Brian Barrett at Gizmodo wants to be taken “... To A Future Where Books Act Like This“:
The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.
Thankfully, I am far too old and obsolete to be the target market, because that second Big Idea, Coupland (“making it easier to determine key reading materials based on your professional network”) sounds to me like Orwell rewritten as a Dilbert cartoon.
Linda Featheringill
But this contraption doesn’t include the experience of strolling through a bookstore or a library and having a book leap off the shelf in order to land in front of you, saying “Take me, read me.”
How sad.
scav
odd — except for the glitzy drag and drop, I’ve been hearing about in immanent arrival of most of these developments since the invention of the hypercard, if not before.
John Bird
Yeah, I believe a lot of this was the idea behind HTML. The problem is that I don’t think that a lot of people really want part of their direct reading experience to involve the stuff that they do when they put the book down: going on Google and looking at related work, etc.
Daddy-O
My wife is an elementary school reading specialist. We discuss this once in a while…there are such brain issues at work here that are as of yet undiscovered. Humans have been reading off pages for millenia; our brains have evolved with writing, and the written page. The effects of going completely digital have yet to be discovered, and as subtle as they might be, are genuine.
You use so many DIFFERENT parts of your brain to read, and for many DIFFERENT types of reading, too. Unless the Digital Age is here permanently, I don’t put too much stock in any predictions about its future. And for some reason I don’t have much trust in anyone claiming books will go away forever.
That’s what they said about painting–when photography was invented. That’s what they said about black and white photography when color film was invented. That’s what they said about real film stock when digital cameras were invented.
Martin
@scav: Technology is little match against the forces of corporate self-interest.
daveNYC
Sounds like a great way to dial up the groupthink.
cleek
i neither have nor want a “professional network”. and i don’t want my reading defined by my job.
fuck this stupid culture.
Davis X. Machina
The volumes of the Loeb Classical Library were sized to fit precisely into the side pocket of a gentleman’s suit almost 100 years ago. They can also replace the Thermos in a standard tin lunchbox, so that you can dine with Pindar. Even this degree of thought about human-interface issues has yet to make an appearance in the world of e-readers.
I’ll wait a while yet…..
Nemo_N
I’m getting tired of all this meta.
EFroh
I would love a bound book of about 20 pages of e-paper. That way I could still download any book (or magazine) with a compatible e-format and still have the luxury of being able to page through recent material and quickly flip between and compare what I’m reading right now and what I read 15 minutes ago. That’s mostly what I miss from my Kindle; unless I bookmark everything, I can’t quickly flip between pages that are not immediately adjacent.
Rosalita
@Linda Featheringill:
I’m with you. I love the bookstore/library experience and I love an actual book, with pages…
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
We already have a number of the filters that everyone is complaining about: The library, the bookstore, friends, teachers, coworkers. And after trying to google “bioinformatics statistical learning” with variants and searching through the masses of stuff, some help would be great.
I like having everything right there. I do agree with EFroh that bookmarking needs to be improved.
Steve M.
There’s a great joke in the new Gary Shteyngart novel, which is set in a near future when everyone is even more obsessed than people are now with interacting with smartphones known as “äppäräts”: the protagonist has a pathetic, dated äppärät, and his boss says to him, “Good fucking Christ. What is this, an iPhone?” The point being: what we thing is hot shit right now will someday be embarrassing and old-fashioned.
In this video, new and groovy and fabulous = exactly like a present-day iPad. This could look really silly in twenty years, like 1960’s version of 2000.
geg6
Anyone here who thinks a real lover of books and reading is going to fall for garbage like this? I mean, who the fuck wants to read, in their spare time, from a list that only includes selections based on your “professional network,” whatever the fuck that is? Let alone do it on another goddamn computer screen, escape from which is one of the massive bonuses of being a reader of actual, you know, books?
Is the point that you should only read about your field of work? Or only the works of people who are from your field? Or in the case of someone like me, only people who came from or work at the same university? Or only people in academia? Or what? What the fuckity fuck is a professional network?
And don’t get me started on the whole idiotic idea of reading everything off a computer screen, as if that is in any way, shape, or form the same experience as digging into a brand new book, or a first-edition you found at a yard sale, or even one of the old, well-worn classics from the public library. I’ll quit reading, period, if all I have to do it with is a fucking screen.
And, yes, you kids get the hell off my lawn.
Kirk Spencer
The number one obstacle to ebooks replacing pbooks is cost. No, not of the ebooks, though that’s part of it. (Yeah, you lose cost of paper. You still need editors and marketers and all that sort of thing.)
