Reading Technology:
Curling up with a good information appliance
for Mediatopia, LA, 2002

My copy of Gitelman's Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines split while I was reading it for the first time. Broken in two, a chunk of the book fell out, leaving an empty paper and card shell. Then, it continued to break. Each turn of the page caused a leaf to sever from the sad, glued spine. Landow takes the durability of paperbacks seriously, observing their flimsy construction as an indication that we are 'beyond the book'1. Referencing the student experience, Landow claims that books "embody ill-designed, fragile, short-lived objects". Consequently, "students have lost much of the experience of the book, as we recall - and occasionally idealize - it".2 For Landow, the book, as a technology, is in the throes of decline and awaiting replacement by information technologies.

In this essay I address a tension between and an overlap of the technologies of ebooks3 and books as textual devices. I present the practice of these technologies in the context of the everyday and habit, ingrained in memory. In recent years there has been concentrated speculation, discussion and hype surrounding ebooks and reading devices. Commentaries have been presented in trade and industry publications and events as well as the daily press. The spokespeople of multinational publishing houses waxed lyrical about electronic futures for publishing as moves were made into electronic publishing. There have been increases in the availability and sales figures of electronic book readers, formats and content. While Coover's commentary in The New York Times proclaiming "the end of books"4 seemed premature in 1992, it fuelled a decade of debate and research about books and their electronic counterparts. His declamation is echoed, for example, in Landow's claim that we are 'beyond the book'.

PART I: Habit, Memory and Everyday Practice

This essay engages notions of 'everyday practice' drawing particularly from the work of de Certeau. Implicated in everyday practice are concepts of habit and memory as discussed by Connerton. I discuss habit, memory and everyday practice in concert to develop a framework through which to consider everyday or habituated practices of technology and textuality, with specific reference to the technologies of the book and ebook. In evoking the 'everyday', I am referring to de Certeau's exposition where everyday practices are "ways of operating or doing things"5: these are not merely the obscure background of social activity or of a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives. With a focus on consumers - those users who are 'dominated' in society - de Certeau undertakes a study of several 'everyday' practices including reading, walking and cooking in order to illuminate 'models of action'. Consumers do not only consume, they also 'use', 'make' or 'do' with that which has been purchased or imposed. This making or doing gives rise to 'tactics' which the user deploys and, so, according to de Certeau, "many everyday practices [including reading] are tactical in character"6. Of reading, he argues that it "seems to constitute the maximal development of the passivity assumed to characterize the consumer, who is preconceived of as a voyeur whether troglodytic or itinerant) in a 'show biz society'."7 Books and ebooks occupy an important role in the consumer culture of the internet with significant numbers of users having purchased and downloaded reading material.

Borrowing from Gitelman's account of late 19th and early 20th century technologies, and Hayles' ideas about virtuality, print and electronic reading technologies are addressed as habit and disruption. These theorists - de Certeau, Connerton, Hayles and Gitelman - share an interest in the material and immaterial, the discursive and the physical, not as binary opposition but as interacting and productive polarities. In order to extrapolate the circumstances of electronic books, I source various media reports, industry reports and anecdotal accounts to provide experiential and statistical evidence of ebook uptake. Gitelman's analysis of technology and textuality in the period 1877-1914 addresses the 'successes' and 'failures' of emergent writing technologies as sites of negotiation for meaning and subjectivity. She proposes that technology is both physically and discursively constructed and that technologies of inscription are materialised theories of language. Social, economic, historical and cultural factors also exert pressure in the successes and failures of emerging technologies. If we are 'beyond the book', as Landow proclaims, what writing and reading technologies are waiting in the wings to 'supplant' this technology? Landow proposes that hypertext is the likely successor to the book, yet in the matrix of publishers, software and hardware manufacturers, electronic books (ebooks) are flagged as the successor. In this essay, I look at some of the technologies competing to 'replace' the book under the rubric of the ebook. In Gitelman's study of the phonograph and typewriter, the development of shorthand is examined as a means of "demonstrating the experienced characteristics of textuality that preceded these technologies."8. In the current period and throughout the 20th century, even though computing technologies have existed since the 1950s, the experienced characteristics of textuality were situated primarily with the book and typewriter. At present, the word processor and the ebook are positioned to refigure the textual environment, if they have (or are) not already.

