For all of us bookworms who may have sneered at audio, this is the question. Some, like those of the Frankfurt School, may say that listening isn't reading, but her later line about "how a text reveals itself differently as the reading context changes" suggests that listening isn't merely being a passive captive. Rather, it may open up aspects of the text--the sounds of figurative language, the pace of syntax, and even unwritten movement and sound between the lines--that an author may intend but not explicitly note.

I like her suggestion that the complexities of the text, matched with destabilizing/fragmented reading modes come together as synthesis, but what's the result? New interpretations? Novel (pun unintended) fun?

This stuck out to me as being against the grain of her positive outlook on various forms of reading; the editorial process as it relates to the differing mediums/tools Kirschner uses is unaddressed for the most part of this text, leaving instead a question of the reader-side of this participation. I also disagree—or at least don't believe enduring editorial prowess and multimodal readings have to be mutually exclusive. It seems to me that in the vein of reading as writing, it is when we can dynamically "intervene" with a text that the content is "authenticated and improved." (Or did I read this sentence wrong?)

Separation of form and content works for her here, but I think it's more compelling to try to figure out how form changes content - just as she did earlier when pointing out the common threads between elements of Little Dorrit and her varying reading methods.

This discussion feels like a relic already. I for one also grossly underestimated the conservatism of media and genres in a way: newspapers still look a lot like newspapers and novels like novels. The rise of radically disruptive hybrid forms always seems to be in the future, outside of an experimental fringe. I even skip over all the amazing video content on the NYTimes: don't you?

You might read this differently, along Frankfurt School lines as "subjection."

Cute point, but also serious: print has proved remarkable durable, and the annotations that come with it equally so. Where will your Kindle notes be in twenty years? Can you even access them now? It's really hard to get them off the Kindle platform and into other, open formats...

Yeah, this is what I hope our readings of Melville do: make the act of reading, in all its materiality, move to the foreground.

Okay, so the piece shows its age a bit here, but the broad point about the "liquid text" that can be poured into different formats/containers is still quite relevant. I note, though, that the author slips between medium and material support here. An audiobook is a medium that can be materialized various ways (as we discussed last week, wax cylinder, LP, cassette, smartphone), whereas the Kindle is a piece of plastic, a "material support" in the book history lingo.

And parents.