Reading, screening, kindling and scribding Hamlet

Heard of Scribd? It's a website that allows people to upload documents in different formats (Word, PowerPoint, OpenOffice, etc.) and save them using its iPaper format, which is similar to PDF. Scribd is hugely successful: more than 50,000 documents are now posted daily to the site. This means that I don't have time to read them all. I do, however, take a look now and then, and I always find something interesting, such as Hamlet's BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal.

Hamlet's BlackBerry was written two years ago by journalist William Powers when he was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. He argues that the long career of paper as a medium for information and entertainment is far from over. There is no better alternative, he says. Paper pleases us, which is why, for centuries, we've liked having it around and why we'll be reading on paper for centuries to come.

But when you read Hamlet's BlackBerry on Scribd, are you really "reading" it? Maybe we need a new verb for what's going on here. Danny Bloom, who blogs at Big Think, suggests "screening" for what we now do online. The new word has been accepted by the Urban Dictionary, which defines it as: "To read text on a computer screen, cellphone screen, Kindle screen or PDA screen or BlackBerry screen. Replaces the term 'reading', which now only refers to reading print text on paper." The example the dictionary gives is "I hate reading print newspapers now. I do all my screening online."

Speaking of reading on a screen, the Amazon Kindle e-reader has produced a new verb. Users speak of reading a book on the Kindle as "kindling". We're not finished yet, though, because last month, Simon & Schuster announced a partnership with Scribd in which the American publisher is making books by 5,000 authors available through Scribd. Does that mean we'll be "scribding" Dan Brown soon? It doesn't sound very nice, scribding, but words don't have to be pretty to be popular. Just look at "blog" and "Google".