I’m speaking of the cost of readers. They’ve come down, but $150 is still too much for ‘common masses’. Get it down to $50, even if it’s as relatively featureless as the Kobo, and you’ll see a significant change.
There are other stumbling blocks. An example is compatibilty. Overdrive, for example, works with several readers — but not with kindles or ipads. (Overdrive is a program that allows libraries to check out e-books to patrons with e-book readers.)
Another is the issue of Right of First Sale. Kindle is the one that showed the problem there — with a print book, a lot of people would still have copies of 1984 they now don’t. At some point that’s going to be an interesting battle.
But still, the biggest reason is the lack of readers. There are conservatively 84 Billion people in the united states who checked out at least one book from a library in 2008. There’ve been far fewer readers sold, even total.
DonkeyKong
“making it easier to determine key reading materials based on your professional network”
Otherwise known as colonic marketing.
stuckinred
The Machine is Us is worth a look too.
Linda Featheringill
And, of course, there is the smell of a book.
[smile, sigh, happy memories]
stuckinred
@Kirk Spencer: You priced textbooks lately? EBooks and open textbooks are coming whether you like it or not. Here’s a glimpse
stuckinred
And here is our Global Textbook Project
Welcome to the Global Text Project
Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world – Nelson Mandela
The project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a website. Distribution will also be possible via paper, CD, or DVD. Our goal initially is to focus on content development and Web distribution, and we will work with relevant authorities to facilitate dissemination by other means when bandwidth is unavailable or inadequate. The goal is to make textbooks available to the many who cannot afford them.
Svensker
@Kirk Spencer:
Oh, wouldn’t that be fabulous! Crowded, but fabulous.
Book reading is a dying art. Big book stores are becoming merchandisers — gift books along with a merchandise tie-in (a fancy wine opener with a book about wine, etc.) is the fastest growing segment in a rather moribund business. Indigo chain in Canada is pioneering this, as is Strand in NYC.
Brachiator
@Davis X. Machina:
I presume that you could fit the entire Loeb Classical Library in a Kindle or iBook and have room to spare.
Any useful technology is quickly adopted. Not even corporate interests can slow it down.
I wish that the James Burke series Connections was available at a reasonable price. The episode on the connection of the Great Plague and the Printing Press to the transformation of Renaissance culture was just freaking amazing.
scav
@Brachiator: This episode? Faith in Numbers?
gnomedad
If I wanted that, I’d just become a Republican.
Brachiator
@scav:
Oh Hell, Yes! Thank you.
People forget how books have changed over time. At one time, you depended on scribes creating big tomes to be kept in a library (and usually only a church or wealthy family’s library). With the printing press and cheap paper, you could keep a book in a saddle bag or equivalent of a back pack, and also use a notebook to go out into the world and record your observations and bring it back to have it printed.
And now, today, your libraries (music, literary, video) can be portable and sharable in ways never dreamed of before.
Just not true at all.
Davis X. Machina
@Brachiator: 2G Kindles aren’t Unicode-friendly, and hence not suitable for ancient Greek — they’ll do Demotiki.
Amir_Khalid
One thing that scares me about ebooks — the short life of digital data storage standards. In 2020, will your Kindle n.0 be able to read the ebooks you bought in 2010? Or will you have to buy your old books all over again every so often, the way your parents had to buy their favorite LPs all over again on CD? And how do you share, or transfer possession of, an ebook?
I can see networked reading clubs being useful in an academic or work setting, but implementing this idea is a matter of building a social media app — subject, of course, to standards being in place that let you share what you need to share — markups and annotations to text, discussion threads, etc.
This is a political/commercial issue as much as it is a tech issue; there are big corporations with lucrative turf to guard. Competing, mutually incompatible standards could make this kind of sharing a major pain in the butt, major enough to defeat a good idea.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Daddy-O:
This I diagree with. Elites have been reading since the invention of cuneiform give or take (i.e. if you call scanning the Sumerian equivalent of a spreadsheet used to inventory the stock of goods in the temple stores “reading”, okey dokey, otherwise we might have to pull back a bit on the antiquity of it all), but mass literacy is less than 1000 years old, in many parts of the world less than 200 years old. That’s not nearly enough time to influence human evolution.
