Children are highly adaptable by nature, and with the exception of the almost blind, I’ve never met a child of reading age who couldn’t get into an ebook. As adults we may prefer to cling like Socrates to the old way. But trust me, we can all “get into” an ebook. There’s no barrier in the brain to reading once you’re engaged with a book. And if you say there is, if you genuinely feel that you can’t get into an ebook, then it’s probably not written well. If you give yourself a chance, you can adapt to the ebook experience. Children who are brought into ebooks now have the golden opportunity to start fresh without any preconceptions.
Now, I mention Socrates because he’s relevant to this discussion about the barrier between new and old ways of reading. If you think there’s a divide now about reading print books versus digital books, consider that in Socrates’s time, there was an argument about the value of reading itself.
Socrates was born into an oral culture, and his teachers taught him through dialogues, which were texts that they had memorized. Socrates learned early on to challenge and question those texts. He was the last philosopher of Greece’s oral culture.
His student Plato was brought up in the oral culture but had learned to read. Ironically, it’s only through Plato that we know about Socrates, because Socrates didn’t believe in writing. He never learned it and never wanted to commit himself to paper. Plato disobeyed his teacher and secretly wrote down Socrates’s teachings.
In his day, Socrates was one of the most respected (and notorious!) teachers of them all, which is why I think his words are appropriate here. He lived in a time of incredible change, when the Greek alphabet itself was first developed. (That’s an amazing innovation in its own right, right up there with hyperlinks as one of civilization’s most mysterious and unexpected inventions.)
While writing existed before the Greek alphabet was invented, there were no vowels. Greek writing, though, was invented with a one-to-one correspondence between letters in the alphabet and sounds that people would pronounce. Greek was simplicity itself. It was immensely efficient in a way that any Amazon engineer would appreciate. And yet Socrates still railed against it! (Although, keep in mind that Socrates was also skeptical of pockets and preferred, like many others in ancient Greece, to keep his money in his mouth. This is true. He would often hold his money in his mouth while walking around and take it out to talk.)
The arguments Socrates had against reading are relevant and deep, and you should get to know them. He argued that by reading, we were too lazy with what we learned. We would say that we had learned something because we read it, but we hadn’t actually pondered or questioned it the way he would, the way someone in an oral culture would when memorizing a text, by constantly listening to it and internalizing it and gradually challenging or accepting it. Socrates felt that this act of questioning was of supreme importance to personal growth.
Although I’m an ebook evangelist, in many ways I agree with Socrates, because there’s more to school than memorizing facts. I’m of the opinion that a dialogue process is important with any book, that you need to wrestle with the book (or ebook) and what the author is trying to say.
The same arguments Socrates made about reading itself apply to the digital. He’d be out in the streets right now, complaining about the lack of critical skills in children and their inability to think critically about what they read on the web. You might want to read what Socrates said in the Phaedrus and come to your own conclusions about whether we should read and how. If after that you still believe in reading, then there’s no barrier to digital reading.
If you look at the true importance of what books mean to our culture—and I mean human culture, all culture—then books, in many ways, are what separate us from other animals. Books educate. They convey culture. With a book you can set down all your wisdom and accumulated learning for posterity, and others can read your book long after you’ve passed on and still learn from you. This is how cultures grow—exponentially fast.
You can’t get this without writing. It’s just that simple. There’s a limit to what you can teach person to person through conversation alone and to what the listener can remember and build on from their recollections. And true, you can still say a lot in an oral culture such as preliterate Greece, the same culture that gave birth to Homer and his incredible blind recitations, inspired poetry of the Iron Age.
Homer’s poems were entirely oral, and like him, a diminishing number of preliterate poets still recite heroic oral stories and thus convey the core concepts that define their cultures—concepts like nobility, fighting for what’s right, and truth and justice. But it’s much harder to educate someone about the art of metallurgy or statecraft through an epic poem. It’s nearly impossible to teach medicine or any other science without having a text, something large enough and capable enough to hold the sheer volume of details.
We’re unique as a species, we humans, because we created books as educational tools to augment the little that we can convey orally from person to person. There’s as much of a distance between our Stone Age ancestors and the preliterate Greeks as there is between the Greeks of Homer’s age and the literate billions who now inhabit the earth.
Language is responsible for an explosion of culture and vibrancy and human richness, but it was made exponentially richer by writing, whether in the form of books or scrolls or cuneiform tablets. We’re not born with all of our culture’s teachings inside our heads, the way animals are born, the way animals know instinctively what to eat or what the shadows of their predators look like. Animals rely on instinct, but we rely on being educated, on stories and tales told by mothers to their children or grandchildren. We put these stories down in books so they can educate any number of generations who follow, and we rely on these stories.
We’re born with enormous brains, but we’re born without instincts for self-preservation. Baby ponies and lambs can start walking and eating a few hours after they’re born, but we take years to do the same. Large as they are, our eggshell-fragile skulls are too small when we’re born to hold the wealth and weight of our culture, and it’s not passed down through the generations by instinct alone. We rely on culture to teach us even the most basic things, like how to groom ourselves or bathe or eat and drink. And likewise more sophisticated skills, like hunting or agriculture. These cultural inventions are learned and taught, in turn, to the next generation through books.
We’ve come far in our culture, to the point that we now have digital books and can pick one from millions on a whim and begin reading it in a minute. The pace of technological change—though thrilling—is often confusing. And you can feel like you’re never quite caught up. You can subscribe to a hundred news feeds, if you know how to do that, and you still won’t be caught up, because the pace of technological change outpaces even specialists in the field.
It’s no wonder that a lot of the people I talk to are confused by ebooks. They don’t know which way to turn, which page to turn, which e-reader to use, or why they should even use them. And I totally empathize about how confusing technology can be. But technology is just a tool, like hammers and nails, although fussier, more prone to crashing, and more in need of firmware updates and special USB cables.