Oliver Sacks, Grumpy Reader

By Alan Jacobs • December 27, 2012, 6:39 AM

I’m not sure I fully understand this little essay by Oliver Sacks. I do understand, because I’m experiencing it myself, the frustration that sets in when your eyes age and the long-familiar practice of reading becomes gradually more difficult. I’ve been adjusting to ocular changes by reading more and more on digital devices, so that I can adjust type size as needed.

Many others have been doing the same, which has led to a decline in the availability of large-print books. But Sacks doesn’t like using digital devices, so this does not seem to be a solution to him. He concludes:

If we are forced, later in life, to learn new ways of reading — to accommodate a loss of vision, for instance — we must each adapt in our own way. Some of us may turn from reading to listening, others will continue reading as long as possible. Some may enlarge print on their e-book readers, others on their computers. I have never adopted either of these technologies; for now, at least, I am sticking to the old-fashioned magnifying glass (I have a dozen, in different shapes and strengths).

Writing should be accessible in as many formats as possible — George Bernard Shaw called books the memory of the race. No one sort of book should be allowed to disappear, for we are all individuals, with highly individualized needs and preferences — preferences embedded in our brains at every level, our individual neural patterns and networks creating a deeply personal engagement between author and reader.

I empathize with his frustration, but what in the world does he mean when he writes, “No one sort of book should be allowed to disappear”? Large-print books have never been universal — most books don’t receive the large-print treatment — so what is Sacks asking for? Mandatory large-print versions of all books, enforced by law? If not, then what?

Sacks may not like e-readers, but thanks to Kindles and Nooks and iPads, more books are available to and readable by people with poor eyesight than at any time in human history — by a long shot. How is that not a win?

(And then there’s always the possibility of listening to books.)

Posted in Literature, Technology. Tagged Oliver Sacks.

13 Responses to Oliver Sacks, Grumpy Reader

Mike Nichols says:

December 27, 2012 at 10:10 am

I have had the experience of going virtually blind for almost two years, then recovering my eyesight. Cataracts gradually formed on my eyes, forcing me first to different kinds of magnifiers, then to making text larger on a computer screen. Neither was as good as “regular” reading, but it was reading. The kind of books I read would never have a large-print edition or an audiobook.

Toward the end before I had the cataracts replaced with “bionic” lenses, I could read only one word at a time. At first this was terribly frustrating, since I had been a speed reader. But as time went on I began to appreciate what one word at a time reading gave me. I savored the text, especially poetry, much more. My memory was exercised to remember what I had read, and remembering, enter more deeply into the text’s meaning and style.

Although I can see as well or better than I ever have, I find myself going back to the one word at a time reading if I really want to dig into the text.

Bottom line: Changed circumstances open new opportunities, if we can accept them.
Ping Lin says:

December 27, 2012 at 10:16 am

I believe he’s referring to print books in general (as opposed to the books in computer files and e-readers mentioned) that are in danger of disappearing, for the reasons of convenience stated above.
Cliff says:

December 27, 2012 at 10:52 am

PSA: Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org has an enormous collection of free, out-of-copyright ebooks. Librivox at http://www.librivox.org has a similarly large and free collection of audiobooks, read by volunteers. The quality of the readings vary — not all the readers are native English speakers — but check out the Mark Twain, much of which is read by a superb reader. And then there’s your local library, which likely has both ebooks and audio books.
Ed Haines says:

December 27, 2012 at 11:08 am

There was a time when cataract surgery left one needing thick glasses and very limited vision range. That day is now past and, if one has cataracts causing limited vision (especially noted with night time driving and or driving in fog), surgery with implanted lenses is almost miraculous. My vision is now better than at any previous time of life in my memory. Needless to say, if you need large type in order to read because of cataracts, it is time for surgery.
There are a number of other causes of limited vision that are not so easily managed and various type/verbal books are very helpful for those persons.
Mike Nichols says:

December 27, 2012 at 11:42 am

@cliff. I’d add to that the Internet Archive, which has hundreds of thousand of scanned, transcribed books as well as audiobooks. All are free and downloadable.
http://archive.org/

Also, Google books has thousands of free books that can be read online and downloaded, but you can also find them in the Internet Archive so there’s no need to go to the Google site.
isaacplautus says:

December 27, 2012 at 2:58 pm

Are you going to post a review of Casual Vacancy? I’d be really interested what you thought. It seems to be a book that can provoke varied reactions.
Valerie (Kyriosity) says:

December 27, 2012 at 3:21 pm

I demand the continued universal availability of all books on vellum scrolls. Paper tears too easily. And I always used to be able to remember where things were by how fat the left-hand side of the roll was compared to the right-hand side. I should never be forced to adapt to anyone else’s sensible economic or logistical decisions. No change should occur in the world without consultation of my wishes, and all progress should cease when I find it inconvenient!
MEH 0910 says:

December 27, 2012 at 4:32 pm

In fairness to Dr. Sacks, his vision problems are worse than just aging eyes, which might make more understandable his unreasonable demands.
Rambler88 says:

December 27, 2012 at 5:00 pm

I think Sacks’s point is that he is very, very old, and people of his age who have not previously learned to use computers (as his article implies he hasn’t) often find it impossible to learn them well enough to use. I gather from a relative who is a computer skills instructor that this is an acknowledged fact. I’ve seen plenty of it in my parents’ generation, at ages much younger than Sacks.

