I'm finding, as I slowly take up reading books again, that I find it much more satisfying than reading the internet. Books are finite and finish-able, and so you always know how far along you are. There's a very palpable sense of progress and achievement that comes with reading a book. In reading things on the internet, I find the problem to be that there is too much of it, and there is not enough. You will, before maybe 5-10 minutes, exhaust all the stories that you haven't read on Digg; in a given moment, if you want to read more than that, you have to go to other sites, and there are an infinite amount of those. And, you'll never be done reading Digg. There will always be more Digg, more Slashdot, more Boingboing, more silly technology news, more mashups of multiple cultural elements; you'll never absorb it all, though it's always at your fingertips, ready to be googled for.
Books also benefit from generally having consistent voice, and from being somewhat edited. You still, at this point, need to be a somewhat decent writer to get a book published (I know there are countless counterexamples to this, but still); and then you benefit from your 150-900 pages of material being written by that relatively decent author. Very few internet sites I know of benefit from decent writers, and very few of them are done by one person. It's scattershot, and distracting, like the internet itself.
I realize that books and the internet serve different purposes as reading material. But, I find that my overuse of the internet depresses me, and I think these are some of the reasons: the non-finite, uncontainable nature of it, and the just general badness of it all.
Going back to my book now. Go back to yours!
xo
