Despite this resurgence of words, People of the Book reasonably fear that books—and therefore classical reading and writing—will soon die as a cultural norm. If that happens, who will adhere to the linear rationality encouraged by book reading? Who will obey rules if the respect for books of laws is diminished, to be replaced by lines of code that try to control our behavior? Who will pay authors to write when almost everything is available for free on flickering screens? They fear that perhaps only the rich will read books on paper. Perhaps only a few will pay attention to the wisdom on their pages. Perhaps fewer will pay for them. What can replace a book’s steadfastness in our culture? Will we simply abandon this vast textual foundation that underlies our current civilization? The old way of reading—not this new way—had an essential hand in creating most of what we cherish about a modern society: literacy, rational thinking, science, fairness, rule of law. Where does that all go with screening? What happens to books?
The fate of books is worth investigating in detail because books are simply the first of many media that screening will transform. First screening will change books, then it will alter libraries of books, then it will modify movies and video, then it will disrupt games and education, and finally screening will change everything else.
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People of the Book think they know what a book is: It is a sheaf of pages with a spine you can grab. In the past almost anything printed between two covers would count as a book. A list of telephone numbers was called a book, even though it had no logical beginning, middle, or end. A pile of bound blank pages was called a sketchbook; it was unabashedly empty, but it did have two covers and was thus called a book. A gallery of photographs on a stack of pages was a coffee table book even though it contained no words at all.
Today the paper sheets of a book are disappearing. What is left in their place is the conceptual structure of a book—a bunch of symbols united by a theme into an experience that takes a while to complete.
Since the traditional shell of the book is vanishing, it’s fair to wonder whether its organization is merely a fossil. Does the intangible container of a book offer any advantages over the many other forms of text available now?
Some scholars of literature claim that a book is really that virtual place your mind goes to when you are reading. It is a conceptual state of imagination that one might call “literature space.” According to these scholars, when you are engaged in this reading space, your brain works differently than when you are screening. Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Instead of skipping around distractedly gathering bits, when you read you are transported, focused, immersed.
One can spend hours reading on the web and never encounter this literature space. One gets fragments, threads, glimpses. That is the web’s great attraction: miscellaneous pieces loosely joined. But without some kind of containment, these loosely joined pieces spin away, nudging a reader’s attention outward, wandering from the central narrative or argument.
A separate reading device seems to help. So far we have tablets, pads, Kindles, and phones. The phone is the most surprising. Commentators had long held that no one would want to read a book on a tiny few-inch-wide glowing screen, but they were wrong. By miles. I and many others happily read books that way. In fact, we don’t know yet how small a book-reading screen can go. There is an experimental type of reading called rapid serial visual presentation, which uses a screen only one word wide. As small as a postage stamp. Your eye remains stationary, fixed on one word, which replaces itself with the next word in the text, and then the one after that. So your eye reads a sequence of words “behind” one another rather than in a long string next to one another. A small screen only one word wide can squeeze in almost anywhere, expanding the territory of where we can read.
Over 36 million Kindles and ebook readers with e-ink have been sold. An ebook is a plank that holds a single page. The single page is “turned” by clicking the plank, so that one page dissolves into another page. The reflective e-ink in the later generations of Kindles is as sharp and readable as traditional ink on paper. Yet unlike printed words, with these ebooks you can cut and paste text from the page, follow up hyperlinks, and interact with illustrations.
But there is no reason an ebook has to be a plank. E-ink paper can be manufactured in inexpensive flexible sheets as thin and supple and cheap as paper. A hundred or so sheets can be bound into a sheaf, given a spine, and wrapped between two handsome covers. Now the ebook looks very much like a paper book of old, thick with pages, but it can change its content. One minute the page has a poem on it; the next it has a recipe. Yet you still turn its thin pages (a way to navigate through text that is hard to improve). When you are finished reading the book, you slap the spine. Now the same pages show a different tome. It is no longer a bestselling mystery, but a how-to guide to raising jellyfish. The whole artifact is superbly crafted and satisfying to hold. A well-designed ebook shell may be so sensual it might be worth purchasing a very fine one covered in soft well-worn Moroccan leather, molded to your hand, sporting the most satiny, thinnest sheets. You’ll probably have several ebook readers of different sizes and shapes optimized for different content.
Personally, I like large pages in my books. I want an ebook reader that unfolds, origami-like, into a sheet at least as big as a newspaper today. Maybe with as many pages. I don’t mind taking a few minutes to fold it back into a pocket-size packet when I am done. I love being able to scan multiple long columns and jump between headlines on one plane. A number of research labs are experimenting with prototypes of books that are projected wide and big via lasers from a pocket device onto a nearby flat surface. A table or a wall becomes the pages of these books, which you turn with hand gestures. The oversize pages provide the old-timey thrill of your eye roaming across multiple columns and many juxtapositions.
The immediate effect of books born digital is that they can flow onto any screen, anytime. A book will appear when summoned. The need to purchase or stockpile a book before you read it is gone. A book is less an artifact and more a stream that flows into your view.
This liquidity is just as true for the creation of books as for consumption. Think of a book in all its stages as a process rather than artifact. Not a noun, but a verb. A book is more “booking” than paper or text. It is a becoming. It is a continuous flow of thinking, writing, researching, editing, rewriting, sharing, socializing, cognifying, unbundling, marketing, more sharing, and screening—a flow that generates a book along the way. Books, especially ebooks, are by-products of the booking process. Displayed on a screen, a book becomes a web of relationships generated by booking words and ideas. It connects readers, authors, characters, ideas, facts, notions, and stories. These relationships are amplified, enhanced, widened, accelerated, leveraged, and redefined by new ways of screening.