His protest then, is probably aimed at the premature declaration that large-print books are obsolete. Such declarations are a common and ludicrous characteristic of technology industries. We are told incessantly that desktop computers are obsolete, along with CDs and local data storage. The desktop was actually made obsolete first by the netbook (remember those?), and printed books were made obsolete in the 90s by the multimedia CD. The obsolescence didn’t seem to take.

“The man who sees two or three generations is like someone who sits in a conjurer’s booth at a fair and sees the tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once.” — Arnold Schopenhauer

As to large-print books, though, I rather doubt they would be a loss in the long term, once basic computer skills have become common in the elderly. The people who produce large-print books make the type larger, but they ignore the need to make the leading–the line spacing–correspondingly larger, to preserve the white space that promotes the reader’s ability to follow a line without unnecessary effort. (Increasing the line space would greatly increase the number of pages, and paper is a major cost factor.) The result is that it is easier to make out the letters, but more difficult to read the text. E-books have much better options, and e-books with larger screens and controls could be easily made for people with vision problems. (And how about a wide-screen e-book for general reading without desktop/tablet screen glare. Or maybe piping an e-book to a big-screen TV?)

As to regular-print books, they, and especially the old ones, won’t become obsolete until their publishers rediscover the professional editorial, proofreading, and quality-control skills that must be exercised whenever a text is rehandled, in order to produce a minimally usable text in the new format, much less an optimally usable text.

The zillions of free Google OCR scans that enthusiasts like to talk about have clearly not been much examined by those enthusiasts, since most of them are not even minimally usable. They aren’t even good enough to be worth cleaning up. (I speak from professional experience on this. It’s easier to re-type, even if you type as poorly as I do.)

Project Gutenberg texts are better, but they are still commonly just the equivalents of a first proof, before proofreading, in the traditional publishing process. A volunteer proofreader is not the same as a professional.

Even many of the e-books I’ve seen, and paid for, from major publishers are not as readable as a printed book, or lack standard features of printed books in particular fields, to the point of being quite annoying and/or clearly inferior. This is not a function of the technology, but of poor coding and poor (or absent) quality control. The situation reminds me very much of the early Web, and much of the current Web. (Good professional proofreaders, by the way, can generally make a better living doing something else.)
Alan Jacobs says:

December 27, 2012 at 6:04 pm

isaacplautus: I suppose I’d have to read it first, no? Haven’t climbed that mountain yet….
Winston Smith says:

December 27, 2012 at 11:29 pm

“How is that not a win?”

Well, for starters, the shuttered independent book store, the mutability and comparative impermanence of pixels, and Jeff Bezos deciding to withdraw your copy of 1984.
isaacplautus says:

December 28, 2012 at 12:09 am

It’s a commitment. My sister says she won’t read it because Martin Amis and co. are more worth the time. But I actually liked it, with a few caveats. The sex descriptions are a little awkward and tawdry. And the opening is rough going: too many characters introduced too quickly. But once I got into it, I found myself really gripped by the characters and plot. It’s straight realism, but you definitely see the same storytelling grip of the Potter books at work. And, while I didn’t like any of the characters, I nonetheless was quite intent on seeing what happens to them. It’s a pretty merciless satire on contemporary Britain. I can see Cameron and the Conservatives finding it preachy against them, but at the same time I didn’t get the sense that these were social problems that can be solved merely by putting Labour back into power. It’s fundamentally a tragedy.
Scott Lahti says:

December 30, 2012 at 1:14 am

In comic response to Dr. Sacks’s demands for diverse platforms of his literary loves, one MARTIN L. FLICKER* has weighed in on the Letters page of the NYTBR for December 30, 2012 (the letter on the same print-version page, about the reproductive potential lurking otherwise undiscerned in John Lennon’s ashtray is also a hoot).

*Apologies to those reading the all-caps version of that name with sleepy eyes, and thereby feeling at one with my colleague from a summer job back in 1983, who told us that thanks to snowy TV reception in his dorm, viewers of the closing credits of Barney Miller noticed with amusement the fusing of the second and third letters of the surname of co-creator THEODORE J. FLICKER, a Freudian mis-sighting in which I see, per Google, that he was far from alone.