The first thing that struck me when I opened Andrew Prescott’s My Acts of Reading on his Digital Riffs blog was the fact that it told me it was a 9 minute read ! This, coupled with the fact that I could tweet it, link to it and share it on Facebook or LinkedIn – all of this functionality (I use the term deliberately) was presented to me before the text even began. Not things a ‘real’ book can easily provide.
I identified with his comments about owning books more as trophies than for use. I have a lot of reference books (including all 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary) but in truth I only occasionally use them. But I do look at them often, and that in itself gives me pleasure – something that can’t be experienced when looking at my Kindle.
Prescotts’ point that ‘digital transformation is one of gradually shifting accommodation, experiment and realignment’ matches my own experience. Like a number of others on this thread I also find the process of note taking from digital content to be a challenge. When using books and paper I have always taken very detailed notes, as the act of transcription helps solidify my understanding of my reading. I’m consciously moving away from this and what I’ve started to do is use mind maps. I make brief notes on the laptop (using an app called Scapple) and then once I’ve finished a piece I link the notes together to help make sense of them. This process of going back to the notes and linking them really helps me.
Bibliography
Prescott, A. (2015) ‘My Acts of Reading’, Digital Riffs. Available at: https://medium.com/digital-riffs/my-acts-of-reading-c97b2fe4c339 (Accessed: 7 November 2021).
