?

People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.

E-mail lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.

That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity. And some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled e-books on apps from Amazon, Apple and Barnes Noble have come away with a conclusion: It’s harder than ever to sit down and focus on reading.

“It’s like trying to cook when there are little children around,� said David Myers, 53, a systems administrator in Atlanta, who got a Kindle Fire tablet in December. “A child might do something silly and you’ve got to stop cooking and fix the problem and then return to cooking.�

“These apps beg you to review them all the time,� he said, but he remains a fan of the device.

For book publishers, who have already seen many consumers convert from print books to e-readers, the rise of tablets poses a potential danger: that book buyers may switch to tablets and then discover that they just aren’t very amenable to reading.

<!– AD CAN GO HERE

Buy gold online - quickly, safely and at low prices

END: AD CAN GO HERE –>

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Views: 0

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Leave a Reply

Powered by WordPress | Designed by: Premium WordPress Themes | Thanks to Themes Gallery, Bromoney and Wordpress Themes