In the last 40 years, several electronic book formats have emerged. In her account of the portable computer, Wilson attributes the idea for the handheld device to Alan Kay who in 1968 described the Dynabook as a "portable interactive personal computer, as accessible as a book".9 Ditlea recounts that the first digital books were produced in 1971 when Michael Hunt was given access to computer time on the mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois. Hunt "decided that widely disseminating the contents of libraries was the greatest value computers could create".10 Hunt's efforts evolved into Project Gutenberg which continues to publish open source, out-of-print texts, downloadable to and readable on a personal computer. In 1990, a range of diskette-based works including Jurassic Park and Alice in Wonderland were released by Voyager Co. but not offered by multiple publishers.11 Also in the 1990s, portable document formats were developed for the pre-internet, print environment then adapted for the online environment. Due to its storage capacity and portability, the mainstream success for the CD-ROM is considered to be its use for reference material. However, artists, writers, start-ups and publishing houses such as Eastgate Systems release experimental and/or self-published creative work on CD. Even though there is a current emphasis on DVD technology, the CD remains in circulation and use.12 By the mid to late 1990s, internet usage proliferated, delivering to readers a range of texts not previously available.

A regularly repeated refrain from readers, publishers and writers alike - 'no one will ever curl up with a good ebook' - dismisses ebooks. For many commentators and consumers, this is a compelling argument against ebooks. This statement charts an exchange between the reader and the book. In this emphatic statement, the book is imbued with corporeal significance that the computer (or other reading device) cannot possibly displace. Clearly, 'curl up', as a comfortable or pleasurable embodiment of and for reading a book, is exclusively reserved for the book and it is unimaginable that the body could or would 'curl up' with a substitute book. It is important to note that reading is a plural, fluid and variable practice which individuals do for diverse reasons: there are likely to be books for which this 'curled up' posture is not desirable or necessary but are read regardless. For the purposes of this essay, I am interested in the 'curled up' posture because the presumed experience of reading from a different technology in this 'curled up' posture is not as desirable or pleasurable as reading a book in the same posture. It is not the same experience and therefore not as apparently rewarding.

In his discussion of memory and habit, Connerton addresses posture as an incorporating practice stating that "where the characteristic posture of [for example] men and women are almost identical, there may be very little teaching of posture and there may be very little conscious learning of posture ... Postural behaviour ... may be so automatic that it is not recognised as isolatable pieces of behaviour".13 Learning the posture of 'curling up with a good book' emerges from sighted and practiced repetitions. This 'curling up' position as a reading posture results in contingent incorporating and inscriptive practices, or, as Connerton explains "no type of inscription is at all conceivable without ... an irreducible incorporating act".14 In the familiar context of reading, it is the body that 'curls up' and flips the pages while reading and these actions are performed in concert with a knowledge of technology, language and writing. Further, he argues, "patterns of body use become ingrained through our interactions with objects ... Postures and movements which are habit memories become sedimented into bodily conformation."15 As de Certeau suggests, reading is a 'silent production' in which a reader "insinuates into another person's text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he [sic] poaches on it, is transported into it, pluralises himself [sic] in it like the internal rumblings of one's body"16. Reading, in this context, is an embodied and technologically contingent practice in a web of other practices and circulations including pleasure and consumption.

Reading a book in this way has become naturalised. There is a perceived relationship, an exchange between body and book that another technology can neither account for nor accommodate. Building on Connerton's propositions, Hayles provides a framework through which to consider embodiment in an age of virtuality. This consists of two interacting polarities: body and embodiment, inscription and incorporation. She explains the interaction thus:

as the body is to embodiment, so inscription is to incorporation. Just as embodiment is in constant interplay with the body, so incorporating practices are in constant interplay with inscriptions that abstract the practices into signs. When the focus is on the body, the particularities of embodiment tend to fade from view; similarly, when the focus is on inscription, the particularities of incorporation tend to fade from view. Conversely, when the focus shifts to embodiment, a specific material experience emerges out of the abstraction of the body, just as the particularities of an incorporating practice emerge out of the abstraction of inscription.17

Hayles contends that an 'incorporating practice' is "an action that is encoded into bodily memory by repeated performances until it becomes habitual".18 For Connerton, these practices "cannot be reduced to a sign which exists on a separate 'level' outside the immediate sphere of the body's acts. Habit is a knowledge and a remembering in the hands and in the body; and in the cultivation of habit, it is our body that 'understands'".19 In the practice of reading, curling up', as a habit, is a form of corporeal knowledge or embodied knowing.

