Lesson for the Digital Future

My review in The Star today :

Two renowned authors share insights into the future of the book.

This Is Not The End Of The Book

Authors: Jean-Claude Carrière & Umberto Eco

Publisher: Harvill Secker, 336 pages

THESE are anxious times for book lovers. New digital technologies mean that we find ourselves on the edge of a literary revolution of a magnitude that hasn’t been seen since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Industry insiders predict that the traditional, printed book will disappear completely within the next 25 years in the face of competition from e-books and the easy availability of plentiful information at the click of a mouse on the Internet.

Last year, Amazon.com, as good a barometer of changes in book-buying habits as any, announced that for the first time sales of digital books have outstripped US sales of hardbacks on its website. American bookstore chain Barnes and Noble claim that they are selling three times as many digital books as all formats of physical books combined. We are witnessing an increasing number of libraries ditching physical books in favour of digital content. There are huge shakeouts in the publishing industry, and book retailers are also under threat.

No wonder so many of us worry that the book as we know it, the artifact that we have grown up with, and which has delivered to us so much knowledge and personal pleasure, will be lost to us.

This Is Not The End Of The Book delivers some much needed hope and reassurance. Jean-Philippe de Tonnac brings together, in a series of conversations, novelist and critic Umberto Eco (best known for his novels The Name Of The Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum), and playwright and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière to debate the place of the book in the digital age. Both are bibliophiles of the most devoted kind and have a deep understanding of the history of the book.

On the question of whether or not the book will survive, Eco sets our mind at rest within the first few pages. The book, he points out, is already an entirely effective piece of technology and “like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.”

But so far most of the innovations in storing data (including floppy discs, videotapes, and CD-ROMs) in recent decades have become obsolete incredibly quickly, with the resultant loss of important cultural heritage. Printed books have proved more durable, so that “we can still read a text printed five centuries ago”.

As well as contemplating the present and future of reading, this book takes us on a tour of the past. De Tonnac tosses into the ring the questions that spark the discussion, and what ensues is a delightfully meandering conversation, full of fascinating asides and anecdotes.

Eco and Carrière look at the way that words have been stored over time, and how ideas have been communicated down the ages. They give us insights into how the book lovers of the past got their fix; they talk about libraries, editors, Shakespeare, the holy books of Islam and Christianity; and about the books that are lost to us through accidental fire, negligence and stupidity. Indeed, one interesting question that is raised is whether the books that have survived from ancient times actually are the greatest works of their time, and what might we have actually lost along the way?

In previous centuries you didn’t need to have read a great deal to be considered well-educated: in the 18th century, for example, the upper classes would be able to carry their whole libraries with them in trunks when they travelled as just 30-40 books contained all the learning of the decent individual. Today, of course, much more is published and considered important than it is possible to read. Eco and Carrière talk about how we are deeply influenced even by the books we have not read.

No discussion of books and reading down the ages would be complete without a discussion of censorship. Book burning is seen as a symbolic act of “purification” after a culture has been “poisoned by certain books”. “You have to respect a book’s power to want to destroy it,” says Carrière – Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses being a case in point.

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the conversation is the personal insights into the relationship that the two have with books. Carrière’s first contact with books was with the Bible in the church in the French village where he grew up; and also with George Sand’s Valentine, a book that his father read over and over because he was fond of it. Eco recounts how he fell in love with reading, poring over the eclectic stack of unbound volumes his book-binder grandfather left behind.

They go on to discuss their personal libraries, how they gathered the books they have, how they display them, and to whom they plan to bequeath them eventually. Eco has 50,000 books in his various homes, 1,200 of which are rare titles, among them books on “human error, bad faith and idiocy” – subjects that, he says, fascinate him. Carrière says that he owns 30,000-40,000 books, 2,000 of them ancient.

Have they read all the books in their vast libraries, though? Carrière replies that “a library is not necessarily made up of books that we’ve read, or even that we will eventually read. They should be books that we can read. Or that we may read. Even if we never do.” Eco agrees with him. “A library is an assurance of learning,” he says.

