Warm off the press, and with copious thanks and admiration to Junhong Xiao for the invitation to submit and the translation, here is my paper “The problematic metaphor of the environment in online learning” in Chinese, in the Journal of Open Learning. It is based on my OTESSA Journal paper, originally published as “On the Misappropriation of Spatial Metaphors in Online Learning” at the end of 2022 (a paper I am quite pleased with, though it has yet to receive any citations that I am aware of).

Many thanks, too, to Junhong for sending me the printed version that arrived today, smelling deliciously of ink. I hardly ever read anything longer than a shopping bill on paper any more but there is something rather special about paper that digital versions entirely lack. The particular beauty of a book or journal written in a language and script that I don’t even slightly understand is that, notwithstanding the ease with which I can translate it using my phone, it largely divorces the medium from the message. Even with translation tools my name is unrecognizable to me in this: Google Lens translates it as “Jon Delong”. Although I know it contains a translation of my own words, it is really just a thing: the signs it contains mean nothing to me, in and of themselves. And it is a thing that I like, much as I like the books on my bookshelf.

I am not alone in loving paper books, a fact that owners of physical copies of my most recent book (which can be read online for free but that costs about $CAD40 on paper) have had the kindness to mention, e.g. here and here. There is something generational in this, perhaps. For those of us who grew up knowing no other reading medium than ink on paper, there is comfort in the familiar, and we have thousands (perhaps millions) of deeply associated memories in our muscles and brains connected with it, made more precious by the increasing rarity with which those memories are reinforced by actually reading them that way. But, for the most part, I doubt that my grandchildren, at least, will lack that. While they do enjoy and enthusiastically interact with text on screens, from before they have been able to accurately grasp them they have been exposed to printed books, and have loved some of them as much as I did at the same ages.

It is tempting to think that our love of paper might simply be because we don’t have decent e-readers, but I think there is more to it than that. I have some great e-readers in many sizes and types, and I do prefer some of them to read from, for sure: backlighting when I need it, robustness, flexibility, the means to see it in any size or font that works for me, the simple and precise search, the shareable highlights, the lightness of (some) devices, the different ways I can hold them, and so on, make them far more accessible. But paper has its charms, too. Most obviously, something printed on a paper is a thing to own whereas, on the whole, a digital copy tends to just be a licence to read, and ownership matters. I won’t be leaving my e-books to my children. The thingness really matters in other ways, too. Paper is something to handle, something to smell. Pages and book covers have textures – I can recognize some books I know well by touch alone. It affects many senses, and is more salient as a result. It takes up room in an environment so it’s a commitment, and so it has to matter, simply because it is there; a rivalrous object competing with other rivalrous objects for limited space. Paper comes in fixed sizes that may wear down but will never change: it thus keeps its shape in our memories, too. My wife has framed occasional pages from my previously translated work, elevating them to art works, decoupled from their original context, displayed with the same lofty reverence as pages from old atlases. Interestingly, she won’t do that if it is just a printed PDF: it has to come from a published paper journal, so the provenance matters. Paper has a history and a context of its own, beyond what it contains. And paper creates its own context, filled with physical signals and landmarks that make words relative to the medium, not abstractions that can be reflowed, translated into other languages, or converted into other media (notably speech). The result is something that is far more memorable than a reflowable e-text. Over the years I’ve written a little about this here and there, and elsewhere, including a paper on the subject (ironically, a paper that is not available on paper, as it happens), describing an approach to making e-texts more memorable.

After reaching a slightly ridiculous peak in the mid-2000s, and largely as a result of a brutal culling that occurred when I came to Canada nearly 17 years ago, my paper book collection has now diminished to easily fit in a single and not particularly large free-standing IKEA shelving unit. The survivors are mostly ones I might want to refer to or read again, and losing some of them would sadden me a great deal, but I would only (perhaps) run into a burning building to save just a few, including, for instance:

