It's the End of the Book as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

I call my five-year-old daughter "my entertainment on demand girl." When we put on a DVD she always wants to skip to her favorite scenes. If a commercial comes on TV, she begs me to fast-forward through it. Right after I shoot video she cries, "Let me see!" until I show her, but if I dust off our old 35 mm film camera she doesn't understand why we can't view the images immediately.

As a kid, I knew that consuming entertainment meant waiting, sometimes months, or a year, for movies like The Wizard of Oz to air on TV (and if you missed it, you missed it), or weeks for a roll of film to fill up so we could take it in to be developed--then more waiting for the photos. We considered Polaroid a miracle of technology because you could snap a picture, wait 60 seconds, then peel the paper off, hoping you didn't end up with a gooey mess.

What does this have to do with books? Plenty. Our childhood experiences shape our expectations later in life, and whole generations are growing up with the expectation that entertainment will be available whenever they want it, wherever they are. This will have a profound effect on... everything, including books. While we've witnessed the digital tsunami plowing under the music industry and news business -- and lapping at the shores of TV, movies and radio -- books, until recently, have been largely sheltered. The fact that publishers have always charged for their product (unlike, say, newspapers and magazines) has shielded them from double-digit losses plaguing ad-based businesses. It also helps that piracy hasn't made significant inroads because not many people read whole books onscreen. Yet.

The Amazon Kindle offers a glimmer of what's to come, and if things continue as they have e-books will force most books out of print and on to the screen. This is perhaps little comfort to those who like nothing more than to curl up in bed with a good hardcover, reveling in the heft of pages and binder in their hands, even the musty smell, which, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos points out, is really just old glue and mildew.

E-books, however, won't be read on today's Kindle, with its cramped black-and-white screen (reminiscent of a Mac laptop circa 1993), its clumsy, nippled navigation and uninspiring interface. New technologies tend to mirror those that precede them. In World War I the first tanks were tractors with cannons bolted to the side. Early automobiles were called "horseless carriages" for a reason, and 75 years ago Amelia Earhart flew a plane made of little more than wood, canvas, and bailing wire. When newspapers migrated to the Web, they repurposed articles from print. Now The New York Times is awash in multimedia, blogs and databases unavailable in the daily paper. With microprocessors and screens improving at a Moore's Law clip, the e-book reader will undergo a similar transformation, integrated into tablet-like multimedia devices boasting eye-friendly multitouch screens and providing immersive viewing experiences. (As for me, I'm betting on Apple to swoop in and grab much of Kindle's e-book market share.)

Think of the possibilities. Say you were reading a biography of Amelia Earhart. In addition to the actual text-y "book," you could link to video and radio interviews with the almost mythic aviatrix, watch newsreel footage, study maps of her journeys and the schematics of her plane, access interviews with aviation historians, and read newspaper and magazine articles covering her life and death. You could sample music from the early to mid-1930s--maybe download the songs from an online retailer--purchase memorabilia on eBay, sift through photos, link to primary sources given as footnotes, and engage a social network of other aviation buffs, who might debate the various theories surrounding her death. There could be multiplayer games based on the book, a Facebook (or equivalent) app that tells you how adventurous you are on a scale of 1 to 10 next to Amelia Earhart, a mobile phone application coded in her honor that compares the safety records of airlines.

Books then would be multimedia events far more engaging than mere words on a page, and the reader would control how he or she consumed them.

It's the ultimate entertainment on demand.

[Take a look at Adam's new book, Viral Loop, out next week.]

Follow Adam Penenberg on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@Penenberg

Comments

[scrocker1946]

(CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS COMMENT)

More subtle, but equally relevant, is the issue of choice overload and decision paralysis. It it really a good thing to have some millions of blogs and websites of potential relevance and value all equally and immediately available? One could easily make it one's life work to select the best and most relevant of the available content. Indeed, one could make it one's life work to try to definitively determine standards and techniques by which such decisions might be made.

The alternative to "choosing the best" is the equally scary "put down your bucket where you are". Superficially this would appear to work. Wherever you go in infospace you will find something of value. But infospace is expanding at a rate which makes the redshift expansion of the universe appear lazy by comparison. It has already arguably outstripped geographical space, and may eventually outstrip even the truly immense extent of human social space. What this means practically is that wherever you "put your bucket down" in infospace, you will find relatively few "neighbors". Experiences will become less socially shared and more the product of one's own individual circumstances. Society will increasingly come to lack shared focuses of attention. What this would seem to lead to inevitably is the balkanization of our shared intellectual culture.

' Nuff said.

