Some time ago, I wrote about my feelings for books, and where I thought reading was going.

At that stage (March 2009), I had just discovered reading on my iPod Touch. It was long before the iPad was announced, but I’m pleased to find that my earlier comments are all pretty much still valid. I still treasure the feel of a “real”, dead-tree book and will no doubt still hang on to most of my current collection of some 3,000 volumes – at least until the next time we move house!

But since I bought an iPad in late May of this year, it has become my reading device of choice.

I have now read almost a dozen books on the iPad, and I find it a very comfortable experience, though I am appalled at how badly some e-books have been constructed by the publishers.

Apart from free classics, I have paid full price for all of the e-books I have acquired.

My favourite e-book store is Books on Board, which has a great selection, good prices and a really easy mechanism for selection and payment. Though I have bought a couple of books from Amazon to read in their Kindle app, and a few from Kobo books to read in their app, I prefer to use the Apple iBooks app, which I find is by far the best of the reading apps on the iPad. However, in Australia Apple are still only offering classics from Gutenberg (they haven’t been able to negotiate agreements with local publishers, it seems).

Getting my books into iBooks has involved some shenanigans to remove the Digital Rights Management. I’m not going to tell you how I did this, because it’s arguably against US legislation to publish such information. But I am confident that I am within the law to actually do this – I have paid for the books, after all, and all I am doing is format-shifting them. What nonsense that we even have to worry about this stuff!!

But as well as books, I have been reading a lot of other stuff on my iPad. There are newspapers, for example. I also regularly look at the New York Times. I tried their “Editor’s Choice” app, but though it is well-designed I prefer their web site, which has more varied content.

My local-city newspaper, The Age, doesn’t have an app out as yet (and judging by the offering from their sister publication, The Sydney Morning Herald, it won’t be worth waiting for), but their web site is OK, if a little tricky to navigate by touch. My wife and I both sit reading The Age in the morning on our iPads as we have breakfast. In this regard, I am very fond of the set of MoviePegs I bought, which enable me to prop up the iPad in a portrait orientation.

In the morning I also check out the local weather, using a great Australian app called Oz Weather HD.

I also particularly like the Guardian newspaper app called Guardian Eyewitness. Every day there’s a stunning photograph, complete with tips for budding photojournalists.

Looking rather like a newspaper itself, though actually a collection of my favourite RSS feeds, is The Early Edition, which I use to scan through what is new. Mostly, though, I shunt off longer articles to the brilliant app Instapaper. I’m particularly enjoying following the 17th Century blogger, Sam Pepys, this way.

My latest delight has been discovering that I could subscribe to New Scientist magazine on the iPad, through the Zinio app.

Over the last 30 years (!) I have tried to keep up with New Scientist in many different ways – a subscription to the hard copy through my local newsagent (expensive), a subscription on microfische (required a special reader, and uncomfortable), a digital version through an organisation called Newsstand (I could only read this on my computer, sitting at my desk – also uncomfortable).

But finally, I can subscribe at a reasonable cost (only a third of the cost of the hardcopy), and read it in comfort in an armchair. Brilliant! And much more pleasant and interesting to see all of the photographs, diagrams and sidebars (and even the advertisements) in their right place in the magazine, with excellent layout. The pinch and stretch zoom capabilities of the iPad make this a very comfortable way to read a magazine. I wish The Age was available in this way.

And then there’s… well, comics. OK, I know I’m now nearly 60 years old and I shouldn’t be indulging in reading the kind of escapist stuff I read when I was 13, but the fact is that I still enjoy it. Some time ago I bought a DVD collection of 40 years worth of Spider-Man comics, all in PDF format. I read some of these on my computer, but as usual, sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen is hardly relaxing. But come the iPad, and the excellent GoodReader app, I can sit and read my way through these with great comfort and lots of nostalgia.

Then there are modern comics, or graphic novels, whatever. Both Marvel and DC comics have their own apps (based on the same engine) and both have a good selection of free comic books. I particularly enjoyed ElephantMen, both for the quality of the graphics and the interesting story.

And if we want to get out of the graphic gutter and reach for the literary stars, then there’s always the excellent Shakespeare Pro app. Every play the Bard wrote, complete with line numbers, search capabilities, illustrations and much more.

Reading will never be the same again.

The Infernal Engine

(First published in October 1995)

It came to me only recently that spell-checkers are the invention of the Devil.

No, seriously.

Well, an invention if not of the cloven-hoofed gentleman, then certainly of someone or thing whose intent is the Destruction of All We Hold Dear.