That’s a lesson one hopes will be remembered in our headlong rush towards the digital future.

Poised on the E-Brink

Can e-readers ever replace paper books, journals, magazines and other things we love to read?

asks Abby Lu in The Star's Metro section. She interviews a few guys including my own favourite tech geek, Leon Wing, Timothy Tiah of blogland's ad agency Nuffnang and Donald Kee of MPH who shows off the bookshop's e-readers.

The dingdongdingdong debate goes one with most of us not yet too sure how we'll feel about our reading delivered in this way, whether we will be full embracers or techno-luddites, or simply something sensible in-between.  If we're confused then the bookshops and publishers, take my word for it, are even more so.  We're all poised on the brink.

Short Attention Spans

The Internet worries me for other reasons. I have always been a reader, so the Internet has enhanced my reading, not lessened it. But in a country where reading habits are already so poor, I have to wonder what it is doing to the young.

In a thought-provoking piece in today's Star, Marina Mahathir expresses her concerns that the internet is creating a generation with short attention spans, and no capacity to read longer texts.

Incidentally, Marina isn't quite right when she says there's no male equivalent to chick lit.  It's often called lad-lit or a bit less politely, but slightly more poetically, as dick-lit!

What We Will Lose

... there’s something else that may be lost if old-style books fade from the scene: the personality that authors — and the people who give books to others as presents — sometimes leave for posterity with their handwritten inscriptions.

Peter Khoury in The New York Times writes about some of the best book inscriptions he has come across, and laments that this added dimension to the physical book will be lost completely with the coming of ereaders.
 

Leon Roadtests Malaysia's First E-Reader

My favourite tech geek, Leon Wing, was the perfect person to review the first e-reader to be brought into the country. So how does the Hanlin V5, brought in by bookstore MPH, measure up?

MPH hasn’t gone wrong by bringing this one in

he says ... fairly diplomatically, I think.  A little underwhelmed, Leon?

Ebook Readers Arrive in Malaysia - Finally!

Last Sunday's Starmag carried the news that MPH will be bringing in stocks of an e-reader - at last! The device in question is called Hanlin, and is produced by China-based Tianjin Jinke Electronics.  (Pictured on the left in the hands of MPH's Rodney Toh.)

It will most probably be followed by models from companies such as Samsung, Toshiba and Asus (and Sony? A rather odd omission from the list.).

Hanlin was chosen, apparently :

... because of its flexibility: it can read a wide range of files, including the new eBook industry standard, Adobe ePub, as well as PDF and text files. ... This means it can download eBooks from different online stores, not just MPH’s.

(This is important to me, since much of what I need to read are unpublished manuscripts which are expensive and time consuming to print off, and impossible to read comfortably on present computer screens.)

MPH plans to sell 200,000 eBooks of current titles in the first half of this year through its online bookstore mphonline.com

One particularly interesting point made in the article is that mphonline is in a great position to promote Malaysian literature overseas. Donald Kee says :

There are a lot of Asian authors that are underrepresented, such as Malaysian, Singapore and Thai authors ... we want to become a platform to showcase these writers to rest of the world.

The device is reviewed in next Sunday's edition, so we'll see how it measures up.

But, one wonders, is it already too late for the eBook reader?  The newly unveiled Apple iPad looks impressive and can do so much more ...

Augmented Reality at Esquire

Today Esquire magazine, tomorrow the book you're holding?



(Found via Bettina Tizzy on Twitter.)

Reporting From The Front Line

Sorry for not blogging earlier, I was at a place called Frideswide on the Western Front attending to the casualties and dodging fire in the trenches. And I'm only half joking.

Two of my great loves, poetry and Second Life come together with Oxford University's new virtual simulation which places the work of the war poets (including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Vera Brittain and Siegfried Sassoon) in a three dimensional, immersive environment that you can wander through and participate in. You can watch video, listen to readings of the poetry, read facimilies of documents, and watch video as you visit a training camp, communication trench, a casualty clearing station, and a front-line trench. You can wear (if you care to) the uniform of a soldier or nurse, and of course you can pose for and take pictures. I spent a couple of hours there and still have more to see and listen to.

