Ebooks – the incredible invention of our time, allowing us to read something as massive as the 5th Harry Potter on something as tiny as an I-phone or Kindle. This development has completely changed the scene of book production, and book consumption, since the late 1900s, and quickly became a large part of life in the 2000s.
As a reading obsessed child, I grew up with the paper book, carrying stacks as tall as my head out of the library, maxing out my library card, and always bringing a book with me. Everywhere. In the car (despite my motion sickness), in the restaurant, and even to the pool (greatly endangering the safety of the library’s collection).
Later around middle school, when I had first received my Kindle Fire, I got introduced to the ebook format. The public library in my area partnered with an ebook app, Libby, in order to give account holders access to many free ebooks and audio books. This slowly but surely completely changed the reading game for me.
I’ll be honest, it took a while, as I was not one to give up the romantic quality of a nice hearty book, and still do treasure my physical book collection today. But the ability to bring this book with me everywhere, listen to it as I had to clean or workout, and have it at any moment’s notice was incredible. Especially as the girl who always had one or two books in my backpack, along with all my school necessities, this was a game changer for my day to day life.
Along with Libby, I later got a Kindle paperwhite and use Kindle books very often, many times for the purpose of reading in different languages. To order a German book in the US and pay for shipping and handling is not an easy task. On the other hand, I could now get translations and German novels on my kindle without those extra fees, and not have to wait for deliveries. Win-win situation!
But with all of this, I only ever focused on the content of the books, not looking deeper into how my consumption of the book on a tablet would change the message.
McCluhan argues that the ‘message’ of all mediums is the “change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”1 The accessibility of book consumption did dramatically shift in the ebook development. Reading a vast selection of books became much more accessible around the world, and an international human library is crafted. The pace of getting books, without even leaving the house, and just downloading them onto your own device, maximizes human time, and our ability to read the books.
Possibly the most direct way that one can see how the medium is the message of ebooks, is from the authors point of view, as there is now an acknowledgment that their writing and creation can be disseminated much further than ever imagined. This may shift the content of their writing because of who their potential audience is (now anyone with internet or platform access), but also making it so vastly available is a conscious choice.
The creation of the audiobook vastly changes how we absorb literature, as it will most likely be in a much more casual setting. You no longer have to sit and actually have the book in front of you, you can effectively multitask with any number of other things, which possibly takes away from the experience, or adds to it depending on your point of view. In this case the medium of audiobooks greatly impacts the message we receive, even if we are typically blinded by the content. They begin to feel like podcasts, which are typically more casual in format, and require only moderate attention, but at the same time they are full novels which normally would require a lot of focus.
“The content or uses of such media are
as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association. Indeed,
it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of
the medium.”2
As readers we forget that we are consuming the literature in a different way, and at a certain point the line between staring at a screen and staring at a paper object becomes very blurry. But there is a lot to be said for the choices that got that literature into our hands, and the way that we can consume it anywhere and everywhere now. Normally the content blinds us from this thought process, and we focus on the content.
- Marshall McCluhan, “The Medium is the Message,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), 1. ↩︎
- McCluhan, “The Medium is the Message,” 2. ↩︎
Sources:
McCluhan, Marshall. “The Medium is the Message.” In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1-11. 1964.
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