Motoko Rich, Is That a Vook You're Screading or Are You Just Kindling?

This blogpost is a verbatim pick-up item from literary agent extraordinaire Richard Curtis in NYC -- except for the headline which I tweaked just a bit to get Motoko's attention on this, and she's been instrumental in all this, too, with her very good reporting, especially that 2008 series on "R U Reading This?" in the New York Times that was a major factor is setting me off on this wild goose chase of trying to imagine a name for this new kind of "reading" we do on screens -- and Mr Curtis nailed it very well in his post of October 24, 2009. He promised he would write something on this, and he delivered. This might in fact lead to a major COVER STORY in TIME magazine or NEWSWEEK or VANITY FAIR or ESQUIRE or GQ or the SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE in mid-2010 or so about these very issues, in conjunction with the publication of a very important book that will be coming out from HarperCollins around that time. Stay tuned. Mr Curtis sounded the alarm first. Watch this story morph into a meme.

RICHARD CURTIS WROTE, in his own handwriting, er, penmanship, er, keyboard composing style:

Is That a Vook You're Screading or Are You Just Kindling?

While neuroscientists and child development specialists have been delving into the psychology of reading e-books and vooks (see The Medium Is The Screen, But The Message is Distraction), a blogger named Danny Bloom [in Taiwan, of all places!] has occupied himself with the nomenclature.

Plain old "reading" simply doesn't seem to cover the various acts necessary to experience a multimedia vook that we have to click, scroll, screen, watch, listen to, and - yes - read. So Bloom, who has been aggregating on his blog a great deal of cogent information and articles about e-books, has proposed the word "Screading", combining screening and reading.

We buy it completely, and from now on, "Screading" it will be.

Bloom also brought to my attention that "Kindle" is now a verb [on UrbanDictionary.com and in many blogs written by Kindle users themselves]. It may be a while before "Nook" achieves verb status, however.

RC

KEY WORDS: E-books, Reading, Screading, Vooks, Motoko Rich, Ashlee Vance, John Markoff, Eric Taub, Bill Hill, Edward Tenner, Charles Bigelow, Paul Saffo, Kevin Kelly, Marvin Minsky, Anne Mangen, Mark Bauerlein, William Powers, Alex Beam, Maryanne Wolf, Gary Small, Christian Vandendorpe, David Abel, Neal Rubin, Celia Bertin, Danny Bloom, Vindu Goel, Gregory Cowles, Room for Debate, Alan Liu, David Gerlenter, Sandra Aamodt, Gloria Mark, Robert McCrum, Jack Schofield, Betsy Nolan, Marc Jaffe, Rudy Shur, Anthony Pomes, Robert Avrech, Pearl Saban, Hamish MacDonald, Bradley Winterton, Matthew Battles, Mark Kellner, Brier Dudley, Michael Kinsley, Frank Rich, Jonah Feuhner