It's a very relevant journey for me, as both my grandfathers fought in the First World War. One talked about the terrible things he'd seen all the time: the other couldn't bring himself to mention it at all.

One thing that made the experience special for me, last night, was having the opportunity to chat to one of the researchers behind the project who was able to explain how everything had come together. (Thanks Skanda!)

You can read all about the project here on Oxford University's website, and find out how you too can visit the battlefield and check out the possibilities of this new and exciting medium. Why Second Life? As the website explains :

Virtual worlds create opportunities to do things that are impossible in real museums. By simulating parts of the Western Front, the archive can embed an entire exhibition's worth of content within in the space. This can be further enhanced by placing digital versions of real archival materials and narratives along the paths that visitors take. The result is an immersive and personal experience. It's not 'real' but it does offer possibilities for understanding a part of history that is now beyond human memory.

Cindy Tackles a Digi- Novel

Coiuld this be the shape of books to come? Cindy Tham at The Nutgraph writes about her encounter with a hybrid book, a "digi-novel" called Level 26: Dark Origins, in which :

... readers are given a code to access cyber-bridges or videos that flesh out parts of the plot in vivid detail. There is also an interactive forum for readers to chat with other readers and contribute ideas on how the authors could revise the story for future editions and sequels.

and she wonders whether this is the shape of books to come as society becomes more immersed in digital technology.

Two problems she highlights based on this experience - little is left to the reader's imagination, and of course this is the best part of the reading experience, and the cyber-bridges can be disruptive to the reading flow.

But she vows to keep an open mind about the future of "vooks" ... and so will I.

Sneek Peek of Barnes and Noble's E-Reader

If there's one thing I want more than a Kindle, then it could be the new Barnes and Noble e-reader (as yet unchristened) produced by Plastic Logic, and due to be formally announced on October 20th. There's a sneak peek on the mobilitysite.com website, and it really is a very pretty little gadget a true *sigh* object of desire ...

Kindle Goes International - Sorta

Talk about a news item which gets your hopes up, and then cruelly dashes them a moment later.

Amazon announced yesterday that its Kindle e-book reader would now be available in an international edition, the price has also been dropped to (US$259) and it would ship to 100 countries.

Sadly, Malaysia is not one of them (neither are Canada, New Zealand, and the countries in this region).

I got a bit humphy I'm afraid, especially as I was watching all the excited booklovers jumping up and down for joy on Twitter, where this quickly became a trending topic. I felt left out. I felt hurt and neglected. I came face to face with the realisation of how much I want this bloody device!

I shot off an email to Amazon to ask why we weren't included, wondering whether it was (as Eyeris and Umapagan had tweeted back to me, because Malaysians don't read enough!) or was it an issue with licensing.

I was pleasantly surprised when I got a reply an hour or so later from Amazon spokesperson Cinthia Portugal herself, telling me :

We want to ship Kindle everywhere and we’re working hard on it, but at this time we are not able to ship to Malaysia. ... This is an audacious first step, and we will continue to innovate on behalf of our customers and expand our offerings – we know that there will be other steps, but we’re happy with where we are starting and we think our customers will be too.

So hopefully, we will be there somewhere in the expansion plans. I thought it was interesting too that Amazon seems to be doing a better job with its corporate communications than it did when the Homozone.com scandal came to light.

By the way, it seems there is a workaround solution for those desperate enough : one Singaporean customer at Amazon.com notes:

the wireless doesnt work outside of the USA - you can still buy books using your amazon account online and then download them to your PC and upload them via a cable to your kindle- not exactly instantaneous - but much easier (and cheaper) than slugging it down to orchard to Kino or Borders! Kindle rocks.

The New Literacy

While many have made the assumption that today kids can't write because of all the technology they are surrounded with, Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, has discovered from her research that we're probably :

... in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization ...

according Clive Thompson in Wired magazine :

... technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions. ... It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

Lunsford's team also found that the quality of the writing was high with writers better able to assess their audience :

... adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.... The fact that students today almost always write for an audience ... gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world.

