So I finished reading the physical book. You know, the copy of Dances on Draxghr? It took a while, but today, I turned the page–turned the page!–to the final lines and finished the entire thing.

One of the biggest things I noticed while reading was how bare the text was. I think a lot of us take this for granted, but the incorporated sounds, images, and videos in books on our tablets are not at all present in a printed copy of a book. I mean, you can put pictures in, but how would you even print a sound? I found that a lot of times where things were easy to picture while reading on my tablet, they weren’t easy to picture when reading a physical book. I’m wondering now if we’ve started relying too much on sound and image embedding, as both readers and writers. Don’t get me wrong! Donetta Behar is still the best writer out there, past present and future. But sometimes it felt like descriptions in the book were vague, or sounds, or feelings, because they knew they’d have something else to make the reader picture them…I don’t know.

This is an idea I need to think more on.

Signed,

IT