For the purposes of this essay, 'curling up with a good book' is performed repeatedly and, ultimately, habitually. According to Hayles, "habits do not occupy conscious thought; they are habitual precisely because they are done more or less automatically, as if the knowledge of how to perform the actions resided in one's fingers or physical mobility rather than in one's mind".20 As a habitual movement, 'curling up with a good book' is accepted as an unconscious action and is rendered invisible when the technology and the text have disappeared into the task of reading. Subsequently, 'curling up with a good ebook' represents a threat or disruption to that habituated behaviour. This process of disruption is not straightforward due to reading's implication in other habitual practices and sensory experiences such as literacy or visiting the library or browsing bookshops or leafing through the pages of printed books or the ways a reader might handle their book, reading non-sequentially and so on. In concert with reading and so much else of what we do, these practices are also everyday practices. For de Certeau:

to read is to wander through an imposed system (that of the text, analogous to the constructed order of a city or of a supermarket) ... [The reader] invents in texts something different from what [was] 'intended'. He [sic] detaches them from their (lost of accessory) origin. He combines their fragments and creates something un-known in the space organised by their capacity for allowing and indefinite plurality of meaning.21

'Curling up' becomes the posture which a reader adopts in order to undertake this 'wandering through' and 'reinvention' of the text. 'Curling up' is how we image or imagine ourselves reading in the realm of habit-memory and how we see others reading. As de Certeau explains, reading transports the reader 'elsewhere', to a 'secret scene' where the reader arrives and departs at will, and so, 'curling up' is the posture of this transportation. Reading is subsequently characterized "by advances and retreats, tactics and games played with the text. This process comes and goes, alternately capitivated ... playful, protesting, fugitive."22 For Landow to proclaim that we are 'beyond the book' disavows this everyday quality of reading. He also disavows, as Connerton suggests, that habit and corporeality or inscription and embodiment are tied to memory. Connerton argues "every group will entrust to bodily automatisms the values and categories which they are most anxious to conserve. They will know how well the past can be kept in mind by a habitual memory sedimented in the body".23 If reading books or 'curling up with a good book' is among those things that we seek to conserve and retain in habitual memory, then any attempt to replace the book meets with resistance. Hayles observes "[w]hen changes in incorporating practices take place, they are often linked with new technologies that affect how people use their bodies and experience space and time".24 The reading device and the book, as technologies, are not the same, do not produce the same relationships with the body or embodiment, and are not readily interchangeable. Despite many people having developed everyday and acquired habitual practices of computers and other technologies, these do not, or have not, necessarily included ebooks to any significant degree.

Virtuality, in the context of this discussion, has bearing on the spatial arrangements of objects and bodies. Hayles defines virtuality as "the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information forms".25 She refers to proprioception, "the sense that tells us where the boundaries of our bodies are", to describe human relations with books and computers, or screen and print.26 Accordingly, "proprioceptive coherence ... refers to how these boundaries are formed through a combination of physiological feedback loops and habitual usage".27 Hayles describes a difference in corporeal relations with varied technologies and "although a reader can imaginatively project herself into a world represented within a print text, she is not likely to feel that she is becoming physically attached to the page itself".28 Hayles attributes this to tactile and kinaesthetic experience of print which provides less feedback and less interaction. While the reader might feel that "she is moving through the page into another world", she is unlikely to experience the same sense of immersion and interactivity as with electronic interactive texts. The 'curled up' position seems to reiterate this experience of reading as boundary between reader and technology. In curling up, one's body, while drawn into a relationship with the technology, is distinct from it. The reader is wrapped around the book, cradling it with their body. A question raised by Hayles' discussion of proprioception is how readers negotiate print forms replicated on screens and whether a search or dictionary function is sufficient to afford the material experience of the screen text. For Hayles, "the materiality of ... [our] interactions is one way in which our assumptions about virtual writing is being constituted as distinctively different from print. Even when its output is printed and bound into codex books, we know from the inside that it operates according to spatial principles and a topographical logic of its own."29 In addressing technology as plural, decentred and indeterminate, Gitelman calls for technology to be "the reciprocal product of textual practices, rather than just a causal agent of change."30 Hayles addresses technology in this way when she states that the integration of corporeal perceptions and movements with computer architectures and topologies has resulted in humans expressing cyborg subjectivity. In this respect, "changes to writing and reading matter in large measure because they equal changes to writers and readers. New inscriptions signed new subjectivities."31