And they apparently didn't find a single instance of text-speak in the writing sampled, putting to rest another myth.

There's an interesting comment on the Wired piece at The New Yorker. Thessaly la Force says that she isn't surprised at Lunsford's findings, and says :

It seems safe to argue that we still don’t know very much about how people are using social media and technology to communicate.

A Library Without Books

When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books ...

says Cushing Academy headmaster James Tracy. The administration of the 144 year old school, west of Boston, has decided to go entirely bookless, believing that the future of reading is digital.

LibraryThing's Tim Spalding said a few hours ago on Twitter :

I'm a tech entrepreneur. I'm more pro-tech than anyone I know. But I see ebooks as a disaster for everything I care about. Crazy?

Nope, I don't think so. And a library without physical books really scares me, to be honest.

The Future of the Book ... is Here

Books in the future will be an experience in cross-media. We need to look to the gaming industry to see a space where people are not constrained by the old forms. Fiction authors will become creators of worlds that readers populate like World of Warcraft.

Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn blog attends attends a talk given by Bob Stein, founder and co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. She makes a good case for saying that the future that Stein predicts is actually already here.

She lists some of Stein's other thoughts : just ponder the implications :

• Don’t confuse an object with its purpose. The physical book is not its content
• Books are the vehicles that humans use to move ideas around in time and space
• A book is a place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate
• In non-fiction authors become leaders of communities of enquiry
• Old school authors’ commitment is to engage with subject matter for the benefit of future readers. New school authors engage with readers in the context of subject matter.
• Authors will need to engage with the community around the work they create
• The anxiety about saving a ‘version’ of the content as a printed book will go away. The content will have more of a timeline, a snapshot approach, developing all the time.
• The author will become more like a professor in a class of students. S/he will lead the conversation and point out what may be relevant but the ideas will be in collaboration with the audience/readers.
• Traditional booksellers may be safe in this lifetime, but “your children should go into another career”
• Traditional publishing acts as an intermediary between an author and a reader. Their role in the future will be to build and nurture the community that exists around the author and their work
• E-readers will soon be good enough that they will take off in mainstream. Bob will simultaneously publish his next book in print and ebook formats.
• Print-on-demand is fantastic and will play more of a part as bookstores and publishers go bust

This Bespells Doom ...

One of the problems with ebooks is - you can't get authors to sign them at book events. Or can you?

Apparently David Sedaris signed a Kindle at a reading from When You Are Engulfed in Flames at the Strand bookstore in Manhattan :

A man named Marty who had waited in the book-signing line presented his Kindle, on the back of which Mr. Sedaris, in mock horror, wrote, “This bespells doom.” ... Mr. Sedaris wrote in a recent e-mail message that he has actually signed “at least five” Kindles, and “a fair number of iPods as well, these for audio book listeners.”

The strangest thing he says he has signed though was :

... a woman’s artificial leg ...

How the E-Book Will Change Things

I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.

Steven Johnson at The Wall Street Journal* contemplates the profound ways in which the very nature of reading is set to change with the advent of e-books.

The biggest downside he reckons, is that :

... one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

And here's what I want e-books to become - Vooks! Let's enjoy our printed on paper books, but use the technology for something more exciting.

(*Thanks, Chet!)

Technology Steals Your Plot Devices?

Conspiring with a distant lover? Try texting. Lost in the woods/wilderness/Ionic Sea? Use GPS. Case of mistaken identity? Facebook!

Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone. Such gimmicks don’t pass the smell test when even the most remote destinations have wireless coverage. (It’s Odysseus, can someone look up the way to Ithaca? Use the “no Sirens” route.)

Of what significance is the loss to storytelling if characters from Sherwood Forest to the Gates of Hell can be instantly, if not constantly, connected?

Am much tickled by Matt Richel's piece If Only Literature Could Be a Cellphone-Free Zone in The New York Times, but the point he makes about how modern technology undermines traditional plot devices is food for thought.

