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In the Post-Gutenberg Stacks

ebooks, eReading

ebooks, eReading

My writing an essay on Rabindranath Tagore, three or four months ago, led to an interesting experience that I find myself continuing to think about. As an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Michigan in the first few years of the 1980s, I would often study in the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library. My favorite places were deep in the catacombs of the stacks, 4 South, or the Sixth Floor humanities collection. Since Google digitized the holdings of U of M and those of other major libraries, along with the proliferation of classics online, Amazon and ebooks, and statewide inter-loan services, I, for some time now, have less frequently found myself needing to visit the Library, as I used to, for decades, two or three times a year.

In Tagore’s case, I discovered there were some books and sources I couldn’t obtain by other means, so I took a day last October for the sixty-mile trip to the Hatcher grad library. I started with 4 South, enclosed seemingly in the center of the old library, with very low ceilings, like the cellar of an old monastery. The floor has the bulk of the holdings in religion, especially Islam, Hinduism, and other non-Western faiths. I had on my Android Nexus S phone a list of books and articles related to Tagore and world religions that I wanted to check, complete with call numbers and so forth, from Mirlyn, the library Catalog, which I had accessed online from home. As usual, I was the only person on the floor. One or two might have wandered through that afternoon, cutting across on the way elsewhere. I found the sources in the stacks and piled them up on a desk, about twenty-five books or so.

Before combing through them, I booted my Netbook and turned on the Portable WiFi Hotspot on my phone, so that I could check U of M’s online Catalog, if needed. No reason to run downstairs anymore. I also took out my DocuPen portable wand scanner, so that I wouldn’t have to carry anything downstairs if I wanted to copy an article, which I did with several, emptying the memory, when it became full, onto my Netbook, in PDF format.

Scrutinizing chapters and articles, bibliographies, I found a few things I wanted to pursue further, so I obtained their call numbers with my Netbook, through the Catalog, went back into the stacks, dug around, loved every minute of it. And so it went. Since a few other sources were on the Sixth Floor, which houses mostly literature, having exhausted 4 South for that excursion, I packed up and changed locations, taking about another twenty-five books off the stacks upstairs, from the Tagore holdings of about three hundred books, and burrowed my way through them. I remember being reminded of my time on an NEH summer seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in 1995, and using the Perkins Library at Duke University, especially its excellent collection of Indian literature.

After some time, though, as the afternoon went by, I discovered I was developing a list of books that even the Hatcher Library didn’t have among its several million volumes. I fired up my Netbook again, and, while sitting in a study carrel, logged on to MeLCat, the State of Michigan’s library inter-loan system for the majority of universities, colleges, and local libraries. Working through my list, I found most of the books I needed at other state institutions and ordered them, right then and there, from a shabby old Harland Hatcher carrel, on the Sixth Floor, where over thirty years ago I had enjoyed so many fruitful hours of study.

A couple of books that I particularly wanted were not available at the graduate library nor through MeLCat.  I went online to the HathiTrust Digital Library, found one of them, and added the eBook to my account. The other was on Google Books. I downloaded it and later transferred it to my ereaders.

The MeLCat books began showing up at my local library in Rochester, Michigan, about a week later, when I was ready for them, having read the material I had taken home in digital format. An email notified me when the books were received and available for pick up. I read them in the comfort of my own library.

Frederick Glaysher

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eReading is reading but then…

ebooks, eReading

ebooks, eReading

eReading is reading but then…

February 16, 2009

Reading and eReading are the same. But then… I have second thoughts. I suppose what I was thinking of was that eReading can be as absorbing and imaginative as conventional reading, yet there are advantages to eReading. Often, we think in reverse, about what is lost or diminished by a mechanical device. Yet I don’t want one or the other, but both. I’ve been regularly reading both ways for well over a decade, like everybody else, or at least so many people now.

I can flip things off the net, into a reader, and take it with me for snatches, long or short, when I can. Having hundreds of books and articles with me at all times has advantages. Depending on the inspiration of the moment, there’s always something to read, something I *want* to read, not a soiled, wornout magazine at the doctor’s office, a newspaper at the restaurant that has been handled by dozens of people that day, over their eggs and toast, french fries, and other greasy fare, coughing all over it. I find I actually can read that marginal article, which I wouldn’t have otherwise read, life being too busy since it’s a little lower on my list of priorities or interests. It’s easy to copy and paste it into my eReader to get around to maybe weeks or sometimes months later.

I can’t carry around hundreds of physical books, but I can carry around hundreds of books on my Palm or Sony Reader (PRS-505), anywhere I go.

And then the experience of ereading, I still believe, being tugged in both directions, isn’t quite the same. It can even seem better; right with the right book. The qualitative experience of reading an ebook is as deep and engaging as a printed volume.

Frederick Glaysher

 

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