READING SCIENCE FICTION ON MY PHONE: Aaron Davidson explores Stanza
I finished The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, a novel that holds the distinction of being the first book I read on my phone. I used the Stanza application, which is free.
For reasons both symbolic and tangible, The Time Machine was a good choice. The narrative describes a mythic technology and the exploration of the futurescape, and I often feel my iPhone achieves the fantastical sorts of progress and indulgence fictionalized by early sci-fi authors.
Wells’ style also complimented the physicality of reading on a small screen. The narrator—the “Time Traveler” who invents the machine that carries him 800,000 years into the future—begins describing his explorations moments after returning. He is still piecing together his own story as he retells it, and the resulting descriptions are concise and unadorned. (I can imagine the mobile reading experience being much different for a text with meandering sentences, changes in perspective, or more florid diction.)
The Time Machine took me a few months, because I only read on my phone when commuting or traveling. In this time the software went through a number of updates, each refining the experience incrementally. Many of the additions were smart, like a text annotation feature that seems perfect for paper-writing students. I also came to appreciate the way the iPhone’s light sensor auto-adjusts the brightness of the text (this can also be done manually with a vertical finger flick). Stanza became my favorite app to pull up when there was no 3G/Wi-Fi connection available to load newspaper or social network apps.
In a lot of ways, the phone represents a “gourmet” reading environment, with dozens of customizable niceties available to tailor the experience. After fiddling with text sizes, I settled for about 90 words per “page.” This meant constantly “flicking” to the next page, which gave the sensation of reading more (and quicker). I’m not sure I actually read any faster, but I became addicted to checking what “percentage” of the book I’d read before disembarking the train or bus. I liked the quantification, the digital equivalent of holding a book up to see how much is left.
The enjoyment I took from finishing The Time Machine swelled when I began searching for more free downloads. Stanza accesses more than 100,000 free books, journals, and periodicals from a number of public domain aggregators (like Project Gutenberg, Fictionwise, Feedbooks, and more). I found 45 works of Wells’ fiction and nonfiction available for free, and found the breadth of free, public domain reading staggering. Ayn Rand’s first novella! Ulysses! The Iliad! Milton, Nietzsche, Proust, Thoreau, Wilde, Tolstoy, Austen, Kafka! Every work of Shakespeare! (Check out Project Gutenberg’s top 100 to get a better sense of a fraction of what’s available.) You can also easily upload any digital text, even ebooks purchased elsewhere.
At this point, the availability of these texts should be saving students hundreds of dollars (Stanza is available as a desktop application, too, so in lieu of a “fancy” phone you can also access all these books with any connected computer—Mac or PC). Not to mention the natural resources saved by not reprinting classics readily available at any garage sale, thrift store, or used bookstore.
The mobile reading experience seems like a broad win. Classics live on in an accessible network of databases, and the reading software is intuitive, evolving, and amenable to all sorts of reader needs. My eyes can only stare at screens for so many hours in a day, meaning there will always be stacks of bound paper on my nightstand. But it’s nice to have another intelligent, usable option to enliven an “old technology” like reading. As the Traveler says: “There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.”
