by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2015/04/30 12:57 +00:00, original URI: http://www.siao2.com/2015/04/30/8770668856267196403.aspx
Friend and Twitter friend @terrynakamura posted the other day on Twitter an article about how how your paper brain and your Kindle brain are two different things: http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-18/your-paper-brain-and-your-kindle-brain-arent-same-thing
That is true as far as it goes, but for argument's sake you have to consider that your Audible brain is yet another!
Is it just me or is this like The Beatles White Album where people who want the best picture will have to buy the book again each time a new format comes out?
I think it's just a conspiracy by Amazon to make you buy the same book over and over again! Certainly not everyone will do it, but some people would rather watch the movie instead anyway!
Now to get into my main concern with the article: the sketchy "proof" of the DEEP reading argument. I will accept quite readily that these three different ways of reading the same book activate three different parts of your or my brain, but even the additional sources added to the article don't really make the full case for value judgment of their comparative worth.
In the end, each view into the work of the author or authors brings different pros and cons to the subject, and ignoring the relative merits of the accessibility of graphic novels to audio books is easier than ignoring the fact that Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer prize winning Gödel Escher Bach can't be easily captured by a non-visual medium, which in the end is largely the same issue.
Furthermore, the fact that neither leet from the likes of Mark Russinovich nor URLs from the likes of Orson Scott Card are ever read literally the way that audio books usually try to do it show that the only thing worse than a passive vocabulary is the institutional inheritance of someone else's passive vocabulary.
It gets even more difficult when one has to translate into another language, where important meaning can be lost in any or all formats, which is why multiple translations can come in handy.
There is also the fact that some people would rather have a book read to them by someone like Scott Brick than by someone they don't know. If you have to risk being led down a garden path, then there is something to be said for choosing the gardener when you can!