In addressing arguments about successive and liberating technologies, Duguid proposes that assumptions about the past and future conjoined with assumptions about simplicity and complexity produce unbelievable predictions. He observes that a range of technologies have survived after the development of alternatives,

on the strength of their deep social resourcefulness ... [We] may find that the simple hinged book will prove ... enduring. The closed cover, turned page, broken spine, serial form, immutable text, revealing heft, distinctive formats, handy size, and so on offer their own deep-rooted and resilient combination of technology and social process and continue to provide unrivalled signifying matter.32

Duguid's argument is compelling on the grounds that ebook manufacturers endeavour to replicate certain aspects of the book format including linear form, font or page design. He suggests that to offer serious alternatives to the book, "we need first to understand and even to replicate aspects of its social and material complexity".33 As a technology, he argues, books are both a "conduit for ideas produced elsewhere ... [and] ... a means of production".34 As part of a social system, "books produce and are reciprocally produced by that system as a whole".35 Technologies (books, computers or reading devices) and texts are interdependent and consequently, our habits of technologies and texts are also interdependent. While ebooks might replicate certain design elements of the book, they do not engage that social and material complexity to which Duguid refers. Again, this might be revealed in the practice of 'curling up with a good book'. In the technology of the book, a reader is habituated or socialised to that particular relation of text and technology. The introduction of ebook reading devices threatens to disrupt that relation, charting other reciprocal relations between technology and textuality, virtuality and subjectivity.

In this essay I have explored reading as an 'everyday' practice. To this end, I have drawn on the works of Connerton and Hayles to discuss notions of habit and memory. I have focused on the much repeated phrase 'curling up with a good book' to establish reading and the technology of the book as habituated and pleasurable. In focusing on this expression as the locus for this exploration, I have drawn from Hayles and Gitelman to define relationships between technology and textuality and virtuality and subjectivity as a mean of charting corporeal and inscribed relations to reading. In particular, Hayles work explores relationships between technology and the body in the context of virtuality. I am particularly concerned about and interested in how this framework can be applied to new reading technologies - such as ebooks, personal organisers and ebook reading devices - in order to consider the ways in which these technologies might affect not only reading, but also subjectivities of reading.

PART II: Reading, Appliances and Devices

At present, ebooks are produced for reading on a variety of platforms including personal computers, dedicated reading devices and multipurpose reading devices (such as personal organisers). Manufacturers are marketing, if not the 'best', then the technology that they might hope endures in the manner that Gitelman describes. In assessing the 'successes' and 'failures' of technologies, she asserts a problem of evaluation: "the notion that the 'best' technology succeeds only makes sense if 'best' can involve extrinsic as well as intrinsic advantages ... Rather than try to settle which is the "best system, better to seek the variables of contemporary evaluation and the social and economic conditions that helps make those variables potent ones."36 For Gitelman, the success as well as succession of technologies are bound in a network of relations, negotiations and possibilities that determine their use and ultimately endurance. For example, in her discussion of the phonograph, designed for business purposes, Gitelman reveals that consumers appropriated the machine for entertainment, as part of the "rising tide of mechanical amusement". An everyday practice of the phonograph emerged that saw consumers make and use this technology in an appropriative manner.

In his critique of the computer industry, Norman also proposes that the technology that succeeds is not necessarily the best. Norman's criteria for 'best' technologies are those which are 'human-centred' rather than technology-centred. Finding computers too complex and difficult to use, Norman argues for technologies which are task-specific and which fit a task for which they are specifically designed. Such specificity in technology gives rise to the 'information appliance', defined as "an appliance specializing in information: knowledge, facts, graphics, images, video, or sound. An information appliance is designed to perform a specific activity, such as music, photography or writing. A distinguishing feature of information appliances is the ability to share information among themselves."37 Usability, convenience and cost are among the benefits of these devices to the consumer or user. In line with Norman's proposition, to be information appliances, reading devices must be specifically designed for the task of reading. Both the book and ebook reading devices are information appliances to different degrees. The book is an effective information appliance because the technology has been absorbed into the task and become invisible: when people say they are reading a book, it is the text not the technology to which they refer.

