What is a Book?

I will be researching the ways that digital/audio books are changing the way that people "read". I am attempting to narrow the topic to either digital ebooks or audiobooks, but I just haven't decided yet.

On the topic of audio books, I have always been bothered that people equate listening to a book with reading a book. If you listened to it, you listened to it. If you read it, you read it. I'm not saying that one is better than the other, but I think it is important to maintain a separation in our minds, and our language, between the two. listening and reading use different parts of our brains and are quite obviously different. Call me crazy, but that is how I feel. I obviously have a bias on this topic, but I'd like to find out more about how different the two are, and the pros and cons of each.

On the topic of digital reading, I am interested in kindles/ebooks/digital reading and the way they are changing the way people read. I have worked as the archivist at our university museum for going on four years. Basically, archives directs, organizes, and preserves all of the paper records that come in to the museum. The question of digital preservation is complicated. Thanks to technology we can now scan all of our paper records and make the digital copies available to patrons while keeping the physical records safe from wear and tear. However, some institutions have decided to keep the digital copies and throw out the physical records. In an effort to stop myself from going on for a page about what this means, I'll just say it is an issue of debate. It is a debate in libraries as well, as they consider how their function will change if kindles become the norm and books go to the wayside. As a side note, The Provo City Library offered a kindle as the grand prize for the summer reading contest this year. I am also a family history major, so paper records, and their physical preservation and digitization, are important to my career as well. I am also taking the bookbinding class this semester, where we are learning about the history of the book etc. So, basically, I have a lot of personal interest in this topic due to my job and my major. I am interested both in the debate about preservation and in how kindles change the actual, mental and physical process of reading. Do people read more? Does the brain process "digital" pages the same was as physical pages?

I think I am more interested in the second topic (kindles) than the audiobooks. Mostly, I will just go on random rants about how people shouldn't say they read a book when they listened to it, and vice versa (except no one ever says it the other way around, which I think is interesting. Ok, I'm stopping now). I also thought that this blog post was very interesting, and it is where I got the painful picture at the head of this post.