Two Ways to Read

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first required reading for my master’s is a book I already own. From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods, by Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier. Good book, useful book, and the print is small enough that twenty minutes with it is work for my old ass eyes.

There’s an obvious fix for that. I own a Kindle. On the Kindle I make the type bigger and the problem goes away. Except there’s no Kindle edition of the Howell, at least not in Amazon’s store, and that’s the only store the device really wants to talk to. There may be an ebook out there somewhere. Getting it onto a device built to sell me Amazon’s copy is a project, and usually a more expensive one. Graduate reading lists are already expensive. I’m not adding a surcharge for the privilege of reading in a font I can see.

So I sat with that for a few days, mildly annoyed, and then realized the annoyance was pointing at something else.

Because even if the ebook existed, it wouldn’t have solved the problem. It would have solved the font.

Here’s the first reason. Citations. A Kindle book doesn’t have pages, it has locations, and a location is a number that means nothing to anyone who isn’t holding the same file at the same font size. Chicago has a rule for this. When an ebook has no fixed pagination, you cite a chapter, a section, or a searchable phrase instead.¹ It works. It’s also strictly worse than a page number, because I’m handing my reader a rope ladder instead of a street address. Not impossible. Just worse, every single time, forever.

That leads to a second reason, and it’s the one that took me longest to name. Skimming. With a print book I flip, and my eyes run down the page hunting a word, and I stop when something catches. Two hundred pages in a couple of minutes. The Kindle can search, which is a different thing entirely, because search requires me to already know the word I’m looking for. Half the time I don’t. Half the time I’m looking for a shape on a page I only half remember, upper left, maybe two thirds of the way through, and the Kindle has no upper left and no two thirds of the way through. It has one screen, and then the next screen.

Some years ago, I was doing research on details of the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and was looking for details about King Harold Godwinson in the ebook I had by author Marc Morris called The Norman Conquest. A lot of text in that book, and it reads like a story rather than a textbook. But it has a lot of detailed information. The problem was that skimming the book for information, not a particular word or phrase, took forever on my Kindle. I spent hours slowly flipping pages with only a few lines of text each time to work with. Changing the font size made it worse. I gained more text per page, but it was smaller and harder to read, making skimming take even longer. I pressed through and found the information I wanted at the cost of spending way more time than I really intended to.

That’s the whole thing, really. The Kindle assumes I read a book once, forward, and never come back. For a novel that assumption is exactly right. I’ve got most of Jeremy Robinson on there, and reading one in the dark, lying down, holding a device that weighs nothing, is better than any paperback has ever been. I’m not going back.

Coursework doesn’t read that way. Coursework reads a book four times, backward and sideways and in pieces, and then has to tell somebody else precisely where it was standing when it found the thing. Those are different verbs. It turns out I’ve been using one word, reading, for both of them.

I spent forty years watching digital replace physical, and mostly it did, and mostly it was an improvement, whatever anyone wants to say about the smell of paper. This isn’t one of those. The Kindle isn’t the worse tool. It’s the tool for the other job. The three volumes of Gibbon on my shelf take up room I don’t really have, and the genealogy books take up more, and they’re going to stay there, because there’s a kind of reading that needs a left-hand page.

The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024), 14.59, https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org. ↩︎

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Two Ways to Read