The push for reading to shift beyond a naturalised and self-contained text and technology such as the book to digital technologies that require a reading device, software application and ebook, requires an effect on the social and material circumstances of reading. Importantly, in Western societies more authority is attributed to the printed word as textual representation and much of what is presented in electronic formats is presented as untrustworthy.38

For Duguid, "the advent of multiple new technologies is probably changing not only particular works, but also the social system in relation to which the works were written and read".39 Ebooks and information appliances can generally be described as 'disruptive technologies' in the sense that they disrupt established habits and tasks and bring something new to those practices or tasks.40 Because the practice of 'curling up with a good book' is embedded in habit, those technologies which seek to replace or complement the book will need to somehow accommodate or offer a very different experience: or an experience that is both same and different. While habit might be stubborn, it is neither wholly intractable nor unnegotiable. Fidler argues "as with traditional print media, digital forms must be comfortable and convenient to read while lying in bed, riding on a subway, dining in a restaurant, or sitting on a park bench".41 Inasmuch as reading is a habituated practice, so too are the reading postures which Fidler identifies. In understanding cultural artefacts such as books and technology, they should be considered as agents within social networks and exchanges. The network in its entirety is what shapes the artefact and imbues it with significance.

A reader knows - by their embodiment - the difference between an electronic and printed text or an electronic and print technology despite efforts by hardware manufacturers to make the ebook reader more 'bookish'. In a study of handheld reading devices undertaken by EBONI, key issues for the development of these devices included: display and readability; size and portability; comfort and ease of handling; and hardiness and durability.42 Reviewers and commentators also make these complaints about handheld devices. For Norman, personal document assistants or personal organisers are evolving into information appliances. Having learned from the failures of earlier models, manufacturers are honing their devices for usability and simplicity. Handheld devices fail as information appliances when they replicate the complexity of the desktop or laptop computer.43 For Norman, "the new technology is never quite the same as the existing one, and in the differences lie the benefits."44 A question emerges about whether the differences between electronic and print information devices are acceptable to the reader or not.

While several commentators have addressed or allude to this issue of 'sameness', current ebook readers are either single-purpose or multi-purpose handheld devices, some of which resemble and simulate books and open like books while others resemble personal organisers or laptops. Many reading technologies seek to reproduce the linear reading experience with added functionality such as search and dictionary tools. While software that reproduces the sound of turning pages has been developed, some handheld devices allow the reader to 'dog-ear' pages, provide highlighting functions and post-it notes. Are these simulations comforting or artifice, or further disrupting? With many of these 'features' of ebook reading devices, it appears that manufacturers approach ebooks as 'printed books but better' and that the book has to be bettered. That is, the simulation of the sound of a turning page, 'marginalia' or a dog-eared corner is better with an ebook than with a printed book. This does not necessarily equate to the experience of readers and commentators who complain about readability and resolution or who are concerned about what happens if they drop their personal organiser on a concrete platform while running to catch a train. The notion that the simulation of old technology in a new technology is an improvement emerges from a reading of Bolter and Grusin's idea of 'remediation' where old media is represented in another, newer medium.45 Gitelman warns that no one should be satisfied with the implications of the term remediation, "with its suggestion that new media necessarily improved the old along some path toward perfect, transparent mediation".46 To do so would be to ignore that all new technologies and media, despite their uses, "inspire conflicted cultural moments of self-consciousness about the making of meaning."47

Ditlea observes that the publicity surrounding ebooks "has been drawn to single-purpose devices whose function is to display reading matter in a booklike fashion"48. He states that of the hundreds of millions of personal computers now in use around the world, only a few hundred thousand users have downloaded ebooks.49 As users develop their computer and information skills, download culture and other aspects of cyberculture such as online shopping and browsing can develop as everyday practice. Gasson proposes that "e-books have to look and feel better than p-books, or they aren't worth inventing."50 Similarly, co-founder of ePress.com, Kirvin admits that ebooks "don't have the curled-up-by-the-fireside aesthetic of a nice hardcover".51 Also, CEO of Forrester Research, O'Brien, suggests that handheld devices will "ultimately ... look and feel more like a magazine ... the kinetic experience that people are used to."52 A 1999 study of reader preference for electronic (personal organiser and website) and print formats of newspapers found that readers preferred portable document viewer formats to print and website formats of newspapers. This study also found that "the more respondents wanted to own a PDV, the more they like that format".53 Of course, reading a newspaper and reading a book are different readerly and reader experiences, but the role of desire for consumer objects in creating approval of the portable document format cannot be overlooked. Conversely, the more users desire print book formats, the more likely they are to disregard or dislike electronic formats. A reader takes more pleasure in a text which is read in a technology they desire.

