Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading

by Merkoski, Jason

  With this in mind, I think that companies like Google are smart to focus on content first. You can have the best e-reader, but if your content selection is lackluster, you’re just going to be a flash in the digital pan. You can be the talk of the town at the Consumer Electronics Show, the yearly trade show for gadgeteers in Las Vegas, but content is a long-tail proposition, and the accumulation of selection takes time. I know this from leading an ebooks team at Amazon. I know how long it takes to digitize all these books.

  Though Google got into the game late, you haven’t seen the last of them. Because although their strategy makes their results seem low key in the short-term, it positions them perfectly to drive and lead the next phase of reading, what I call Reading 2.0.

  Bookmark: Bookshelves

  As a kid, I used to enjoy mock living rooms.

  The furniture stores of my youth seemed to sprawl on forever, with one mock room following another. Some were decorated in sleek 1980s decor, while others were warmer and more homey. It was an amazing experience to walk through a furniture store and go through one iteration of a room after the next. Endless foyers with endless opportunities for playing board games or watching TV.

  I remember the mock living rooms most because they all had bookshelves. I was drawn to the books, of course. Oddly, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason for why some titles were chosen over others for display in the rooms. The books were all hardcovers, as if even in these mock living rooms, it was important to demonstrate wealth and prestige, perhaps as a nod to the “libraries” of the wealthy, special rooms whose walls were ornamented with leather-bound books. In retrospect, the furniture stores likely bought the books by the pound.

  Today’s furniture stores are more sophisticated and even have cardboard cutouts of computers inside the mock living rooms. But books are still on the bookshelves of these rooms, as if they’re waiting for their owners to one day return and read them. Of course, the owners will never return home, since the furniture stores are simply aspirational galleries for homemakers. And yet, I’ve never once seen an e-reader inside a furniture-store showroom, mock or otherwise.

  Old habits die hard. And while books linger on in our cultural consciousness, so will bookshelves.

  Is the feeling of warmth we get from a well-stocked library or drawing room genuine, or is it simply something accultured into us? Would we feel just as cozy in front of a fireplace in a room bereft of everything but a Nook set alone on a pedestal? Clearly this feeling comes from our culture. We associate poverty with an empty environment and wealth with a richly appointed one. But can these perceptions change? Can we collectively become comfortable with simplicity and minimalism? Can nothingness become the new black, as they say in fashion circles?

  We’ve yet to see Swarovski-crystal Kindle cases or cashmere iPad protectors, but as ebooks penetrate into the echelons of the ultra-wealthy, you may see gold-plated styluses and Kindle chargers with prongs made from polished rock from the top of Mount Everest or Mars. Then again, perhaps we will come to appreciate the austerity of style that the cloud brings. If all your ebooks are a download away in the cloud, why display them ostentatiously?

  Cicero said that a home without books is a body without a soul. So what does that mean now as we start to relegate our bookshelves to our garages or sell them off at yard sales? Do we not have souls? What does it mean to our spiritual lives if we stop accumulating physical books, these printed volumes that once graced our lives? Are we going to have vast, ornate Edwardian mahogany bookshelves with just a Kindle or Sony e-reader or Apple iPad by itself on one shelf?

  As digital goods, books are just pieces of media now, like TV shows and movies and songs and apps, there on a skeuomorphic, digital simulation of a bookshelf on an iPad. “Skeuomorphic” is the word for a design philosophy that Apple, in particular, believes in. It’s a philosophy of ornamenting the digital with useless and irrelevant aspects of the physical goods they were copied from. For example, on Apple’s iCal product, you can see a leatherette blotter to make the digital calendar seem more like a physical one. Likewise, in Apple’s iBooks app, the whorls and burls of wood on a bookshelf have been replaced by a digital texture.

  The move toward digital books democratizes fashion and style. It’s no longer necessary to buy teak bookshelves, no longer necessary to display your books in a place of pride in your home. Bookshelves are being relegated to that great consignment shop in the sky, where you can also find CD towers, videotape cabinets, decorative typewriter-ribbon canisters, and home darkrooms for processing 35mm film.

  Of course, on the flip side, doing away with bookshelves is another nail in the coffin for books, as relics of an elite aristocratic age when we judged one another by what we read. As homes lose their bookshelves, books lose their elite status. In fact, we all lose.

  Surprisingly, as a culture, we seem to be okay with this. But what do you think?

  http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/13.html

  Google: A Facebook for Books?

  When I speak of Reading 2.0, I’m using a metaphor from Silicon Valley. The first release of a software product is Version 1.0, the second is 2.0, and so on.

  Reading 1.0 is the experience we’re all familiar with: reading a print book from the title page to the author bio at the back. That experience hasn’t changed much in thousands of years, not even since Gutenberg’s printing press. Reading is still a linear experience, a static experience. Whether you read a clay tablet or a scroll, you read in one direction—from the start to the end of the text.