This on the other hand, I agree with. In The Gutenberg Elegies Sven Birkerts speculates that our current transition from a literate culture to a post-literate culture is as momentous as the transition from an oral culture to a literate culture in Ancient Greece – i.e. a consciousness changing event. Sounds about right to me. I can already see changes happening in terms of the different attitudes towards personal privacy and solitude held by younger friends who are growing up with pervasive social networking and dominantly visual media. On the one hand privacy doesn’t mean the same thing to them, and on the other hand they have a deep seated anxiety about being cut off from the hive mind, which is quite evident when their cell phone is suddenly lost or the bills don’t get paid and their service is abruptly disconnected.
So when the Orwellian panopticon arrives, it may turn out that our descendents simply won’t care all that much, but the flip side of this is that repressive authorities will be able to use solitary confinement as a far more powerful tool for coercion in the future than is the case now, because people won’t know what to do with their own minds when they are completely alone. That is a discipline which deep immersion in a book can teach, but more interactive media cannot.
Brachiator
@Daddy-O:
You do realize that reading and writing are very recent, and very local, adaptations. Perhaps one of the reasons that there are varieties of reading problems is that the eyes and brain have had to adapt to a fairly recent and alien function.
If anything, comic books and movies may be a more natural fit for how our brains work (e.g. cave paintings at Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, France 15,000-18,000 BC). We dig the visual. We tell stories. The rest is commentary.
@Davis X. Machina:
Ah, but one of the coolest things about the web and various devices was being able to find mp3 files of someone reading the first chapter of the Iliad in Greek, the Canterbury Tales in Middle English, etc. and being able to set things up to switch from a reasonable facsimile of the written text to audio.
I can just about do one of the things that future ebooks will be set up to do: My nephew had to read Three Greek Tragedies for a class assignment. So, I sent him some notes I wrote on Antigone, along with some YouTube links to performances of Greek plays, some in English, some in Greek with English subtitles.
This should be a standard feature of ebooks, the ability to jump from criticism to text to performance.
Perfect Tommy
I took the plunge and got a Kindle DX using rewards points. I use it to read pdfs downloaded from the journals that I subscribe to, NAP pdf books and have access to thousands of free classics like Dickens and Melville that I am really enjoying reconnecting with. It’s not as convienient at the coffee shop when you go up for a refill, and can’t just leave it on the table as you would a paperback, but I am really enjoying it. I typically will buy used books at Amazon for ~$5 + the obligatory $3.99 S&H. At those prices, the $9.99 Kindle versions are not too bad of a compromise. I do miss being able to pass along a good read to a friend.
Svensker
@Brachiator:
If you talk to agents, publishers, writers and book dealers, they will disagree with you.
Or go to garage sales. 20 years ago, garage sales used to be packed with used books, many interesting and odd ones. Today if there are books at all, they are David Patterson and Harlan Coban best sellers, and not too many of them.
The most depressing thing, tho, is to talk to book editors about books. Because they won’t be talking about books, but about the latest movie or TV show, or the latest internet sensation. They’re not interested in books for reading, either, only in books by or about celebrities.
mclaren
Their new motto:
This is all about making more money for giant faceless companies by shoving more stuff at you that they think you’d like. What it doesn’t do is allow the reader to discover exciting unexpected new books. In fact, carried to its logical conclusion, this system will discourage each member of the reading public from ever going outside hi/r “social group.” So everyone winds up locked inside their own sterile self-referential circle-jerk list of books, never venturing outside to something new, never allowed to evolve, never permitted to change their tastes in books.
People who start out reading murder mysteries will only be recommended more murder mysteries, people who start byr eading comic books will only get recommendations of more comic books, people who start out reading techno-thrillers will only receive suggestions for more techno-thrillers. No possibility that someone who starts out reading techno-thriller might eventually graduate to, oh, say, The Polish Officer by Alan Furst or Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de St. Exupery or The Medusa and the Snail by Lewis Thomas.
How sad.
txvoodoo
@Kirk Spencer
Ebook readers, as they’re priced today, pay for themselves in the space of buying 15 ebooks vs 15 hardcovers – faster, if you take advantage of the many many legally free ebooks available (both classics via Gutenberg online, or sites like this, which compile Amazon’s free offerings: http://inkmesh.com/free-ebooks/?start=0&site=kindle )
As far as the Amazon Kindle 1984 issue, that’s moot – Amazon gave all those who “purchased” the improperly-uploaded free version a credit to buy a legit version. (An Australian had uploaded 1984 as a free book – in Australia, 1984 is out of copyright, but it isn’t in the US). And they also promised they’d never again delete a properly purchased Kindle book.
Nellcote
Tech stories like this make me want to stockpile actual paper books like survivalists stockpile food, ammo (and gold coins).
John S.