In discussing the 'life cycle' of devices, Norman claims that as technologies mature, they become more attractive as consumer goods because they enable consumer experiences. Norman looks to a third generation of personal technology as "the generation where the technology disappears into the tool, serving valuable functions, but keeping out of the way ... The generation of the invisible computer."54 As Gitelman has pointed out with regard to the Edison era, consumer expectation and behaviour also plays a role in shaping the market and determining the use of particular technologies. An Ipsos-NPD55 survey of online buyers found that 69% of respondents are aware of ebooks. While 3% thought they were very likely to buy an ebook, 20% said they were somewhat likely. This survey also revealed that 77% of respondents expect ebooks to be cheaper than print books. In Ipsos-NPD's ongoing BookTrends survey of adult fiction, ebook purchases represented 0.1% of respondent purchases. This translates as less than 500,000 ebooks purchased between January and June 2001.56

Norman also charts business and product development models for devices, stating that 'early adopters', with their interest in technology or specific functions, drive the device in its early days. While early adopters buy despite inconvenience and cost, once a product 'matures', 'late adopters' will buy a device when the "product is truly capable of meeting their needs, [waiting] for firm evidence that it brings economic value without disruption of their existing way of doing things. These buyers want convenience, reliability, and value."57 They also want to use, make and do with the appliances. Anderson Consulting predicts that by 2005, 28 million ebook reading devices will be in use worldwide. In a reader survey, Anderson found that 62% were likely to purchase an ebook reading device at a fair and reasonable price.58 By mid-2000, the number of single purpose dedicated readers reached 20,000 while Palm devices - only one type of handheld PC - reached 6 million.59 As 'information appliances', handheld PCs are surpassing single purpose device sales and winning buyers despite the task specificity of a single purpose device. Given that mobile phones are also accommodating an increasing number of functions including ebooks60, the competition for the handheld device may not lie between print and electronic books or single purpose and multi-purpose devices but rather among different types of handheld multi-purpose devices. What appears to be at stake in this contest is the future of handheld computing and which technology is the 'best' locus for that activity, which will be best suited to the task it performs. According to Wilson, the trend towards convergence is yet to reveal the form of overlapping functions and technology. The issue here is whether converged or dedicated technologies will have greater appeal among users. Wilson proposes that "the future shape of portable electronic books is, at least in part, dependent on whether the trend towards convergence applies equally to ebooks as it does other technologies."61 From a reader's perspective, the cost of handheld PCs is prohibitive. When asked how much they were prepared to pay for a handheld device, 44% of respondents to a survey at BookBrowse.com wanted the devices to be free while 14% were prepared to pay over US$100. Of the respondents, 4% already owned a handheld computer and 22% would buy one if it cost less than US$100.62 A Wired report proposes that the "industry will soar when an e-book reading device with a high quality screen and full PDA functionality hits the market for under US$100, which is expected to happen [by the end of 2003]."63 These emerging trends indicate that one way competition among handheld devices may manifest is as 'portable entertainment'. Anderson Consulting forecasts that the e-book industry will be worth $2.3 billion by 2005, approximately one-tenth of the publishing market. This study also points to the need for broad-based content and a growth in digital music and video on demand. These types of content could be available on the same device.64