But surely technology opens the door to new plot possibilities? An online friend told me how one day he was given a parking ticket by a very attractive traffic warden. Chatting her up there and then wouldn't be an option, so he slipped his handphone (an old one he didn't mind losing) into her bag without her noticing, so that he could ask her out on a date later. (And yes, the ploy worked.)

Or there's the wife who goes through her husband's handphone numbers looking for the names of women he might be having an affair with, and finds herself having a blazing row with a police officer in Bukit Aman with whom the husband had had some official business. (True story.)

These are just two scenarios I stole to jot down in a notebook, planning to use them for stories one day.

Times change and I'm sure that all down the ages there were some writers cursing some new technological innovation which rendered some of their devices obsolete, while others embraced the possibilities enthusiastically ... and still others (Orwell, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson - to name but three of many) were way ahead of it.

(Thanks for the link, Chet!)

ReKindling The Passion

... the new Kindle edges even closer to the ideal of an e-book reader. The reading experience is immersive, natural and pleasant; the book catalog, while not yet complete, is growing and delivered instantaneously; and apart from the clicky keyboard (an unnecessary appendage 99.9 percent of the time), the design feels right.

David Pogue at The New York Times rather likes the newly launched Kindle 2. It has longer battery life, a bigger memory and can hold many more books. It can even read the books aloud to you!

And it is a hell of a lot less ugly than its predecessor. (Shame though about the silly name!)

So when can we see it here?

According to The Times, an Amazon spokesman in London said :

We are looking internationally and we know that customers are looking forward to getting their hands on a Kindle but we have no announcement to make at this time.

Sod it!

The technology is getting better, but why aren't e-books taking off? Bobby Johnson on The Guardian blog reckons there just isn't enough piracy! :

The real reason that the music industry came around to the idea of downloads wasn't because they had a startling insight into the future, or even because Apple forced the issue by building a clever ecosystem around the iPod (it didn't launch the iTunes store until 2003). It was because customers were choosing to pirate instead. ... To put it less glibly, the publishing industry isn't being forced to confront a radical shift in consumer behaviour caused by technology, because that scenario just is not happening. Customers aren't forcing the issue by choosing to abandon books and read pirated text instead. And this means the problem isn't there to be confronted.

And, of course, reading in general is having a hard time.

Silverfish's Raman gives his view on e-books and readers in The Malay Mail today.

Uma Gets an E-Book Reader

"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again, off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy...." Homer just felt out of place; trapped in circuit and screen, wrapped in anodised aluminium. The text just seemed to prattle. It felt atopic, not in its substance, but in its presentation. It felt like it was just floating above the surface. It lacked texture. It lacked opacity. It lacked the flatness of print.

The device itself felt unfamiliar in my hands; its frigid metal made my fingers numb. I had only been using it for a few days and I already missed the warmth of paper. I missed its yellowish tinge, its redolence.

If this is indeed the future of literature, then allow me to state my objections. You see, the pleasure of text goes beyond its mere consumption. The pleasure of text exists in its experience. The pleasure of text lies in its linearity. Already I miss that sense of accomplishment of having one side thicken as the other side thins. I miss being able to feel that gradual progression in my hands.

I miss the weight of it all. Ulysses should feel heavier than Jonathan Livingston Seagull. To carry Proust around in your pocket steals from its stature. For it should be as toilsome a task to lift it as it is to read it.

I miss the paper cuts.

Umapagan Ampikaipakan in the New Straits Times (and one of the most enthusiastic and clued up readers I know) succumbs to curiosity and buys himself an e-book reader, but reckons physical books will actually undergo a resurgence :

Because after swimming for so long in online data streams, we will need to seek out the the stationary words that only a page can offer. We will need to disconnect. To go offline. And the book will forever be our haven.

I think that is very true!

The End of Books?

If reading has a history, it might also have an end. It is far too soon to tell when that end might come, and how the shift from print literacy to digital literacy will transform the “reading brain” and the culture that has so long supported it.

Christine Rosen in The New Atlantis writes about the very serious implications of a move away from physical books in favour reading digitally. [via Conversational Reading]

This is, I feel a very important piece which should stir up much needed debate about where reading is headed.

More posts on this topic.