Newcastle University

What form do you use – physical books or an e-reader?

I really love technology – I got an iPhone early, I got an iPad early, I recently invested in a desktop Mac. So I’m not someone who … technology is important in my life and I love it, but I don’t read using a tablet. Obviously I’ve got the Kindle app on my iPad, I will use it for functional reading – instruction leaflets for equipment and things like that. But I would never think what’s going on my Kindle for next week. Even when I go abroad, I will have books. And if I’m going abroad, what determines what I take with me there is books that I don’t mind leaving behind. […] So I might take, say I was going to Germany, I will take maybe three novels with me, all of which I’m quite happy leaving in the hotel room. So books are disposable as well, I’m not kind of fetishist about books. What I do have on my iPhone, and I think it transferred across to my iPad, is Emily Dickinson’s poems and William Blake’s poems, but William Blake in particular, his poems are really important to me. So I’ve got those, and sometimes I do look at those.

Is there any particular reason why you prefer to read physical books?

I think part of it will just be that I’ve got a kind of stubborn block in me. I like paper, I like different fonts, I like seeing where I am in a book. It’s a whole kind of … it’s a sensual experience, I suppose. And I suspect that it has something to do with the kind of learner I am.

And what kind of learner are you?

Well, to me, having it on an e-reader is very much a kind of visual thing – it is purely visual. Whereas if you’re handling the book, and I know there’s the kind of kinetic thing in handling something, but if you’re actually handling the book, turning over a page, bending back the spine and flicking back, flicking forward, physically doing that – and I know you can do all of that on your Kindle – I think there’s something about how I get information, in terms of my type of learning. But I don’t know – other colleagues doing other research may find that’s absolute nonsense, that’s just a hunch! I just think there’s something sterile, I guess, about a screen. And I love using computers, I don’t have a problem with that – you know, I write much fewer letters and write a lot more emails now. But for me it’s books.