> Anyone else have this experience?
>
> Doug
>
>
Yes, and no.
What I loved about books in college and grad school was writing in them...
you should see all the furious crap I added to Murray Bookchin's attempts to
completely rewrite history based on mutualist premises... Similarly, though
they got ruined in a basement flood, I had three or four copies of Tucker's
red Marx-Engels Reader in college - not because I felt obliged to buy a new
one each time it was assigned but because it turned out that each prior time
I'd underlined the wrong stuff.
At the same time, I can do all that with a pdf and/or a text file, it is far
more searchable and I can cut and paste quotes at lightning speed - and then
take notes/add comments on those.
I really miss, however, the sense of: "Oh, just finished chapter two, or ten
or... and there's three, or one or... inches of the book left when I read
e-books. In bed or outside, I can't imagine not folding a paperback to
crack its spine for manual manageability, though I guess it'd be nice to be
able to read in the wind without having to fight the pages.
My sense of the idea that a great deal of electronic writing has less
substance comes more from the greater number of people writing - and
therefore a far greater percentage of twaddle, flawed argumentation, half
thoughts, etc - but also from the informality that most folks use when doing
so. Its not that academic or intellectual or creative writing, at the
limit, has changed its that there so many more kinds of writing folks are
doing in almost-academic/intellectual/creative arenas, on the one hand, and
so much informal writing - from blogs to tweets to... - that abounds.
I get infuriated at the lack of argumentation in my students' work but then
remember that I'm having them do a great deal more writing than I ever had
to do, that their preparation is far below what I had going in to college
and that they've, most often, been taught to simply express themselves or
report/repeat what others have said rather to assemble, build and develop
and argument. This isn't about paper vs. bytes.
A