Books, books, books

We attended the giant annual book sale in town here this last weekend, and despite our vows to bring home fewer books than last year (we'd had to buy another bookshelf to accommodate them all), we still came home with a lot. In all fairness, there were three of us searching this time, so we did meet our goal in per capita terms!

But in the traffic jam on the way there, we began talking about the physicality of books, in part because we'd both heard of California's proposition to require electronic texts in all its public schools. News: Here and here. Although we both agreed that digital text is becoming more prevalent and can be useful, we both wondered at the timing of the move.

The Husband (TH) tried the electronic textbook route for one year of dental school and switched back to paper the next because of the headaches using digital texts created. This was about five years ago, so no doubt there have been technological developments. But I have to wonder whether they are enough. If a highly intelligent health professional finds electronic text difficult to work with, what chance does an elementary school child have?

I don't mean from the perspective of familiarity with online venues. Even though I think the idea of 'digital natives' is a fallacy, setting that aside and accepting that perhaps there is indeed something different about the experience of growing up reading paper texts and growing up primarily online, the devices on which online textbooks rely are fickle indeed!

There's no information on how the content will be delivered, but technology inevitably breaks down, often at inopportune times. If the students will access their texts online, they will need to have access ($$$) and that access will need to be reliable, unlike the previous city where we lived. We had to call out the repairmen 3 times in one year to repair our internet connection, and each time it took an average of 5 days to get someone there. If my kids had needed that access for school, we would've been scrambling to get it.

But there's another phenomena that both TH and I, as well as other friends that I've asked experience which has to do with the physical nature of the book itself. Both TH and I have had the experience of recalling something we've read by its physical location on the page. We've remembered for example that it was the second paragraph from the top on the right hand side of the page about 2/3 of the way through the book. A quick flip in the right general section leads you to the source you wanted.

This is because memory is highly influenced by space. It certainly is true that in navigation or danger avoidance, being able to remember *where* those dangers are is an excellent skill, and we all develop this kind of spatial memory, whether or not we apply it to reading. If you can't find your keys, you replay the memory of your actions when you last knew you had them until to you come to the part where you 'see' where you put them down.

What happens to this memory aid on an electronic screen? I understand about the search function of a website - that could act as a replacement for the spatial memory cue. But unless a whole site has its own search function (not impossible), you'll need to rely upon a search engine, so that your search terms will need to be quite specific. Either option requires wading through a lot of other instances of the keyword coming up. Now a persistent person might keep going till they find just the right reference they were thinking of, but if my students are any any indication, they don't bother with much more than the first three hits on any search.

I will admit that it's possible I'm an old fuddy-duddy and the way that I learned to learn does not apply to 'digital natives'. But even so, subjecting all the public school students of California to this grand experiment - and it is an experiment - seems like a premature move on the part of the governor.

Meanwhile, I lugged about 50 lbs of books home. Perhaps I can at least get "pumped" as a result of my love of the physical!