Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading (24 page)
Read Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading Online
Authors: Jason Merkoski
As retailers move toward tablets to let you consume all kinds of media, we’re finding that our focus often gets diluted and our attention spans get—what? What was I saying? Hold on, let me check my email and do a quick tweet.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve paid more than my fair share of dollars toward Apple’s billions in app sales. And I’ve done this with the drawback that when I do read on my iPad, I often find myself bouncing from the ebook application to the browser or to Facebook or a bunch of other applications. And the single-threaded reading experience that I get with dedicated e-readers or even print books is lost.
The reading I do on my iPad is more like snacking than eating a full meal. That wonderful faculty I have in my brain as I read, the way that my temporal and parietal lobes light up as I explore what-ifs and puzzle out the layers of meaning in the book I’m reading—well, on a tablet, those lights grow dim, and I lose focus. And I’m a fairly disciplined guy, so it’s not a matter of my own susceptibilities. These multifunction devices, which will be a core part of our future, engender a less focused mode of reading.
This is problematic, because as your mind wanders like a moth at a carnival after sunset, bumble-flitting from booth to booth, from light to seedy neon light, it may never return to where it began. Now, this flittering has the side benefit that if we can channel ourselves properly while reading, we’ll be able to use other applications as adjuncts to look up words or to go online and find out the hidden meanings or subtexts. But ideally all this functionality would be seamlessly present in the reading experience itself, so we wouldn’t run the risk of losing our place in the reading or our train of thought.
So we either need better applications that keep us rooted to what we’re reading, or we need to police ourselves—perhaps with lockouts that we apply to ourselves that prohibit us from wandering out of the book to check our email or surf the web or only allow us to do this once an hour while reading. Perhaps future software updates for the iPad will allow teachers to lock devices down into ebook-only mode or give students intermittent access to the non-ebook parts of the device. Lockdown controls like this would probably be useful for a lot of adults I know too.
Lockdown controls aren’t the only thing we could benefit from. I think we can all benefit from a brush-up course on digital hygiene, on learning how to focus. And I think we’re going to learn just how important social networks are. A 2012 study by the Association of Magazine Media showed that Gen Y was reading more magazines than ever, although this reading was tied to an increase in the use of social networking sites. So let’s face it, ebooks are going social, and it’s going to be a strange symbiosis, like that between a hummingbird and an orchid: one without the other would likely not last. Digital books will form an unlikely alliance with social networks, and they’ll both survive the changing tides of fashion and the flighty whims of technology.
Still, one of the reasons I adore dedicated e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook, as opposed to tablets like the iPad, is that they keep your attention on an ebook as you read. Like with a print book, you’ve got a dedicated reading experience with no distractions—no buzzing lights or videos or ads for meeting singles online or tweets to respond to. I worry when reading experiences start to include too much distraction and context shifting. As someone sensitive to media ecology, that’s where I draw the line. I think all of us, our children included, should be encouraged toward dedicated experiences, not distracting ones.
Our devices are shortening our children’s attention spans. Our children need to concentrate when they learn to read to become good readers—and from that, good thinkers. But our hypermediated environment is one of constant distraction, so our kids are often learning to read—and through that, to think—in a rather shallow and careless way. It never used to be possible, let alone culturally acceptable, to read and watch TV at the same time. You would have to pick one or the other to focus on.
But now with devices like the iPad, you can multitask between them, switching from reading to watching a video when the book becomes too hard. And let’s face it: our brains are lazy. Ask any cognitive neuroscientist, and they’ll tell you that our brains are machines for avoiding work, if there’s any work to be done. And reading is hard work. It’s rewarding, true, but you have to actively work at it. When you skim a book and passively read it, you don’t recall as much of what you’ve read as when you pause, linger over sentences, find the humor or irony in them, and actively work at the reading experience.
That said, not everyone can focus. Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) causes inattention, distractibility, and disorganization. Incidences of this disorder are on the rise. In fact, it’s estimated that up to 10 percent of American children have this. At the time of this book’s writing, doctors still don’t know what causes ADHD. But most doctors would agree that you don’t try to fight inattention with more inattention. If anything, children with ADHD are encouraged to create routines and avoid distractions. Snacking on digital media on iPads and similar multifunction tablets only feeds the inattention.
