A Golden Age for Reading Books

While reading books might be waning in today’s mobile phone obsessed, Facebook generation, the tools and technology for reading and remembering books have never been better. I’d call it a Golden Age for those lucky souls willing to invest the time to read.

This is difficult for me to admit, coming from a long history of reading real books. I have a personal library of more than 2,000 books that line the shelves of a small reading place that I consider a sanctuary.

But for the past ten years I’ve read more and more books electronically on my Kindle than I have in paper format. Other than cookbooks or art books, all my reading is now digital. And that isn’t quite true either, since I use the marvelous Paprika app to house all my recipes, with an iPad in the kitchen as I cook. If I find a recipe I like in one of my books, I can’t use it properly until I successfully track it down online to import into my cooking system.

My younger self would be aghast to hear me say this, but my Kindle is a far better book than any on my shelves. Here’s why:

• Instant access to an immense library of available titles. Almost all books published in the past five years are available on Kindle, including thousands (millions?) more available through self-publishing created in this new world of digital publishing (no publisher needed).
• The reading experience is better. My aging eyes appreciate the larger fonts and backlit screen of the Kindle Paperwhite. I find it hard to read normal books now.
• I can fit a thousand books in my bag. I can read from a Kindle or my iPhone or my IPad, really whatever device I have in hand, and it knows my place in the book.
• I can read in microbursts from my iPhone with the mobile Kindle App. The ability to crack open the app on my phone at the exact place I last left off is very convenient to fill those times in waiting rooms I’d otherwise be checking Twitter or Facebook.
• I can even listen to an audio version of the book on my commute and it still knows my place when I get home and open my Kindle.

There is one lesser known benefit of Kindle e-books. With a finger, you can highlight sections of the book that are memorable to you, that you’d like to be able to find again quickly. You can even see the passages of the book you’re reading that others also highlighted (I think there’s a way to see what other famous people highlighted in the book you’re reading too, but I think that’s creepy). In “real” books, these highlights can be found if you’re brave enough to mark up a book to begin with, by flipping haphazardly through the pages until flashes of yellow or pen scribbles catches your eye. I once searched in vain for a scribble in a massive poetry anthology that I knew I marked, but could not find. With a Kindle, these highlights are more readily available as a nested menu option from within the book itself.

But there’s hidden power in this simple digital highlight feature. Did you know that you can access a special Amazon web page housing all the highlights and notes from your Kindle library? And that with a couple of clicks, you can email yourself the sections of every book you’ve highlighted, complete with MLA style reference header and locations within the book?

Think about that: the text from every highlight you’ve applied from every book you’ve read, all available digitally.

Over my life of reading, I have haphazardly captured quotes that were meaningful to me. Some in books with yellow highlighting, more important ones I would transcribe into a notebook or journal and sometimes commit it to memory. I can still rattle off passages from Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Melville which is amazing to me because it was 30 years ago that these words were planted in my mind. In later years, I would capture these in Day One, my daily journal app. More times than not, when I read something beautiful, I would simply appreciate it in the moment, savoring it like a sip of fine wine, recognizing that any attempt to save it for later was impractical.

With a Kindle, highlighting is so easy, but only really important passages got the finger swipe from me because – why bother? It’s all just digital ether and I’ll never take the time to review these like I would in a hardbound book on my shelves. How wrong I was.

I took the time recently to email myself the highlights I’ve captured in books over the past ten years. I use Ulysses for most of my writing and thought it would be nice to have these quotes in my writing tool as reference. It was dead simple to import all my highlights, usually a “sheet” for each book. With a few clicks I applied tags to each quote; things like Strategy, Love, Meaning of Life, Family, etc. I then scoured my digital journals and files for any stored quotes and brought them in too. The whole process took a few hours because I had long lost highlights from a decade of reading.

And now I have a way to see the most precious highlights of everything I’ve read over the past ten years that I can quickly filter down to just those dealing with leadership. Or mortality. Or forecasting. Oh my. As a writer this is an incredible gift, allowing connections and new breakthroughs in thinking and writing that just wouldn’t be possible with this external brain I’ve created. And now I have a logical place to capture quotes I read from books I haven’t read that still move me – straight into Ulysses with a quick tag for later reference when I’m writing and need some inspiration on the topic I’m tackling.

If my younger self understood the power of these current digital reading tools housed in a humble Kindle Paperwhite, I’d like to think I would have changed my tune before now.