  But now, we’re at the threshold of Reading 2.0, a seismic shift, because with this development, reading is no longer linear, no longer static.

  Although the idea of nonlinear, weblike reading was discussed as early as 1945 by Vannevar Bush, a computer theorist at MIT, it wasn’t until the advent of hypertext and the web in the late 1980s and early 1990s that we saw the first glimmering of this new form, where we could jump around within a book or in a collection of them.

  Now, we already understand that ebooks can be fluid. Their content can change seamlessly as they’re updated, as the author or the publisher sends down new changes to the text. But more importantly, the texts themselves could be collections of other texts that are constantly changing. Reading could become dynamic.

  The reading experience could become more social too. Ebooks allow you to interact with other readers. You can’t look at a print book and see who else is reading it and then tap their names to tweet with them about your favorite plotlines or passages. But you could with ebooks.

  With all its cross-linked books, Google may be on the verge of making Reading 2.0 possible. They may do it in a number of ways. But my hope and suggestion is that they do so through an idea I have, which I call “the Facebook for Books.”

  You see, I believe there’s ultimately only one book. All books, digital and physical, are part of this one book. No book exists in a vacuum. Even a book of fiction like The Lost Symbol mentions outside references. All books are linked in this tangle of intertwining roots, which you can think of as hyperlinks.

  In the future, there’s going to be just one book, a vast book that includes all the others inside it, which I call the Facebook for Books. You’ll be able to start reading from any book and naturally segue into a different one, just by following a link. It could be a bibliographic link or just a link to a book that influenced the author and that’s been annotated as such by a reader like you or me. You will be able to link forward or double-back and keep reading. It’s social networking, if you will, for books.

  For this to work, a critical mass of books will have to be digitized. That’s because there’s a network effect, a compounding effect. The more content you get, the more cumulative the connections are between books, and the more intertwined and rich the network becomes. A small network will only have a few books and a few connections, while a rich network will be able to link in more. Having m
ore links provides more pieces of the puzzle, more ways of seeing how one book influences or leads to another. And ultimately, readers will have more interesting reading experiences as they follow all these links.

  As a reader, you will have a richer appreciation of a book’s subject matter and different insights from multiple authors—sometimes contradictory—all just a click away and all of which give you a better appreciation of the whole. This kind of deep linking lets authors have a debate right on the page you’re reading, and you get to judge which author or which idea wins. The often-overlooked hyperlink can make this happen. I truly believe that the hyperlink was a twenty-first-century invention that was somehow discovered too early in the twentieth century, an invention we still haven’t managed to fully exploit.

  Google is in a great place to make this happen. They know search engines, and they can figure out how to continually process the content of all books to make these hyperlinks, so that all the references between books are intact and up to date.

  We can already see hyperlinks in the indexes and footnotes of science journals and nonfiction books, as one book bows its respectful head toward another and as one author acknowledges another. But those are just labels. They’re not yet working hyperlinks. Such bibliographies and footnotes could form the basis of explicit hyperlinks between books, although you can’t click on an entry in an ebook bibliography and go right to the destination. Not yet, at least.

  But sometimes these links are more implicit than explicit. As great as William Faulkner is, for example, his writing would be nothing if not for Shakespeare and the King James Bible. In fact, cultural and literary references abound in books. This book, for example, tips its hat to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Battlestar Galactica, Samuel Beckett, Socrates, Neal Stephenson, and so many others.

  But as I say, there is only one book, the book of all human culture. It should be possible to seamlessly switch between books, as opportunity permits. For example, in an early chapter I wrote how the product code names from Kindle came from characters in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. It should be possible to let readers seamlessly switch over to reading that book, right here, in the middle of this one. That’s how web browsing works, after all. If a book is compelling enough—as I hope this one is—then readers will come back after their jaunts and sojourns into other books.

  Not only are all books connected, but so also is all culture. It should be possible to create a link from this book into a related Battlestar Galactica episode—or at least to a clip from it to show its relationship to the current content you’re reading. There should be a hypertextual overlay across all media that lets a consumer flip from book to movie to comic book and back again, as often as the reader pleases, because there is only one book, the book of all human culture. And let me tell you, it’s a great book. But it’s so long that you’ll never finish reading it in your lifetime.

  This “one book” is something that we, as readers, would enjoy having, although retailers like Apple and Amazon might object to this—especially if retailers stand to make less money by selling subscriptions to the one book than they would by selling individual books. Publishers might also object to this one book, because they might not want to link their books to one another’s.

  That’s because publishers care about their brands. But let’s be honest: a publisher’s brand means little these days. Do you want to buy a Random House book, or are you more in the mood for a HarperCollins title? Is that really the question you ask yourself when you’re inside a bookstore? No. You look for a book that’s interesting, an author you love, or a subject or genre you want to explore, and you often have no idea who the publisher is. The one book I envision would allow this exploration to happen.

