Subdued to what it works in…print vs digital?
In Sonnet 111, the poet wonders whether he is being chided for “public manners” bred of “public means:”
And almost thence my nature is subdu’ed
To what it works in, like the Dyer’s hand.
This brings up some questions, 400-odd years later. In Shakespeare’s day, writers used ink, pen and paper. Today, these have largely been replaced by keyboards and computer screens. Oh, sure, some writers may still like to jot their ideas down on paper before putting them in a Word (R) document, but I bet they’re getting fewer and fewer. I used to do that. I liked the way I could manipulate words on a page, scratch things out, draw lines to show where I wanted to move a sentence to. But I got tired of struggling with my own handwriting. Have you ever tried to read Elizabethan handwriting? Talk about chicken scrawl! So I’ve settled on keyboards and computers. What’s the tradeoff? It’s harder to keep track of edits. Harder to see where my thoughts were, how they got to where they are. I’ve learned to keep old versions of files, but it’s not the same. Too often, I wish I could see what I had changed. (I’m sorry, but turning tracking on doesn’t do it for me. It’s worse than my handwriting—I usually can’t make heads or tails out of it. Maybe it’s just me, but it just looks like more computer junk. Or something a lawyer would send me.) And, of course, there are the incessant suggestions from the wizards at Word (R) (spelling, grammar, punctuation—it insists that a comma always belongs after the word so). So my question is, does giving up pen and ink in favor of the keyboard affect how authors write? I wonder. Just asking. There’s certainly something that happens when people write emails. They just stop reading what they write. It’s just type and send—errors and all!
The other side of the coin—and one I feel more strongly about—is how the choice between print and digital affects readers. Ebook readership is strong, but I love print books. I love the way they feel (I find them more comfortable to hold). I love being able to scan any part of a page, or the whole book, without getting lost (whenever I move around in an ebook, I always feel like I can’t tell where I actually am). Most of all, as soon as you move away from fiction, formatting becomes an issue. Ebooks simply cannot reconcile the need to scale to whatever screen you are using with special formats (like indented lines of poetry, followed by glosses, then commentary—a typical critical edition of The Sonnets). Is the experience of reading a book in digital format as satisfying to most readers as reading a print edition?
OK, here I am writing a blog that you are obviously reading online and I’m extolling the virtues of print. So why am I using a digital medium? (Both for this blog and for my metrical analysis of The Sonnets.) I think most blogs would make boring books. They’re meant to be a medium for tossing thoughts around and getting feedback. That’s what this one is, anyway. I suppose I could have set out to write a series of short essays. But I didn’t. A blog is a different sort of beast. As to my metrical analysis, well I explained that a bit in my first post. Although printing cost was one issue, I was really concerned about the discussion of meter getting in the way of the discussion of the story of The Sonnets (which I think is much more fun). Maybe I’m wrong, but I just didn’t think a metrical analysis of The Sonnets was a subject that could carry a book. I liked the idea of making it a companion to my book, and I hope it works in the digital format. Once my book is published (I expect this fall), I’d like to hear from my readers about that.
I wonder how many people, like me, still prefer reading books in print?