Welcome to the blog of the Consulting Editors Alliance. This is our forum for sharing views on the wonderful, bizarre, enormously frustrating and satisfying (depends on the day) world of book publishing and our roles in it as freelance editors, writing collaborators, and ghostwriters. Please join the conversation!

Monday, September 13, 2010

Maybe I'm Crazy, But . . .

. . . isn't it perverse for a writer to argue that the problem with ebooks is that they make reading too easy?
So here’s my wish for e-readers. I’d love them to include a feature that allows us to undo their ease, to make the act of reading just a little bit more difficult. Perhaps we need to alter the fonts, or reduce the contrast, or invert the monochrome color scheme. Our eyes will need to struggle, and we’ll certainly read slower, but that’s the point: Only then will we process the text a little less unconsciously, with less reliance on the ventral pathway. We won’t just scan the words – we will contemplate their meaning.
So writes Jonah Lehrer in his article "The Future of Reading" in (of all places) Wired magazine.

Personally, I like the idea of people reading my words deliberately and thoughtfully, contemplating their meaning. But I'd prefer they do so because of the profundity of my insights rather than because the print is so darned difficult to decipher.

Friday, September 3, 2010