My 3 year old son (who has autism) is unbelievable on an iPad. I mean, it’s literally something to behold a child so young – who still doesn’t really verbally communicate – flipping through Dr. Seuss books and twisting and flipping interactive areas with as much ease as the person in this demo.
I am often astonished at the knack he shows for understanding touchscreen interfaces, which is something he has been doing since around 18 months. He is actually better on an iPhone or an iPad than ANY of his grandparents. And thanks to the amazing app ProLoQuo2Go, he is starting to put a voice to his words.
For all the things that are wrong in this world and all the pining for the “good old days”, I couldn’t be happier that my son is alive right now, at this moment. I see him flourishing with all the tools available to him, and I can’t even imagine how someone like him who isn’t neurotypical managed 10, 20, 50 years ago.
To paraphrase Jesus Jones, right here, right now, there is no other place I would want to be with my son.
Brachiator
@Svensker:
RE: Book reading is a dying art. Just not true at all.
This is publishing, not reading.
There is a change happening, and it is powerful. It’s funny how some posters here cheer for the demise of newspapers, but magazines are shutting down in droves as well. The last time I passed by my local bookseller, Vromans, they had shrunk their outside magazine stand and some film magazines I use to buy aren’t there anymore.
But obviously a lot of reading has shifted online. And amazon recently recorded that for some category of books, ebook sales were now exceeding physical book sales.
And publishers are getting hip to a new market. I informally predicted and see that Kindle users stock up on series fiction, especially romance novels, science fiction and mysteries. But you also see that free classics are also popular. This may not put money in the pockets of publishers, but people are obviously reading, which is the main thing.
And do-it-yourself publishing is growing. Ultimately, people are adapting to the new media and new ways of reading, listening to, and viewing media. Audio book sales are strong, and stronger because people can download mp3s rather than deal with tape cassettes.
It’s funny, some of the most devoted readers I know are young readers who devoured the Harry Potter series, and look for new stuff. They are also often writers, doing fan fiction for themselves and others. Some of this is semi-underground since it bypasses traditional publishers and editors. But it is still reading and writing.
And all of the people doing hand-wringing are forgetting something very important. When Charles Dickens or Conan Doyle were turning out must-read stuff, it was in the form of magazines, not books, and this was not considered to be serious literature. Doyle even tried to kill Holmes off because he wanted to turn to more serious stuff, and his readers reacted by wearing black armbands or mourning and insisting on the return of the Consulting Detective.
Humans are storytelling animals. As soon as we could speak, we sat around the campfire, or in caves and someone, a Bard, looked into his or her comrades’ eyes and said, “Once upon a time …”
GTP
@stuckinred: Thanks for the shout out! Become our fan on Facebook and you can stay up to date with all of our new publications and learn more about what we do! Have a great weekend!
WereBear
@John S.: I have heard the iPad is an amazing device for people like your son.
I am so happy that he is one of them.
Jager
I love the all the tech and its handy as hell, but the last time we went camping I brought “The Girl Who Played With Fire” along. I “interfaced” with it, under a tree, around the campfire, took it to the beach, read it in the tent with a headlamp, left it on the ground while I helped my Grandson’s build a rope swing. It got damp, was tossed in the trunk of the car for the ride home and the dog may have nibbled it. And I never had to plug it in, not once.
Larkspur
I’m in favor of reading and disseminating information in any way possible, whether it’s via Kindle or my local library, or fan fic or graphic novels, or old-timey ‘zines, or anything. Just read.
I just don’t want the paper-containing libraries to get left behind. (A) I am low-income and non-spendy and depend on libraries (and yes, I give whatever I can to the library funds, and I contribute books for their fund-raising book sales). (B) I want to be able to read something even if we’re experiencing a few decades of rolling blackouts or intermittent electricity or spotty internet access. Because it could happen. Being very old, I grew up in this whole “every day, in every way, everything is getting better and better” hallucination, and I actually had to learn about the great rock and the great roll of history* before I understood that it is in no way a natural law.
* I believe I have stolen that rock and roll history phrase from Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban. O, what we was, and what we become.
chopper
i just love how they’re touting how the service let’s you look at books and publications based on the ‘impact they’ve had on popular opinion or debate’. this would be a great idea, if ‘popular opinion or debate’ in this lousy country wasn’t the intellectual equivalent of a toy monkey banging two cymbals together. it’s like buying music based on how popular it is with dogs.
chopper
@Jager:
outside of that italicized bit, sounds a lot like your last girlfriend.
greyjoy
I disagree that book-reading is a dying art. I think that with the advent of having various e-reader apps on smart devices of all kinds, people who normally would read very little are actually reading more. Those of us who habitually read a lot aren’t changing our habits because we already make a point of reading. I think that the idea of “a book” is changing dramatically, since “a book” is no longer just a bunch of paper pages bound between a cardboard cover with graphics printed on it. It can now be an audio clip on various media, or an electronic file, but the data is still available in largely the way it was meant to be consumed, which is as a single block of data in linear fashion.