Not just children have ADHD. Many adults do too, and the numbers are still climbing. Maybe it’s part and parcel of carrying around so many smartphones and tablets and laptops, of being too plugged in to the internet and chat windows and glittering digital eye-candy. But this disorder is debilitating. In the end state, if this continues unchecked, we run the risk of becoming a nation of ADHDers, unable to focus, engage, or reason clearly.
What’s the way out of this?
Simplicity, mindfulness, and attention. It might be as simple as doing nothing. As long as it’s the right kind of nothing.
In the book
Hamlet’s BlackBerry
, author William Powers describes a technique that works for him. He calls it a “Walden Zone.” It’s a room without electronics. A room in your house where you can think, like Thoreau on Walden Pond. A place where you can meditate and contemplate—and ideally, you’re not contemplating what your next game of
Angry
Birds
will be like or how you’ll beat your former score.
It’s a technique I use in my own life. There’s always a room in my house with no gadgetry, and I try every year to take a vacation for a few weeks somewhere without electricity. I try to reconnect with myself. Even if you don’t suffer from ADHD, this might work for you too.
If you have other techniques to stay focused that work, why not share them with others who are passionate about ebooks but wary of the perils of having too many distractions? And if you’re a parent or a teacher, what do you think about how reading is taught these days? Do you think kids can become good readers when music and TV and the web and texting are taking up their attention and taking them out of their books?
One of the amazing things about the ebook revolution is how much attention it has gotten in our culture. Ten years ago, hardly anyone talked about the book-publishing business. Even editors and publishers were bored with it. Movies and TV were much more exciting. But today, you can find stories about the ebook revolution online and in newspapers almost every day. Why is this so fascinating to people?
I believe it’s because books had a solidity to them. They represented the accumulated weight of our culture. Books were the last bastion of the analog. Prior to the Kindle, all other forms of media had been digitized. Music, movies, TV shows, video games, even newspapers were available on the web for instant download and instant gratification. But books remained in print.
But now, the last bastion of the analog, the last stalwart bulwark, has finally been cracked, and books are available for digital download. With the advent of ebooks, books will never quite be the same. Now, our eyes will grow accustomed to LCD screens and eInk displays instead of paper softly lit by glowing fireplace embers at night. Our kids will never know the subtle way that books get scarier by night as you curl up under the covers with a flashlight to read.
These next few years will be momentous for the book industry, as it shifts from a purely physical mode to a digital mode. But this shift into the digital is happening everywhere, not just with books. Everything we take for granted in the physical world is up for grabs in the digital world, including core concepts like ownership of ourselves and our creations, digital or otherwise.
As we transition our lives wholesale into Facebook and Twitter and communicate more with email than face to face, what does it really mean to own something or even to “be” in the purely existential sense of Hamlet in his soliloquy? What does it mean as our books shift to the cloud from our trusty wooden bookshelves and from neat or perhaps messy stacks next to our beds? What does it mean as our media—our books and songs and movies—are no longer real-world things with any substance that we can feel with our fingers? What does it mean as we move our memories online into social networking services or as we post our photos onto websites like Flickr instead of printing them out at the pharmacy and putting them into photo albums?
These questions persist and will only grow harder to answer over time.
All the papers, all the records and receipts of our lives, will go digital next. There’ll be ways of browsing them, handheld devices that we can use to browse our own lives through these collections of bus tickets and love letters that once meant so much to us.
I think it’s a stretch to say that we’ll live out our lives entirely in the digital world like cyberpunk authors of the 1980s would have had you believe, that we’ll sell off our furniture and live instead with bare-bones lamps and beds made of origami that can be crushed underfoot when they’re no longer needed, that we’ll live in small shacks like U-Stor-It lockers, jacked into computers, and that we will only care about our avatars and the clothes they wear. It’s a stretch to think that we’ll live this way, but nobody knows. What it means to be alive in a digital sense is still up for grabs.
Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about the seven wonders of the ancient world. In particular, the fact that some still exist. I’d thought that the Pyramids of Egypt were the only wonders of the ancient world that still remained, but actually, there are remains of almost all the other monuments from antiquity. There are chunks of masonry of the Lighthouse at Alexandria in the Mediterranean Sea, remaining from when the lighthouse was toppled by an earthquake. There are fragments and sculptures from the Temple of Artemis held at the British Museum after being recovered by early archaeologists.
