One of the problems with reading on the internet seems to be that there’s too much competing for your attention at any one time, and not a huge amount of incentive to persevere with what you’re concentrating on at any moment.
I don’t know about you, but I consider a physical book a challenge. I will start on the first page thinking, “Damn, I’m gonna feel good as soon as soon as I finish this.” There are two things I enjoy about making my way through a book: firstly, the act of reading itself, which is tied to the author’s command of craft; secondly, the really pleasant sense of completion I feel as soon as I hit the final page, which is tied to the form as opposed to the content.
The process of reading a book is like hiking (hello, dodgy metaphor!): you enjoy the journey, sure, but at the same time, the whole point of the exercise is, at least ostensibly, to reach a pre-determined end-point.
When you read online, there’s no end-point, because the internet is unstructured. The hiking equivalent of this would be heading off without a map, without any ability to track where you’ve come from or where you’re going, and with no goal in mind. You can still enjoy the stroll, but it’s fundamentally not so satisfying. One predominant reason people seem to hike is so they can feel they’ve achieved something… and so they can tell others they’ve achieved something (“Yeah, that’s right baby, I hiked Kilimanjaro…”, etc.). Our achievements are the building blocks of identity, so telling our friends of our achievements isn’t so much boasting as it is letting them know ‘where we’re at’. Same deal with reading: we don’t own bookshelves just because we need some place to store our old books. On bookshelves, our books become trophies, markers of achievement, expressions of our own personal identity (“Yeah, that’s right baby, I’ve read Kafka…”, etc.).
The internet is new, and the way we read online isn’t set. If we want the experience of reading online to surpass the experience of book reading, we need a way to mark what we’ve read, to mark out what we will read, and to develop goals for our reading. More than that, we need to mark out what we’ve read, not only for ourselves, but for others to see: we need to develop the web equivalent of a bookshelf.
I’ve been using Marco Arment’s Instapaper for several months. If you’re finding the reading experience online trying or unenjoyable, Instapaper works. The premise is pretty damn basic, but that’s kind of the idea: Instapaper offers a mechanism by which you can save individual blog posts or online articles for reading later. That’s it, really. Find a post you like, click the ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet, and the post will appear at the bottom of your Unread list. Read an article on your Unread list, and it moves to the Archive. It’s nothing fancy, but used properly, it can fundamentally alter your online reading ‘workflow’. No longer will you find yourself ambling randomly from one article to another, with no incentive to stay focussed. Now you’ve got a map, and, with that, the ability to track where you’ve come from and where you’re going.
Even better, once shared, the Archive becomes your bookshelf… and the Unread list replicates that ever growing pile of books-to-be-read sitting by your bedside table.
Comments
2 responses to “Constructing an Internet Bookshelf”
What about delicious? I’ve been using it for a few years; it was a kind of bibliography for me when I was thesis writing.. the tags are key, though they can get out of hand. Much escapes still. Sometimes I wonder if I’m trying to conjure up mental space that simply doesn’t exist….
I did try Delicious for a while. I think it might appeal to those with a penchant for classifying – those who like to keep their bookshelf meticulously organised into sections and sub-sections. Instapaper, though, is more my style: keeps me focussed, but doesn’t require a great deal of upkeep.
I suspect that other people have their own systems by which to organise the way they read online. Even something as simple as a Word document, with a list of ‘articles to read’ and ‘articles I’ve read’… I think that’s all you really need to construct a basic reading map.