-Steve

[scrocker1946]

Somewhere underlying this article seems to be the implied assumption that more information is better, more choices are better, and the accessibility of megadoses of available content is an unqualified good. Well, here's my message to the apostles of the information revolution. The human bandwidth is not infinite.

Do you have any idea how long it would take to do justice to all the auxiliary content you suggest one might enjoy in conjunction with the Amelia Earhart bio? The mind boggles! And while one enjoys the spectacle of total immersion in Amelia Earhart, what of the hundreds of comparable topics one must thereby forgo? The scenario you suggest would be of practical use only to Earhart scholars and/or rabid Earhart fandom.

What is actually needed in this age of "drinking from a firehose" is not more water pressure! What is needed is the skill to present information *concisely*. What is desirable is to be able to grasp the essentials of Earhart's story without needing to make it a major project. Sometimes less really is more.

(CONTINUED NEXT COMMENT)

[January]

I agree mostly with garyd63, not because graphic technology is a threat to books but because of personal habits. I rarely watch a video segment online. The time it takes for someone to tell me I can reduce by reading what they have to say.

Yes, I realize that video for online blogs is big and getting bigger. But it will have to do so without me. The internet is for readers. The so-called "mere word on the page" is sometimes called "poetry." I prefer the realization that what makes for great film and great drama are great writers. These days such is noticed more in its absence than availability. Quantity may overwhelm quality, but I cannot rationalize that as an advantage.

[garyd63]

I would guess that Penenberg, as with most of the supporters of books on screens, grew up a reader of traditional print sources. They stacked up a nice vault full of traditional reading, including the skills of concentration, self-motivated imagination, and patience, along with the content and the nuance which comes from great literature. This is what Penenberg's children and yours will be missing as books on screen eschew these skills and hard won understandings, replacing them with what?

Here's Penenberg's jangled vision: "Think of the possibilities. Say you were reading a biography of Amelia Earhart. In addition to the actual text-y "book," you could link to video and radio interviews with the almost mythic aviatrix, watch newsreel footage, study maps of her journeys and the schematics of her plane, access interviews with aviation historians, and read newspaper and magazine articles covering her life and death. . . . etc.. You know, all the stuff we eagerly searched for AFTER we read a great book. All lost and/or diminished in the mad dash to the next, and then the next, surface stimulus.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-penenberg/its-the-end-of-the-book-a_b_306937.html

[Adam Penenberg]

What you view as a threat to--well, I'm not sure, to one's level of patience or comprehension?--I view as an exciting possibility. I suppose there was a time you rued the emergence of the Internet because it drew people away from encyclopedias, and that telephone sure did ruin face-to-face communication.

It would take hours to find all the complementary content I mentioned in cojunction with Amelia Earhart's biography--if you could find it at all. Why shouldn't it be in one place for a reader to enjoy immediately, and in a form and order he or she wants to enjoy it?

The book will inevitably evolve, as newspapers are forced to change. Consumer demand and economics will see to that. It can be a painful process but it will happen. It is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things whether you fear young people will somehow miss out on your experiences of growing up. But they won't miss out. They'll have their own experiences, and I suppose one day they'll look at their children and worry about their missing out on what they themselves experienced. And the cycle continues.

[garyd63]

It would be easy, but seriously snarky of me to turn the opening line of your reply to me into a dismissal of all that follows. But I only ask you to look at it again: “What you view as a threat to--well, I'm not sure, to one's level of patience or comprehension?--I view as an exciting possibilit­y.”

Patience and comprehension are endangered by new technologies. Your daughter, Ms. Entertainment on Demand, is representative not unique. It’s a symptom of the times when patience and comprehension have to be defended as qualities valuable to all and not just the quaint hangups of earlier generations.

Inevitability is a force difficult to counter. You buy into it and it becomes, well, inevitable. But dissing me as someone who fears “young people will somehow miss out on your [my] experiences of growing up” misses the mark of what I was saying. To state it again: Is it not the case that current cheerleaders for broad tech over deep reading are in fact products of deep reading? And doesn’t this fact give them, so to speak, the best of both worlds, a reading education _and_ a facility with the new tech toys? What, I ask again, will be lost and what will be gained when only reading while twittering is the basis for the growths of minds and culture?

Those who currently bang the cymbals of tech paradise should at least sample the truths of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”:

[BlackJAC]

And what happens when the power goes out?

[Adam Penenberg]

Um, batteries? What happens when the lights go out when you're reading a book?

[Techef]

As a 2 year Kindle reader and a senior citizen tech user my mind has more room in it the more books I read but my shelves are not crowded by the megabytes of books that I carry with me almost everywhere. Get over the dead trees, it's about reading not shelf decoration.