A while back I published a post called I hate books, in which I wrote about how fed up I am with books being published on dead trees. My pal Maria wrote a rebuttal, I love books where she wrote about the appeal of words printed on paper.
In my post I mentioned the convenience of ebooks. A Wall Street Journal article, How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write goes a thousand miles further than that. Steven Johnson suggests that before long instant, online access to books will produce deep change to how we find books, how we think about them, how we read them and even how we write them:
Now that books are finally entering the world of networked, digital text, they will undergo the same transformation that Web pages have experienced over the past 15 years.
… With books becoming part of this universe, “booklogs” will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, “In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.”) You’ll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage’s true meaning.
Think of it as a permanent, global book club …
[Via : How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com.]
If you have any interest at all in books you really should read his whole article — it’s fascinating and deeply thought-provoking.
Aside: he mentions that the Aha experience that provoked his article came about because of the Kindle, and the ease with which he was able to stop reading one book, purchase and read another. We don’t yet have access to the Kindle in New Zealand.
I’ve been reading books on handheld screens for at least a decade now — I started when I had a Handspring Visor. My current device of choice is an iPod touch. The selection of items I want to read is limited though.
It’ll be interesting to discover what the Kindle will allow, once it gets here.
These Posts may interest you too:
- The future of books is digital What makes a book a book? This radio interview illuminates the question. ...
- I hate books We have this new stuff called technology. Let’s find ways to make it work to spread the ideas and information that used to be in books. ...
- Kindle ebooks come to Kiwiland The Kindle app for iPhone becomes available for Kiwis, along with many Kindle ebooks. ...
- Books, eBooks, BookMooch, manybooks Printed books are such a problem: once you’ve read them, then what? Once upon a time I’d put the book on a shelf, after maybe lending it to a friend....
- Transition times in textland Could the Kindle help save the environment? ...
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
It would indeed be a shame if readers were able to publicly comment on books as they do on blogs and forums. As we all know, the ‘Net is full of trolls. Publishing would become a personal popularity contest, with the author who offends the least number of people the person most likely to get new books published. There won’t be black or white — just gray, as every author and publisher attempts to please everyone all the time to avoid negative comments. Original thought would come to a standstill as old thoughts are regurgitated with fewer and fewer controversial points intact.
Amazon.com is already promoting author popularity contests with its reviews; the author with the most friends who can post positive reviews wins. I’ve been fooled into buying an absolute piece of crap novel by author friend reviews on Amazon. Likewise, I’ve seen more than a few excellent titles bashed by people who obviously didn’t bother to read what they were reviewing. I won’t get fooled again. I don’t read the reviews there.
But imagine that kind of comment availability on a global scale, affecting what publishers decide to publish and what we have available to read.
That’s not a world I want to be an author in. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen in my lifetime.
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