It was General Jack D. Ripper, I think, who informed us that fluoridation of drinking water was all a dirty commie plot to Pollute Our Precious Bodily Fluids. These days, with the end of the Cold War, I would hesitate to point the finger in the same direction, but I ask you, have you ever heard of a Russian spell-checker? You bet your sweet babushka you haven’t.

I came to this revelation only recently, I must admit. But it all came clear to me when I was reading an article in “The Age” newspaper, on the concerns that parents have about the apparent decline in their children’s reading and writing skills. The article reported (unidentified) teachers as claiming that it was no longer necessary to teach children how to spell. “After all,” they went on, “there’s always the spell-checker”.

That was bad enough, but then I went on to read that the “whole-learning” approach depended on children learning to read, not by spelling out the sounds, but by learning to recognise the whole word in context, using “picture queues” and other non-verbal evidence.

Picture queues? Putting aside images of portraits lined up to get into a gallery, I puzzled over this for a long time, until I realised that what was meant were “picture cues”, that is, hints from illustrations. The article, I realised with a sense of impending dread, had been spell-checked!

“Queues” is a perfectly good word, of course. It would have passed the spell-checker easily. But it was the wrong word, and entirely the wrong meaning in the context of the sentence. A queue is something long and boring, the epitome of inaction. A cue, on the other hand, as in a billiard cue, is something which prompts something else into action.

A perfect example, in other words, of why spelling is important, and why spell-checkers are the invention of the Devil, or of someone who admires him.

Later in the same edition of the newspaper, in an article discussing ethics, we see “principle” used incorrectly instead of “principal”, greatly confusing the sense.

No newspaper in Australia now employs a proof-reader. The profession of proof-reader is going the same way as that of gas-lighter. Archaic, unnecessary, old-fashioned. Yet its loss will leave us all in the dark.

The problem with spell-checkers, of course, is that they don’t check spelling. They merely have a long list of combinations of letters which are known to be valid English words; and the best they can do is to report that a certain combination is not in its list. This entirely negative check does pick up some mis-typings of course, otherwise no-one would use spell-checkers. But as any Scrabble player knows, there are some very weird combinations of letters which are perfectly valid English words. Worse still, people can add their own words to the list in the spell-checker, if they find the checker regularly picking them up and questioning them. Ah, blessed relief: no more annoying “Ignore, Change, Add?” messages from the spell-checker. But the result is, that over time, the list of accepted spelling combinations in the checker gets longer and longer, and fewer and fewer mis-spellings are actually identified.

Spell-checkers would still have their uses even so, but because of sheer laziness, or for short-sighted economic reasons in the case of the newspapers, no-one who has run a spell-checker over an article feels any impulse or duty to read it to pick up any other errors, let alone to check for sense and coherence. The result is that the quality of journalism (never very high) is plunging rapidly. One frequently these days comes across sentences or phrases in published material which simply do not make sense, or which are so badly mangled that one has to give up in disgust. So no example is set to young people of good writing, and so the standards of literacy continue to drop into the abyss.

A friend of mine recently tried to convince me that within five years keyboards will be a thing of the past: all computer input will be through voice-recognition.

“But what about words which sound the same, but have different spelling?”.

“Oh, artificial intelligence will sort all that out,” he said airily. “Besides, we have spell-checkers.”

The trouble with artificial intelligence, of course, is that mostly it is artificial stupidity: dumbness repeated over and over again a million times to achieve a result. Like trying out a million possible moves in a game of chess. Like checking every word against a vast list of possibilities.
But the worst thing of all about spell-checkers is that I reckon they are going to halt the process of spelling reform. Lord knows, the English language is full of odd and non-phonetical spellings: that’s probably why we need spell-checkers in the first place. Laugh, cough, bough, though. Night and fright. Photograph.

Without the invention of the spell-checker, there was at least some hope that over a period of time English spelling would become more rational: the Americans have at least made a start on it. But if my spell-checker, based on an Australian dictionary, rejects “center” in favour of “centre”, “color” in favour of “colour”, and refuses to play along if I attempt “nite” or “foto”, what hope is there for spelling reform? We are all going to be locked into late 20th Century spellings of the particular country we base our dictionaries on. The process of slow shiftings in spelling will just stop.

Similarly, old, obscure or esoteric words will drop from use because the spell-checker won’t let them through – try using a great word like “logodaedaly”, for example, and have the Microsoft Word nanny peremptorily interrupt you and tell you to correct that word it has underlined in red for you, you naughty person!

To close, I can’t do better than to quote from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, written long before spell-checkers, but presaging their invention:

Lexicographer, n.

A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods… Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as “obsolete” or “obsolescent” and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its resoration to favor – whereby the process of impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, the bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that “it isn’t in the dictionary”…

Ignore, Change, Add?