• A dictionary from 1936, bound in leather by my father and used in countless games of Scrabble and spelling disputes when I was a boy, and that was used by my whole family to look up words at one time or another.
• My original hardback copy of the Phantom Tollbooth (I have a paperback copy for lending), that remains my favourite book of all time, that was first read to me by my father, and that I have read myself many times at many ages, including to my own children.
• A boxed set of the complete works of Narnia, that I chose as my school art prize when I was 18 because the family copies had become threadbare (read and abused by me and my four siblings), and that I later read to my own children. How someone with very limited artistic skill came to win the school art prize is a story for another time.
• A well-worn original hardback copy of Harold and the Purple Crayon (I have a paperback copy for lending) that my father once displayed for children in his school to read, with the admonition “This is Mr Dron’s book. Please handle with care” (it was not – it was mine).
• A scribble-filled, bookmark-laden copy of Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control that strongly influenced my thinking when I was researching my PhD and that still inspires me today. I can remember exactly where I sat when I made some of the margin notes.
• A disintegrating copy of Storyland, given to me by my godmother in 1963 and read to me and by me for many years thereafter. There is a double value to this one because we once had two copies of this in our home: the other belonged to my wife, and was also a huge influence on her at similar ages.

These books proudly wear their history and their relationships with me and my loved ones in all their creases, coffee stains, scuffs, and tattered pages.  To a greater or lesser extent, the same is true of almost all of the other physical books I have kept. They sit there as a constant reminder of their presence – their physical presence, their emotional presence, their social presence and their cognitive presence – flitting by in my peripheral vision many times a day, connecting me to thoughts and inspirations I had when I read them and, often, with people and places connected with them. None of this is true of my e-books. Nor is it quite the same for other objects of sentimental value, except perhaps (and for very similar reasons) the occasional sculpture or picture, or some musical instruments. Much as I am fond of (say) baby clothes worn by my kids or a battered teddy bear, they are little more than aides memoires for other times and other activities, whereas the books (and a few other objects) latently embody the experiences themselves. If I opened them again (and I sometimes do) it would not be the same experience, but it would enrich and connect with those that I already had.

I have hundreds of e-books that are available on many devices, one of which I carry with me at all times, not to mention an Everand (formerly Scribd) account with a long history, not to mention a long and mostly lost history of library borrowing, and I have at least a dozen devices on which to read them, from a 4 inch e-ink reader to a 32 inch monitor and much in between, but my connection with those is far more limited and transient. It is still more limited for books that are locked to a certain duration through DRM (which is one reason they are the scum of the earth). When I look at my devices and open the various reading apps on them I do see a handful of book covers, usually those that I have most recently read, but that is too fleeting and volatile to have much value. And when I open them they don’t fall open on well-thumbed pages. The text is not tangibly connected with the object at all.

As well as smarter landmarks within them, better ways to make e-books more visible would help, which brings me to the real point of this post. For many years I have wanted to paper a wall or two with e-paper (preferably in colour) on which to display e-book covers, but the costs are still prohibitive. It would be fun if the covers would become battered with increasing use, showing the ones that really mattered, and maybe dust could settle on those that were never opened, though it would not have to be so skeuomorphic – fading would work, or glyphs. They could be ordered manually or by (say) reading date, title, author, or subject. Perhaps touching them or scanning a QR code could open them. I would love to get a research grant to do this but I don’t think asking for electronic wallpaper in my office would fly with most funding sources, even if I prettied it up with words like “autoethnography”, and I don’t have a strong enough case, nor can I think of a rigorous enough research methodology to try it in a larger study with other people. Well. Maybe I will try some time. Until the costs of e-paper come down much further, it is not going to be a commercially viable product, either, though prices are now low enough that it might be possible to do it in a limited way with a poster-sized display for a (very) few thousand dollars. It could certainly be done with a large screen TV for well under $1000 but I don’t think a power-hungry glowing screen would be at all the way to go: the value would not be enough to warrant the environmental harm or energy costs, and something that emitted light would be too distracting. I do have a big monitor on my desk, though, which is already doing that so it wouldn’t be any worse, to which I could add a background showing e-book covers or spines. I could easily do this as a static image or slideshow, but I’d rather have something dynamic. It shouldn’t be too hard to extract the metadata from my list of books, swipe the images from the Web or the e-book files, and show them as a backdrop (a screensaver would be trivial). It might even be worth extending this to papers and articles I have read. I already have Pocket open most of the time, displaying web pages that I have recently read or want to read (serving a similar purpose for short-term recollection), and that could be incorporated in this. I think it would be useful, and it would not be too much work to do it – most of the important development could be done in a day or two. If anyone has done this already or feels like coding it, do get in touch!