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  Reading 2.0, as I describe it, would give you a conversation with the book and with other readers, as well. For example, let’s say you’re a Harry Potter fan. You’ve finished all the books but still want to read more. What if you could continue reading about Harry and Voldemort? The feature I’m describing would let you continue reading stories written by others as fan fiction or essays about the Harry Potter series and its cultural significance. Linked together as one book, they’d all immediately available, just one page turn away.

  Linked together into one vast networked book, just like pages in the World Wide Web, networked books can inform one another. Ideas within books could be related and linked and commented upon. The comments can live on, as can the paths other people take through the books. Maybe you’ll find someone who has interesting reading habits, and you’ll follow the paths they take in the same way that you might subscribe now to someone’s blog feed.

  In the same way that YouTube personalities now video-blog about the latest trends, there might be networked book mavens or rock-star book readers you want to follow. Readers can become agents and sleuths and leave inky footsteps behind them as they roam through millions of books. We can follow each other’s trails, like veins of copper or maybe gold.

  Google will figure out how to monetize all the world’s books, in the same way they already make money from you, whether or not you explicitly pay them for anything. You’re a gold mine of data to Google, and they already mine your browsing history and chats and every email you care to send or receive using Gmail. They’re creating a genome about you and about everyone else. And of course, yes, they’re going to use this data for inevitable advertising purposes, which, after all, is how Google makes most of its money.

  But if you’re willing to overlook the fact that Big Brother won’t be a politician but an ad man and that he’ll have the face of Google, and you’re willing to experiment with the future as an early adopter, then you should take a chance on Google. Because the future of reading belongs to Reading 2.0. And as hard as it may be to see it now, Google seems to be in the best position to build that future.

  Not only do they have about the same number of ebooks available as Apple and Amazon and other retailers, but according to a legal affidavit they submitted as part of a recent court case, they have also scanned in twelve million volumes as part of the Google Book project, and they add five thousand more books a day. Google has digitized more of human culture than any other retailer or library. And when it comes to creating a rich network of books, it’s the breadth and depth of content that matter.

  And you, as a reader, are the one who benefits the most.

  You’ll get all the books you ever wanted to read in one endless, insatiable buffet. You’ll be able to skip and dance from book to book. As it is now, the only textual links in ebooks come from dictionary or Wikipedia overlays, which are a good start but insufficient to encompass the majesty of all human exuberance, art, creation, and imagination. You’ll get all books in one reading experience, and if Google is behind this, it might even be free—except, of course, for pesky ads on the bottom of every page.

  Bookmark: Book Discovery

  How do you find the next book to read?

  A better discovery tool than browsing will likely emerge, one that is based a lot on recommendation engines such as those used by Netflix. These sophisticated engines average the kinds of movies that you like to watch, based on your own habits, with those of other Netflix customers and then blend all these viewing habits together to come up with recommendations. This will happen for ebooks too. Hopefully, these recommendation engines will work as well as the savants who run used bookstores who can zero in on exactly the best book for you just by chatting with you and getting to know you.

  Some book discovery services like Goodreads and LibraryThing use individually written reviews as the basis of recommendations, but these suffer from one deep shortcoming: well-promoted books get a lot of reviews, and older or under-advertised books get few reviews. Just because a book is old doesn’t mean it isn’t great. But if a book doesn’t get many reviews, the tacit assumption is that the book isn’t worth reading—which may not be true. A truly dem
ocratic book-recommendation engine could automatically review and rate all books, giving Fifty Shades of Grey just as much attention as a hidden gem like A Voyage to Arcturus, one of my favorite novels.

  Such a book-discovery system should look at the text of a book as the basis for making recommendations. This would democratize the process and let the text speak for itself. It would allow neglected books to shine and put overpromoted books in their place.

  With a democratic book-discovery system, readers looking for a particular niche of content could find hidden gems based on an algorithmic analysis of an author’s style, gender, and time period; by the kinds of tables or equations inside the book or the places mentioned; by measures of the vocabulary used or ratios of adjectives to nouns; by the percentage of functional words like “of,” “to,” and “in”; by sentence length and paragraph count; by dependent clauses and dangling participles; by parentheticals and punctuation; by the use of curses, colors, and capitalized words; by the amount of dialogue and number of dashes; by reading-grade level and density of the text; by the cast of characters and the kinds of plotlines; by the use of footnotes and sentence fragments; by alliteration, sibilance, rhyme, and rhetoric; and finally, by quantifying the subjective, emotional experience of reading a book.

  To succeed, a company needs to treat this as a deep problem in computer science—a deep and perhaps unsolvable problem, because after all, what you’re really doing is teaching a computer how to read!

  Democratic book-discovery engines will eventually emerge and become popular, and a whole host of other book-related companies will emerge too. The ebook revolution has spurred an evolutionary explosion of new startups. Some cater to better ebook browsing, some to annotations. Some sell their books on subscriptions, while others serialize them. We’re very much alive in the time of rapid evolutionary change, a lot like the way it was in the era of the Burgess Shale Formation.