There are still ruins of the basement levels of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, and you can go there and walk among the ruins of an ancient wonder. It’s even said that the base that supported the Colossus of Rhodes still survives at a church a mile away from the bay where the Colossus was said to have once towered. And who knows? One day, there may be a cuneiform tablet unearthed that contains a plan for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Though the Old World has been scoured by archaeologists, they’re always turning up new things. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the last of the seven ancient wonders, no longer survives, but the workshop where it was built was recently uncovered.
I’m surprised that remnants of the ancient wonders have persisted for millennia, and I’m encouraged, because if brute stone can survive, surely a digitized person can survive, as well. We should all be able to float down the eons in a Pharaonic funeral boat, immortal in a way that the ancient Egyptians could never dream of.
Perhaps I’m in an elegiac mood these days, but I wonder what would prompt people to build a digital version of themselves. Could I build a digital monument to myself, a digital Mausoleum of Halicarnassus? Would it be something that merely baffles my friends and family, or would it live on as a testament to a madman’s desire for immortality, as mad as the Pyramids or a forty-foot-tall silver statue of Zeus?
Could a version of my digital self become a companion for people in the future, a confidante, someone they could talk to? Could my digital self gradually learn from itself or others and subtly reprogram itself in the same ways that I myself might? Will there be a place where digital personas can congregate together, some digital mortuary grounds or Second Life where they can talk about who they once were or argue about ideas?
I’m not sure. But I’ve got the mad Pyramid-architect desire to try and find out, to see what happens, one way or the other. A digital self, if it can avoid bit rot, is a kind of immortality. It’s the oldest dream of them all, the Faustian dream of living long enough to know and observe everything. Except that there’s no devil in this Faustian pact—or at least, no devil that I’m aware of yet.
In the telling of the story, the devil granted Faust all the knowledge he wanted, with the catch that his soul would one day be claimed by the devil. The knowledge was limited only by death, which of course explains the motivation for Faust to cheat the devil and live on. Sadly, in both Christopher Marlowe’s and Johann Goethe’s versions of the story, Faust inevitably dies.
His tale is ultimately a moral one, the message being that we can’t live forever. We can’t come to know everything. And that’s fine. I know I won’t live forever. My body and mind are frail, just like yours, like everyone’s. But that’s okay. Because surely through my digital self, I’ll live on—right?
And this, in fact, is the final digital frontier. The digitization of memories and minds themselves. It might take a hundred years before the heirs of Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs figure out how to digitize human brains and make them available for purchase and download. But once that happens, it would be an amazing experience to download the personality of your deceased grandmother and to speak to her for a few hours. Or perhaps you could have a conversation with yourself as you once were. Or speak with any of the great minds of history and have a dialogue with them or argue with them.
For example, I’m reading a classic sci-fi book now called
Martian
Time-Slip
by Philip K. Dick, and I’m stunned at how good it is. If I could download the author’s personality and start talking to him about his book, I’d feel overjoyed. The closest I can come now is to talk to other readers or post to the dead author’s Facebook fan page, but it’s clearly not the same as a genuine conversation with the author.
Of course, in all likelihood, the minds of wealthy entertainers or technology early adopters will be digitized first. Theirs will be the minds available a hundred years from now as public domain recordings for people to download for free. And while theirs will be the first minds to be digitized, the quality will be poor, like that of wax cylinders or early ebooks.
Though created with the best that technology could once offer, they’ll eventually be seen as grainy, more lo-fi than other hi-fi brains available for download later in the future, so they’ll be relegated to public domain archives that hardly anyone ever visits, the equivalent of the Department of Special Collections at the University of California. And who knows, maybe Jeff Bezos will convert one of his data centers into a building to house his digital brain. Heck, if I had the money, I would do this too.
You don’t have to take my word for this; you can read any contemporary sci-fi book to see the same insights and impulses toward living digitally in a disembodied way. Because these ideas are now part of our culture’s currency. But for now, you and I are as analog as it gets. We get hangnails and wrinkles on our feet. We drink entirely too much beer and suffer entirely too much of a hangover the next day. It’s all part of being analog, and there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, I like it—wisdom lines, headaches, and all.
