[montsnmags]

Originally Posted by DDHarriman

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Going back to your first question: still no, the technology is always a mean to objective, no technology is going to help you loose yourself into the content

The problem, as I see it, is an inherent contradiction in this statement. If technology is a means to achieve an objective, and the technology is an ebook device that has let you finally achieve your objective of losing yourself in the content, then logically technology is helping you lose yourself in the content.

- it will help you to loose yourself more, or in a different way, or sooner, or deeper, or… - but the attraction to the content is independent of the technology.

The content cannot be separated from the technology when factoring in the physical process of "reading". You detail this in your itemisation of the technological development of the modern book (bound pages, et cetera). The content doesn't exist without the medium in which to place it and relate to it. To separate it from its medium is to apply a hypothetical idealism (understandable when we are referred to the material representation of "ideas") that might assist in some other rhetorical sphere, but does not stand strong against reading's technical/technological and physical/physiological practicalities.

Exceptions are of course, the technology not existing turns the access impossible, like, if I’m blind and there is no audiobook published I do not have easy access to the story.

If exceptions exist, then the "rule" is broken. While you have specified the "impossible", it is just as applicable to "levels of discomfort". We'd inevitably have to apply subjective value judgements to individual discomfort, which no person is in a position to do other than the person suffering the discomfort. We cannot apply a value as to whether someone has "it" on the basis of our view as to whether the discomfort they feel reading from a particular medium or in certain circumstances is a sufficient degree of discomfort to not exclude them from "it". Exceptions almost always grow.

If manchuia was sufficiently uncomfortable reading pbooks that she/he could not lose himself/herself in the content, we are in no position to determine to any relevant standard (only to an irrelevant subjective standard) whether she/he has "it" based on that unwillingness to bear that discomfort.

There is no "right" way to read - reading is an entirely individual experience (as you yourself relate) and therefore the means by which one does it, the state of mind in which one does it, and the pleasure one extracts from it are just as individual. The only "it" to be had is so personal that objective measurement is impossible.

In the end, manchuia's question is not a request for an answer to an objective problem. It is, both in the way she/he has presented it and explicitly in its content, a question asking for subjective opinion and experience, likely arising out of the curiosity of the individual looking for comparative experience. It's also an excellent question to pose, and an interesting experience you relate, manchuia.

Personally, I'm not like you, manchuia, in that an ereader has not kick started a reading habit. It has probably prompted me to do something I have been meaning to do for some time - read "classics" that are in the public domain but which I would otherwise have seen expense for in pbook form.

Cheers,
Marc