People do love to make sky-falling announcements like we’re all going to stop reading, stop using the Web, stop using Flash, stop buying books, etc. because some new technology came out and it’s going to change all our lives. However, when the fuck has that actually happened? We’re all still driving cars, surfing the Web, listening to CDs, watching our CRT televisions, buying books and going out in public to see friends in person. Old tech sticks around.
Okay, personally, I have an e-reader. I read a LOT (about 200 books a year) and having an e-reader made sense because it was either buy my sixth bookshelf (with storage for another 100 books or so) or buy an e-reader (with storage for 20,000 books). I downloaded Calibre, a free open-source program which converts any text file type to any other text file type in an easy and intuitive manner. I can find virtually every title I want for free online, because e-books are quickly following the same trend that MP3s did 10 years ago–there are enterprising souls out there unlocking DRMs, even scanning books and proofing them manually, and uploading the files.
As for digital data storage standards and people worried about that, let me point out that the computer you buy in 2010 can still read a file you saved in 2000, display a photo you took and scanned in 1995, and play a CD that you bought in 1990. Data formats don’t change that much, and e-books are essentially plain-text files saved into a particular format. Besides, who’s to say you won’t drop your new paperback in the tub and have to go buy a new one? Books are no more eternal than any electronic format.
I also think that, environmentally speaking, people need to rethink their emotional need for the tactile experience of a paper book.
Jon H
@Svensker: “The most depressing thing, tho, is to talk to book editors about books. Because they won’t be talking about books, but about the latest movie or TV show, or the latest internet sensation. They’re not interested in books for reading, either, only in books by or about celebrities.”
Maybe mainstream book editors. The Nielsen Haydens from the Making Light blog, who edit SF/Fantasy at TOR Books, not so much.
Jon H
@Jager: “I love the all the tech and its handy as hell, but the last time we went camping I brought “The Girl Who Played With Fire” along. I “interfaced” with it, under a tree, around the campfire, took it to the beach, read it in the tent with a headlamp, left it on the ground while I helped my Grandson’s build a rope swing. It got damp, was tossed in the trunk of the car for the ride home and the dog may have nibbled it. And I never had to plug it in, not once.”
I’ve always treated my books better than that. Indeed, I treat my books like I treat my devices.
I do use my kindle outside, but very few of my books have ever gotten damp.
Jon H
@Davis X. Machina: “2G Kindles aren’t Unicode-friendly, and hence not suitable for ancient Greek—they’ll do Demotiki.”
I believe there’s a Unicode hack available.
Jason
Great thread. Could you add “Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatlock!” to the tags next to “Pink Himalayan Salt?”
The video presents a small number of useful extensions for e-reading devices; contrary to the genuinely-likable Ann Laurie’s comment above, I find Coupland an interesting software idea for an organization that requires its members to be experts both in major disciplines and a specialty. But what an easy mark I must be for the shiny things, right? I’ll be sorry when the suede/denim secret police come for my uncool niece.
If you like reading books on paper, good on you. Being proud of pulling a few Gs on the demographic curve is pretty annoying, sure, but patting yourself on the back when you fall the fuck off of it is, I’d suggest, reverse snobbery.
(Particularly like the invocation of Birkerts, who plays the Sensible Contrarian role for tenured humanists. Bad for political discourse, but great for the arts! Who knew? What this generation needs is another Updike, I tells ya. And card catalogs.)
grendelkhan
@Brachiator: You know, I got a PRS-300 as a gift recently, and not only was it under a hundred bucks (or so I was told), but it actually does fit in my shorts pocket. There’s little room for much else, but it is actually more portable than a regular paperback book. I can’t read it in the rain, but I wouldn’t read a paperback in the rain. I’ve heard stories about people putting these things in freezer bags and reading them in the tub, but I haven’t tried that either.
Plus, I can put some unbelievably dorky fanfiction onto it and not have to worry about being judged while reading. So, that’s nice.
All this interactive “value-add” gimcrackery, on the other hand, is bullshit. We already have an internet; it’s called the internet. Long-form text is not improved by puking ads and hyperlinks throughout it.