Perhaps I only like it because I have no choice in the matter, and I choose to look the other way when I suffer stubbed toes or pimples in ungainly places like the insides of my ears. Or perhaps I like living in the analog mode because of all the great feelings I can experience, what cognitive scientists call “felt states”—the sun on my skin, the taste of a fresh blueberry, or the wonderful, fresh smell of a spring morning. I’m as happily analog as I can get, and I will be for a long while.
And though I may be embodied in an analog form, I can still read great digital ebooks.
Those who read this in the future may sometimes forget that books weren’t always digital. They may look back upon us with disdain because we don’t have brain implants to post live Twitter updates. They may look down upon us because we have sex with one another instead of using electronic Orgasmatrons. They may frown upon us with the face of history because we’re no more than apes who type software and emails with fingers of skin and bone, because we’re pitiful creatures who wrap rags around our frail bodies as we walk to and from work.
I can only plead with those in the future who read this to remember that if not for us, there would be no digital books today, and the future would be less rich and nuanced. If not for us, future readers wouldn’t be floating as brains in an etheric vat, surrounded by digital books and videos and music as they sample from all of human culture like it’s one vast buffet for the mind. Those who read this years from now, please don’t forget that the future wasn’t always digital and that books weren’t always electronic.
Because without the ebook revolution, the future could never have happened.
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The ebook revolution is the story of a small group of people who set out to change the way the world reads. I mentioned before how I found it at once eerie and amazing to be in a meeting with Jeff Bezos, scrutinizing the number of lines that should appear on an ebook’s page, because it was the same kind of thinking Gutenberg used more than five hundred years earlier. And like Gutenberg’s team, this small group of people at Amazon worked their way up from square one to reinvent reading. And we succeeded. Reading has not only been transformed but also rebooted.
But this success came with a cost. There were unintended consequences of this success, which meant that many ebook features had to be shelved at Amazon. It became important for Amazon and other device makers to keep up with their competition, which meant that certain innovative features were deprioritized so that resources could be spent on the arms race of keeping up with competitors. These ebook features will eventually be built; I’m not worried about that.
Amazon launched the ebook revolution, but now, the future of books is being tended to by people outside Amazon’s walled garden. By innovative publishers or venture-capital-funded startups or iconoclastic propeller-heads. Innovation is out in the world now. It’s out of the hands of Amazon and other technology giants. I believe the smaller, more nimble, more purpose-driven groups will succeed in building these features out. And of course, as always, the readers ultimately win.
Innovation sparked the ebook revolution. And while companies like Amazon and Apple are now raging bulls whose horns are locked in competitive combat, that innovation has gone out into the world. Publishers, as well as authors, are able to innovate. Readers themselves can innovate.
We ourselves, as readers, can reshape the future of the book!
We can reengage the way that books work in our own lives and fan the flame of reading again. In my generation, books have lost people’s attention spans, lost them to TV and movies and video games and the internet. But now books are being revitalized. Reading has never been more interesting, and it’s all thanks to ebooks.
I said earlier that, to the brain, there’s no difference between the words in a book and the words in an ebook, but ebooks introduce us to more than just words. They introduce us to other people and let us talk to our friends and family, right in the margins of an ebook. New life is being breathed into reading by the ebook revolution. If reading can be saved in our ADHD culture, then it’s thanks to innovative ideas from Reading 2.0 and to pioneering publishers and retailers and tech startups large and small.
I’m happy that I had a hand in making the ebook revolution happen. I did a lot for digital books. I turned the Kindle flywheel a few turns. I turned a page of the history book, turned books into ebooks. I burned the printed page and fanned the flames, helped to kindle a revolution.
I’m happy to have participated in the Kindle, along with a bunch of others. They’re people I sometimes miss and sometimes don’t, but all had charisma and character. There were enough characters on the Kindle team for a new font. At the very least, there was enough of a cast on Kindle to make a movie about it. BlackBerry-addled vice presidents, Jeff Bezos’s endless array of executive assistants, and engineers with barbeque stains on their shirts debating death matches between killer whales and tigers. They were all part of this ebook revolution, all part of something—well, something magical. Something revolutionary. As revolutionary as the invention of books themselves in Gutenberg’s day.