While Norman discusses task specificity as 'writing' or 'note taking', I prefer to think of tasks in a different way. Handheld devices such as personal organisers are task oriented, and the task that they are specific to, is time management or personal organising. With their calendar, clock and diary functions, handheld organisers are used for marking and arranging time. One task is interconnected with other tasks yet Norman tends to group tasks as disciplines such as music or photography rather than interconnections grouped as practices. In their user's 'free time' or 'spare time', those devices are used to 'fill in time' in the sense that entertainment and leisure have a temporal or contextual quality which can be met by the device: read a book or play games while using public transport or listen to music during lunch. As information specific devices, handheld computers are task oriented to time or personal entertainment. Some new models of multi-purpose reading devices now feature calendar, address book (that can be synchronised with an email client), diary, notebook, built-in microphone and music or voice playback, auto-scrolling, touch screens and bookmarks. Ditlea proposes that content for electronic readers will be diversified and move towards hypertextual, multimedia and interactive content. According to Stein, founder and CEO of start-up Night Kitchen, the shift to electronic environments will happen because those environments are richer than print: "electronic media easily facilitates links to other information sources, it supports multimedia, and it affords richer interaction between authors, publishers and readers".65 It remains to be seen whether this richness will call for a wholesale shift and whether users will look to their PDAs for a particular kind of richness. For Ditlea "lurking amidst e-publishing today is the notion of multimedia books that seamlessly incorporate hypertext, sound and animation. A hypertext branching narrative in a novel or a history book, for instance, would be impossible to reproduce in a book."66 Ditlea, like other commentators, is predicting that as content diversifies and as electronic texts do things not possible for print texts, electronic reading will increase in appeal and these technologies will become more desirable. It will provide something new and disruptive. A Fortune article suggests that consumers will ultimately demand e-books that 'do things' that print books cannot.67 At this year's Pocket PC conference in New York, specialised sessions about interactive content development for Microsoft's Pocket PC were presented.68 The opportunities for hypertext and other forms of new media writing in this environment should be apparent. Given the emergence of the internet, MP3, culture jamming and sampling-type practices, there is the very real possibility that users will create their own content for use on their handheld devices. Users will continue to own other technologies that perform similar tasks such as computers, CD-players and burners, televisions and Playstations, using these technologies to develop or download content for their handheld device.

'Curling up with a good information appliance' may not have the same ring as other articulations of 'curling up' but this is not because the experience is a substitute for a real thing. This scenario raises the question of whether books and ebooks should be regarded as different kinds of texts and technologies, perhaps a different kind of literacy. New reading tropes require definition against existing textual practices and need to be "contextualised".69 As I have sought to demonstrate in this essay, the handheld reading experience is different and requires a different kind of engagement with texts and technology. It does not necessarily supplant existing ways of reading or technologies of reading and exists among a plurality of reading practices and technologies. In electronic environments, certain devices are redefining the functionality and indeed, textuality, of what we have come to know as books. For Gitelman, "digital textuality ... about the identity of authors and the psychology of authoring, about the subjectivity of reading in its relation to the subjectivities of buying, eating, driving, and all the rest of the things people do."70 There is no apparent winner in the reading device race because it is not solely the prerogative of hardware manufacturers to determine which technology is 'best', which succeed or failure, or to be the only vested interest whose experiences of these devices as textual technologies matter.71 Rather, it is local and global networks of exchanges, geographies, users, subjectivities, technologies, histories, publishers, content, marketing, corporations, culture, language, legal structures, economics and so on that will determine the fate of handheld technologies. This complex field of influences, resistance and interaction is in keeping with everyday practices of technology and textuality, virtuality and subjectivity.

