Slow to revolve

On 9/11/2001, everything changed.   Forty days later, on October 23, everything changed again when Apple introduced the iPod.  It took a bit longer for the second change to reach me.  I didn't get the big deal until my firm gifted me with an iPod shuffle for "employee appreciation day" 3 years later.  Even then it took months of looking at the thing before I figured out what to do with it.  Was it just a glorified walkman for playing 45s of your favorite songs?  Meh.  When I learned it could be played over the car speakers with an auxiliary cord, it dawned on me, "It's a re-configurable mix tape!" Once I had made my first playlist for a long car trip, there was no turning back. By  2006, I was so ensnared in the iPod web -- which unlike traditional music accumulation could only be fed sitting on my ass in front of the computer, meeting me where I lived-- that when I heard that Tower Records was closing, I felt personally responsible.

I had a similar slow uptake with the mobile phone: I want people calling me when I'm on the toilet?  No thanks.  But my wife was the influencer on that technology.  Needless to say, when the iPhone first appeared (changing things once more no less) I had the luxury of pitying the first adopters as hopeless saps.   Two years later, looking for a replacement for my deceased Razr, I took the iPhone plunge and became a hopeless sap myself.  

With me, it was never about telecommunications.   In fact, who could have predicted an explosion in personal portable communication devices would spell the death of the phone call?  I use my phone as a phone maybe twice a week.  I have 233 unlistened to voicemails.  With my phone on silent mode, I ignore easily 90% of those who try to reach me. Nonetheless as it is with so many people, my phone is attached to my hand.  In an effort to be with my phone as frequently as possible, I acquired as many habits as I could-- crossword puzzles, language learning, star gazing, ocarina playing.  Mostly, I read books on my phone to such an extent that I can sense the same thing happening to Barnes and Noble that I perpetrated on Tower Records.  The more exclusively I read on my phone, the less and less Barnes and Noble is a book store than it is a tchotchke emporium.  I do still visit book stores, but it's mostly to find titles to search the iBooks* store for for my phone.

As the iPhone is to phone calls, so the iBooks app is to reading.  In the early days of the pandemic, my Books app one day out of the blue following an automatic update started notifying me when I had reached a daily reading goal I hadn't set. The default goal of  5 minutes could be met just by leaving the app open while doing something else.  As I discovered last year, reaching the annual goal required turning the final page on just three books in the span of 12 months.  Though I have no incentive to be honest and absolutely nothing is stopping me from cheating, I don't cheat.  I met the quota last year in February.  When the app began tracking my habit for me unbidden, the laughably low bar of accomplishment struck me as being possibly Apple's way of keeping my reading to a minimum, I imagined for nefarious capitalistic purposes.  But to maintain a streak of daily goal meeting requires a steady pipeline of books.  By year's end, I had read 24 books on my phone, old and new on a variety of topics.  But as I look back at the titles I read in unbroken succession from January to December, I ask myself: What does it mean to say I read a book?  

I read the Brothers Karamazov in one day when I was 18. Do I remember anything about it other than what everyone knows about it?  I remember it had a lot of pages.  And that was a physical book that I have carried with me and have had to find a place for with every move for nearly 5 decades.  What about these electronic books that are designed to conjure the page turning sensation of reading but that unlike a book can't be remembered to the touch in the way that is so useful for finding passages you'd like to read again in a physical book?  eBooks can be searched so easily; they can be highlighted and bookmarked.  But for practical purposes I find that there is only one direction in an eBook and that is onward to the final page.  I like to think that I am accumulating some kind of experience with each book, that intellectual absorption is an inescapable force of the mind, but as I look back over a lifetime of reading, it occurs to me that reading requires more activity, less passivity than an attention-deprived brain such as mine can elicit.  Have I read Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes?  I purchased it last year;  I narrated its text word-for-word to myself for weeks over the summer until I was done with it; while it consumed my time, I thought about it, was moved by it, let it argue with me and inspire me; my iPhone Books app tells me I finished it.  Somewhere in there is that book-- if you quizzed me on specifics, I am not sure offhand whether my ability to respond would surprise or disappoint me.  I have read it something like the way I saw La La Land 5 years ago and yet could not on my own begin to tell you what it was about.  So have I read Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes?  We may need a decision from the judges.

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*iBooks, Books, whatever!  By dropping the i- prefix from its app, Apple is helping you to forget that reading books on the phone and "buying" books for the phone are not the same as owning those books.  Don't forget, as I so often do that the purchase of an eBook buys you merely heavily termed access to material that could be-- and in some reported cases has been-- rescinded by Amazon, Apple and other purveyors of digital readers without warning to unsuspecting readers.  Your digital life is yours only at the will of the big tech providers of it to you, not because they have found a loophole to proprietorship, but simply because the technology allows it.