The Inevitable Read online

  In addition to reading words on a page, we now read words floating nonlinearly in the lyrics of a music video or scrolling up in the closing credits of a movie. We might read dialog balloons spoken by an avatar in a virtual reality, or click through the labels of objects in a video game, or decipher the words on a diagram online. We should properly call this new activity “screening” rather than reading. Screening includes reading words, but also watching words and reading images. This new activity has new characteristics. Screens are always on; we never stop staring at them, unlike with books. This new platform is very visual and it gradually merges words with moving images. On the screen words zip around and float over images, serving as footnotes or annotations, linking to other words or images. You might think of this new medium as books we watch or television we read.

  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.

  Yet the tension between the book and the screen is still being played out. The current custodians of ebooks—screen companies such as Amazon and Google, under orders from the book publishers in New York and with the approval of some bestselling authors—have agreed to
cripple the extreme liquidity of ebooks by currently preventing readers from cutting and pasting text easily, or from copying large sections of a book, or from otherwise seriously manipulating the text. Ebooks today lack the fungibility of the ur-text of screening: Wikipedia. But eventually the text of ebooks will be liberated in the near future, and the true nature of books will blossom. We will find out that books never really wanted to be printed telephone directories, or hardware catalogs on paper, or paperback how-to books. These are jobs that screens and bits are much superior at—all that updating and searching—tasks that neither paper nor narratives are suited for. What those kinds of books have always wanted was to be annotated, marked up, underlined, bookmarked, summarized, cross-referenced, hyperlinked, shared, and talked to. Being digital allows them to do all that and more.

  We can see the very first glimpses of books’ newfound freedom in the Kindles and Fires. As I read a book I can (with some trouble) highlight a passage I would like to remember. I can extract those highlights (with some effort today) and reread my selection of the most important or memorable parts. More important, with my permission, my highlights can be shared with other readers, and I can read the highlights of a particular friend, scholar, or critic. We can even filter the most popular highlights of all readers, and in this manner begin to read a book in a new way. This gives a larger audience access to the precious marginalia of another author’s close reading of a book (with their permission), a boon that previously only rare-book collectors witnessed.

  Reading becomes social. With screens we can share not just the titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them. Today, we can highlight a passage. Tomorrow, we will be able to link passages. We can add a link from a phrase in the book we are reading to a contrasting phrase in another book we’ve read, from a word in a passage to an obscure dictionary, from a scene in a book to a similar scene in a movie. (All these tricks will require tools for finding relevant passages.) We might subscribe to the marginalia feed from someone we respect, so we get not only their reading list but their marginalia—highlights, notes, questions, musings.

  The kind of intelligent book club discussion as now happens on the book sharing site Goodreads might follow the book itself and become more deeply embedded into the book via hyperlinks. So when a person cites a particular passage, a two-way link connects the comment to the passage and the passage to the comment. Even a minor good work could accumulate a wiki-like set of critical comments tightly bound to the actual text.

  Indeed, dense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event. The conventional vision of the book’s future assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on the shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to enliven it with his or her imagination. In this conventional vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability—the nifty translation of a book’s full text into bits, which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: In the universal library, no book will be an island. It’s all connected.

  Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of ebooks and etexts, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

  Right now the best we can do in terms of interconnection is to link some text to its source’s title in a bibliography or in a footnote. Much better would be a link to a specific passage in another passage in a work, a technical feat not yet possible. But when we can link deeply into documents at the resolution of a sentence, and have those links go two ways, we’ll have networked books.

  You can get a sense of what this might be like by visiting Wikipedia. Think of Wikipedia as one very large book—a single encyclopedia—which of course it is. Most of its 34 million pages are crammed with words underlined in blue, indicating those words are hyperlinked to concepts elsewhere in the encyclopedia. This tangle of relationships is precisely what gives Wikipedia—and the web—its immense force. Wikipedia is the first networked book. In the goodness of time, each Wikipedia page will become saturated with blue links as every statement is cross-referenced. In the goodness of time, as all books become fully digital, every one of them will accumulate the equivalent of blue underlined passages as each literary reference is networked within that book out to all other books. Each page in a book will discover other pages and other books. Thus books will seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together into one large metabook, the universal library. The resulting collective intelligence of this synaptically connected library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single isolated book.

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  The dream of a universal library is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages—all connected. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 BC, was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 percent and 70 percent of all books in existence back then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes, and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that keeps receding further into the infinite future. But might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?

  Brewster Kahle, an archivist who is backing up the entire internet, says that the universal library is now within reach. “This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!” he chants. “It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon.” And unlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book in every language to every person alive on the planet.

  Ideally, in such a complete library we should be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine, or journal. The universal library should also include a copy of every painting, photograph, film, and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. Of course, the grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone—the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.

  This is a very big library. From the days of Sumerian clay tablets until now, humans have “published” at least 310 million books, 1.4 billion articles and essays, 180 million songs, 3.5 trillion images, 330,000 movies, 1 billion hours of videos, TV shows, and short films, and 60 trillion public web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50-petabyte hard disks. Ten years ago you needed a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. Today the universal library would fill your bedroom. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your phone. When that happens, the library of all libraries
will ride in your purse or wallet—if it doesn’t plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long.

  But the technologies that will bring us a planetary source of all written material will also, in the same gesture, transform the nature of what we now call the book and the libraries that hold them. The universal library and its “books” will be unlike any library or books we have known because, rather than read them, we will screen them. Buoyed by the success of massive interlinking in Wikipedia, many nerds believe that a billion human readers can reliably weave together the pages of old books, one hyperlink at a time. Those with a passion for a special subject, obscure author, or favorite book will, over time, link up its important parts. Multiply that simple generous act by millions of readers, and the universal library can be integrated in full, by fans, for fans.