NOTES
1 George Landow, "Twenty Minutes into the Future: Or How Are We Moving Beyond the Book?", The Future of the Book. Ed. Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkley: University of California Press, 1996. 209ff
2 ibid.
3 As a provisional definition, 'ebook' is shorthand for a range of technologies and is not a static form. It has included, warranted and evoked a plurality of formats, software and hardware. There has been some fluidity in the use of the terminology of electronic books resulting in uses of 'e-book', 'eBook', 'ebook' and other formations of 'e' and 'book' to evoke both the ebook reading device and the ebook (the text). For the purposes of this essay, I refer to ebook reader or reading device as the technologies used to display, interact with and read ebooks, the texts which are loaded, stored and read via the ebook reading devices. While this also includes desktop and laptop computers, this study is concerned with handheld devices.
4 Robert Coover, "The End of Books", The New York Times, 21 June 1992, Late Edition, sec. The New York Times Book Review. 23ff
5 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkley: University of California Press, 1984, xi
6 ibid. xix
7 ibid. xxi
8 Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. 25
9 Ruth Wilson, "Evolution of Portable Electronic Books", Ariadne: 29 (2001). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/wilson/, accessed 23 April 2002. Alan Kay then went on work for Apple and to develop the Apple Newton.
10 Steve Ditlea, "The Real E-books", Technology Review, 103:4 (2000). 72
11 ibid
12 The International Recording Media Association reports that one in every four U.S. homes is DVD equipped. IRMA also reports that worldwide replication figures for cd-rom and dvd-rom have slowed and hastened respectively. In 2000, cd-rom replication was at 3,608 and in 2002, it was at 3245. DVD-ROM replication has risen from 21 in 2000 to 140 in 2002. http://www.recordingmedia.com/news/stat-replication_worldwide.html, accessed 23 April 2002
13 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 73
14 ibid. 76
15 ibid. 94
16 de Certeau, op.cit. xxi
17 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cyberspace, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 199
18 Connerton, op.cit. 90
19 ibid. 102
20 Hayles, op.cit. 1999. 204
21 de Certeau, op.cit. 169
22 ibid. 175
23 Connerton, op.cit. 204-205
24 Hayles, op.cit. 205
25 Hayles, op.cit. 13-14
26 N. Katherine Hayles, "The Condition of Virtuality", Ed. Peter Lunenfeld, The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. 88
27 ibid
28 ibid
29 ibid. 89
30 Gitelman, op.cit. 2
31 ibid. 11
32 Paul Duguid, "Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book". Ed. Geoffrey Nunberg, The Future of the Book. Berkley: University of California Press, 1996. 69
33 ibid. 66
34 ibid. 77
35 ibid
36 Gitelman, op.cit. 28-29
37 Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer. 1998. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. 53
38 I mean a range of practices which may include: mutable identities, the proliferation of pornography, concerns about the 'safety' of children, excess of content, lack of regulatory controls on content which means anyone with access to the web can publish and so on.
39 Duguid, op.cit. 83
40 Norman, op.cit. 232
41 Roger Fidler, Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media, Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 1997. 236
42 Wilson, op.cit
43 Norman, op.cit. 110
44 ibid. 237
45 David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. 23ff
46 Gitelman, op.cit. 225
47 ibid. 224
48 Steve Ditlea, "The Real E-books", Technology Review, 103:4 (2000). 77
49 ibid. 72
50 Christopher Gasson, "Towards a paperless future", New Statesman. 129:4515 (2000). 57
51 Jeff Kirvin cited by Rick Broida, "Not off the Presses - Paperless publishing is taking off with big-name authors and improved hardware. But are e-books require reading yet?", Computer Shopper, March (2001). 149
52 Dan O'Brien cited by Kendra Mayfield, "Getting a Read on New E-Books", Wired, 11 December 2000, http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,40470,00.html, accessed 20 April 2002
53 Carl Schierhorn, Stanley T. Wearden, Ann B. Schierhorn, Pamela S, Tabar and Scott C. Andrews, "What digital formats do consumers prefer?", Newspaper Source Journal. 20:3 (1999). 16
54 Norman, op.cit. 259
55 cited in "Study Finds Consumers are Not Eager to Purchase Ebooks", The Write News, 1 June 2001, http://writenews.com/2001/060101_nyp_ebooks_report.htm, accessed 23 April 2002
56 Ipsos-NPD, "Ipsos-NPD Reports Book Market Grew Slightly in the first half of 2001", 25 October 2001, http://www.ipsos-npd.com/about/news/01_1030.html, accessed 23 April 2002
57 Norman, op.cit. 34
58 Anderson Consulting, Reading in the New Millennium: A bright future for eBook Publishing: Facilitated Open Standards, 22 March 2000. http://www.publishers.org/ebookstudy.htm. accessed 22 April 2002
59 Ditlea, op.cit. 72
60 Econtent reports that ebook seller Fictionwise.com and Versaly Games, publishers and distributor of interactive games and entertainment content for mobile phones will enable phone users to download ebooks to their devices. "Ebooks for Cell Phones", Econtent, 24:5 (2001). 8
61 Wilson, op.cit
62 BookBrowse.com, "Audience Profile and Demographics", March 2001. http://www.bookbrowse.com/media/audience.cfm, accessed 23 April 2002
63 MJ Rose, "E-Books Live on After Mighty Fall", Wired, 18 December 2001 http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,49184,00.html. accessed 20 April 2002
64 Anderson Consulting, op.cit
65 Leander Kahney, "E-Books: The Next Killer App", Wired, 2 September 1999. http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,21550,00.html, accessed 20 April 2002
66 Ditlea, op.cit. 77
67 "Now Showing: Books: Digital books are beginning to do things that paper-and-ink versions can't. Get Ready for multimedia 'read-ies'", Fortune. 142:12 (2000). 281
68 Pocket PC Conference, 2002. Microsoft. http://www.pocketpc.com, accessed 23 April 2002
69 Gitelman, op.cit. 99
70 ibid. 229
71 ibid