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you
do
liKe readiNG off a comPuter screeN
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You DO Like Reading Off
a Computer Screen
(Originally published in
Locus,
March 2007.)
“I don’t like reading off a computer screen” — it’s a cliché of the
ebook world. It means “I don’t read novels off of computer screens”
(or phones, or PDAs, or dedicated ebook readers), and often as
not the person who says it is someone who, in fact, spends every
hour that Cthulhu sends reading off a computer screen. It’s like
watching someone shovel Mars bars into his gob while telling you
how much he hates chocolate.
But I know what you mean. You don’t like reading long-form
works off of a computer screen. I understand perfectly — in the
ten minutes since I typed the first word in the paragraph above,
I’ve checked my mail, deleted two spams, checked an image-shar-
ing community I like, downloaded a YouTube clip of Stephen
Colbert complaining about the iPhone (pausing my MP3 player
first), cleared out my RSS reader, and then returned to write this
paragraph.
This is not an ideal environment in which to concentrate on
long-form narrative (sorry, one sec, gotta blog this guy who’s
made cardboard furniture) (wait, the Colbert clip’s done, gotta
start the music up) (19 more RSS items). But that’s not to say
that it’s not an
entertainment medium
— indeed, practically ev-
erything I do on the computer entertains the hell out of me. It’s
nearly all text-based, too. Basically, what I do on the computer is
pleasure-reading. But it’s a fundamentally more scattered, splin-
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