[MUSIC FADE] BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ann Kirschner is a dean at the City University of New York and a scholar of Victorian literature. Last year we spoke with Kirschner about an experiment of sorts, reading the Charles Dickens novel Little Dorrit four ways – as a paperback, on her Kindle, and her iPhone and as an audio book. Here’s what that sounds like:

NARRATOR: “Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away.”

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Kirschner says she started by pulling her old Penguin paperback edition down from her bookshelf.

ANN KIRSCHNER: The first thing that just washed over me was nostalgia because there was my name and the date and my little marginalia that I had written as a graduate student. So it was like encountering myself, as well as encountering Dickens. The paperback felt absolutely wonderful in my hands. But then I left my apartment and went down into the New York City subway, and in a crowded New York City subway it’s a little hard to maneuver that paperback. And so, I started thinking, well, maybe I should look at the audio book Little Dorrit, as well, because I'm an audio book lover.



BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ah-ha. You are an audio book lover, and yet many will dismiss this way of reading as not really reading at all.

ANN KIRSCHNER: Oh, I think that’s an ideological falsity. It’s reading. It’s just reading in a different format. When you read an audio book, you’re sort of at the mercy of the narrator. You can't easily go back, you can't easily go forward. So you’re a relatively passive reader. But it lends itself to reading in all kinds of unusual places. You know, you’re having your teeth cleaned, a great time to read [BROOKE LAUGHS] an audio book. [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, let’s skip over to the Kindle, which I understood you received as a gift more than a year ago. Did that change the way you took in the story, absorbed the words?

ANN KIRSCHNER: Reading electronically, you have a lot more control. If you want to make the font larger, you can. If you want to play with the margins, you can. What I didn't like about the Kindle was that I had to make a conscious decision to take it with me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm. I have a friend who said she likes it better than a book because turning the virtual page is so instantaneous and effortless that she felt like a rat in a Skinner box pushing for a pellet, another pellet, another pellet -

ANN KIRSCHNER: [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: - in a good way.

ANN KIRSCHNER: Then she ought to try the, the iPhone, because one of the areas that I actually find annoying about the Kindle is that little click, click, click, because there’s a, a nanosecond when the screen goes black. And I found that that really sort of disturbed my sense of seamless reading.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ah, the iPhone, which seems, on the face of it, to offer the least enjoyable experience because the screen is so small. And yet, I have a friend who reads Jane Austen on hers – hi, Lynn. Is she weird?

ANN KIRSCHNER: [LAUGHS] She’s not weird at all. Go, Lynn! The iPhone was the revelation, to me. The screen is brighter, crisper. You can change pages instantaneously. But the most important thing is that the iPhone is always with you, or at least always with me.

[BROOKE LAUGHS] And, you know, the old Woody Allen line, 70 percent of success in life is just showing up? The iPhone showed up.



BROOKE GLADSTONE: That was Ann Kirschner in June of 2009. It’s a year later, and Kirschner tells us that she now has yet a fifth way to read Little Dorrit.

[ANN KIRSCHNER LAUGHS] The ultimate seduction for you now is the iPad.

ANN KIRSCHNER: Yes, yes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why?

ANN KIRSCHNER: Well, it’s a Swiss Army knife. So, it becomes my calendar, it becomes my note taker; it becomes something I can play with if I have, you know, a half an hour to play Scrabble or something like that. Then the ultimate great use of time, reading, beckons because it’s simply the best e-reader in town.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: We should also add, you can also connect to the internet with it.

ANN KIRSCHNER: How could we have left that out?

[BROOKE LAUGHS] Right, you can sail forth onto the internet; you can seamlessly make a transition from reading to whatever else it is you need to do. So it’s the ubiquity factor. It’s always with you because it is so multi-purpose.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What you used to say about the iPhone.

ANN KIRSCHNER: That’s exactly right, that’s exactly right. And I fooled myself that the size of the iPhone’s screen wasn’t an issue, and – you know, and I think it was the best that it could be at that moment. And you know what, a year from now we’re gonna say the same thing about the iPad.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, you wrote a piece recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “My iPad Day.” And in the comments below the piece someone wrote, quote, “I found this article nauseating –

[ANN LAUGHS] - in its fetishism.” [LAUGHS]

ANN KIRSCHNER: [LAUGHING] I couldn’t imagine what that person meant.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You couldn’t? [LAUGHS]

ANN KIRSCHNER: Well, you know, you could say the same thing about a book. I have a friend recently who produced a memoir to which he added beautiful illustrations, tipped in pictures. It was beautifully bound. There is something, I guess, fetishistic about a beautiful volume. But I have no problem translating that into a digital dimension and saying that iPads are quite beautiful as well.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ann, thank you so much.

ANN KIRSCHNER: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ann Kirschner is Dean of Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York, and author of Sala’s Gift.