Lab Notebook #3: Paperbacks, The EBook and Beyond
Corpus Anatomy
Even beyond the “EBook” phenomenon that took the literary world by storm in the early 2000s, we’ve evolved into an entirely new form of reading that I like to call “PBooks” or PDF texts. Each iteration of literary adaption strips a layer of context from the original piece. Now many books I engage with in college are merely photos of pages listed in order and saved to a PDF.
The shades indicating the curvature of the original paper are darkened in the images, serving as a reminder of what once was. PBooks are just text, the raw data equivalent of a novel. This expression of information is reminiscent to me of the reels of film that compose a movie, individual stills that come together to create a larger whole. I must admit it is harder to see the larger whole when engaging with a piece through PBook form, as the extreme disconnect incentivizes a technical and precise reading, searching for buzzwords or thematic hints like a mechanic might search under the hood looking for car parts. Expectation can do a lot to influence how someone approaches a piece of art, and the expectations associated with a computer file differ wildly when compared to the expectations tied to a traditional American novel.
Offended By Interpretation
Recently I finally took the time to read Tom Woolf’s iconic 1968 counter cultural document “Electric Kool Aid Acid Test” and I sought out the audiobook. I was immediately put off by the voice of the reader, a goofy actor who accentuated the “psychedelic whimsy” of the book just a little too much, pushing the text too far and into the realm of parody. The medium through which I received the information directly affected how I responded to the material, and I was quick to write off the whole novel as overhyped and underwhelming.
I later returned to the same book in material form, the written word, and found my second attempt to be much more rewarding. The writing was not an ugly pastiche, it came across as far more sincere and grounded when it entered my brain via my eyes rather than my ears. I believe the book was written to be read, not necessarily read aloud, and as a reader I felt much closer to the author’s original vision when I approached in those terms. The voice actor was responding to something in the text I observed on my own, the theme of creative freedom present in the summer of love, but presented the information in a way I disagreed with. His adaptation distanced me from the ultimate piece, almost to the point of pushing me to give up. Adaption is not inherently evil, something can be gained by a transition of media, often times a new audience, film can take an allegory to a wider crowd than a dense text can, and PBooks are infinitely easier to distribute than paper based mediums. As long as readers are engaging critically with the overall context of the medium, the higher vision can still be respected.
Between The Lines
So much can get lost in translation, even if you’d expect the transition to be a lateral move. Paperback to Ebook represents a massive jump in presentation, despite both mediums presenting an almost identical display of words. Our in class discussion of literary translation between languages touched on similar points, the ultimate acceptance we must make when studying any kind of literature that there exists something within a text beyond just the words, literally between the lines, the spiritual essence of a theme or vision that is merely executed by the relationship between the written words, not beholden to them.