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Just enjoyed another pair of #SHARP23 #bookHistory #conference recordings. Including a keynote on #ebooks versus print books. This touched on many issues important to me, as reader - and book historian - who now reads with huge difficulty, and relies on ebooks for gigantic fonts for #disability reasons. There is so much snobbishness against ebooks, an incredibly ableist perspective. Many survey responses discussed in this keynote echoed these views, powerfully and clearly. #reading #books #SHARP
Here's something I wrote a while back about my own experience with ebooks, since developing huge reading problems when my progressive neurological disease started in the mid 1990s. They are life changing for me. https://vivsacademicblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/19/ebooks-including-kindle-as-a-way-of-overcoming-disability-reading-problems/ #books #reading #ebooks #disability #SHARP23 #bookstodon #kindle #neuro #bookHistory
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@vivdunstan Yes as someone who has been reading ebooks since 1999 the snobbishness has only gotten worse as the years have progressed IMO. It was the same with audiobooks. That has gotten somewhat better. I say somewhat better because they won’t deny that it’s accessibility issue for me, but they’ll still say it doesn’t count as reading.
@JBaby I'm especially conscious of it in the book history community, where the book as an artefact is venerated by many. But even everyday, yes it's widespread, and has got worse. I've railed against it for decades.
@vivdunstan I don’t know how it is anymore but back when I was in school academia was not digital friendly. So I’m not surprised at all to hear this. I swear I sometimes think people love the object more than the info it contains. It’s a real shame.
@vivdunstan as my eyes have started to change as I age, being able to adjust font size and backlighting on the fly is surprisingly useful. And it’s not actually possible to physically carry around the number of books I now can have with me at all times, it’s very gratifying from a book hoarding perspective!
@wychwoodnz I just posted a link to a blog post I wrote about ebooks and me. I stopped reading almost completely for fun in the late 1990s and early 2000s, because my problems were so severe. Ebooks transformed my life. I get very very angry when this is so readily dismissed by many. I also run into fellow book historians who venerate the physical book and often take an extremely snobbish and dismissive view of ebooks. Winds me up no end! Glad the ebooks help you too.