I’m delighted to be joining the team at the Institute. I’m not an academic but a deviser and manager of projects to promote creative reading, so thinking and doing go together for me. As Director of Booktrust for seven years and of the Poetry Society before that, I’ve been particularly interested in finding new ways to bring readers and writers together. At the Poetry Society we ran a scheme that put poets to work in community settings, opening up access to their work but also providing each writer with new networks of communication, communities of readers and sources of inspiration. Booktrust runs the amazing Bookstart scheme which gives books to babies and small children, seeding a love of words and pictures before literacy blooms. The web has become a vital tool in promoting all kinds of reading and one Booktrust site well worth exploring is STORY, the campaign to keep short fiction alive and thriving; it’s an ideal form to read online.
But I’ve been struck recently by how so much reading promotion cuts literature off from other media, as if anyone still lives solely in a ‘world of books’. We all exist in a multiculture now, and there’s a need to look much harder at how we connect ideas gleaned from tv, websites, books and real life conversations to patch together our personal stances and narratives.
Conventional publishers and their authors wonder how they’ll survive as industries converge and users generate. Working with if:book I’m keen to look hard at different means to bring quality writing – and in particular fiction – to new audiences, so that writers can afford to eat and readers can savour genuinely compelling writing on-line.
When I’ve told colleagues about my move from Booktrust to exploring the future of the book, I’ve had howls of outrage and alarm from some unexpected sources. People who spend their days at a computer and evenings watching TV screens are horrified that I might be out to deprive them of the pleasure of their paperbacks. Readers cling on tight to their tomes as if literature and stationary were inseparable; meanwhile the digital world has stretched the definition of book to include laptops and social networks. So in the era of MacBooks and FaceBook, what does the (paper)book represent to people? It’s a constant in the flux of change; something worth concentrating on and keeping afterwards. Of course plenty of fiction and non-fiction published is transient crap, but research shows that people find it hard to throw away a piece of print if it’s perfect bound.
So a future book should be using all the opportunities that new media affords, but without breathlessness. The kind of pointless interactivity that the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman complained about at this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival really isn’t good enough. Whether we consume it via an e-reader, a mobile, laptop or a document printed on demand, a future book will need to be worth sticking with, the product of some serious thought and time, a carefully constructed whole. It will be rendered using the extended palette of multimedia possibilities open to makers, may be a team effort or the work of a solo author, may incorporate space for reader response and links to other sites, may use a range of delivery methods, be porous and evolving, but if it doesn’t have the integrity and quality we expect from literature then something far more important than the nostalgic musty smell of old paperbacks will have been lost.
Where do literature and stories fit in our lives? That’s the question I’ve always been most interested in. The answer changes all the time, and that’s why the work of the Institute for the Future of the Book seems to me so important.
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
Chris, congrats on your new job! This is a very exciting partnership which will certainly boost the new media scene in the UK. Great to have Bob coming regularly too.
Chris – congratulations on the job. Any chance of getting in touch with you directly to discuss a few UK-related things? I scoured Bookfutures for an email address, but no joy. I can be contacted direct via my site…
“Readers cling on tight to their tomes as if literature and stationary were inseparable”
Did you mean stationery (as in paper)?
Either way, I think that this line (as written) provides an interesting perspective as to the importance of printed material. Just as with the oral culture that proceeded written culture, the promise of digital culture is one that, at its core, is fundamentally mutable. Printed materials (once they emerge from the press) is immutable.
This is not to say that the permanence of print is “better” than the flexibility of digital. Only that they are in fact different, and that as we move from a print to digital culture, we should expect that difference to manifest itself in unplanned manners. And that, I think, is the discomfort that strikes many readers, not some strawman argument about how pleasures of reading are going to simply disappear.
I’d love to claim that typo as subtle wordplay; I agree that both spellings apply to the paper ‘bound’tome, though of course great writing in any form can move us and take us to amazing places.
This sentence also seduced me into commenting: “Readers cling on tight to their tomes as if literature and stationary were inseparable,” to find out that it was a lovely slip.
If printed books are immutable as form, they are mutable as we read them. Borges’s Pierre Menard sits to write chapters 29 and 38 of Don Quijote, neither to copy it nor to write a new version, but to write the Quijote. However, his final work, word for word exactly the same as the chapters of Cervantes, is a completely different one. Cervantes’s words in 17th century Spain have a completely different meaning than those same words written in the 19th century by a French Symbolist.
The digital world reveals what hides underneath form. What it has to offer goes beyond mutability. The future book as a “carefully constructed whole” offers reading, and writing, as an unprecedentedly exciting experience. That book is both permanent and mutable because it is networked, searchable, movable, reachable beyond physicality, shareable, but it can also be kept “intact” while the process is open. Quality will be, as always, up to the editor, perhaps the word “curator” will be a more adequate one here.
Prospects for screen based reading don’t always need to orbit the trope of the book. Why default to frames essentially borrowed from the print format? Lets describe new behaviors, innovative communication methods and quick research without the scaffolding. Then discussion would not be stalled measuring one reading mode performance in terms of another.
Try a description of screen reading without one mention of the book.
gary said:
> Try a description of screen reading
> without one mention of the book.
the word “book” doesn’t just mean those
sheets of paper bound together, gary…
when someone says “i’m writing a book”,
they mean “i’m writing a long _story_”…
how/where the story is read is immaterial.
is the news any different if you read it at
newyorktimes.com or off the paper newspaper?
of course not.
-bowerbird
Try a description of screen reading without one mention of “writing a long story”. My suggestion is to unlink prospects from frames out of history. For example divine inspiration does little to define the fractal creativity of the wiki and there is no relevance of a long story to an endless story. What exactly is an endless “story”? In terms of screen reading we need to know.
i don’t get your point, gary.
i can answer your questions:
* if i am writing a book on a wiki, and you’re
reading along, you are reading my _drafts_, and
once i’m done, we can read the _finished_ version;
* if i’m telling “an endless story” — such as i
might be doing if i’m writing a blog, for instance,
then you can read along as i do that, or you can
“freeze it” at some point and read up to there,
in the same way that “serials” were printed in
newspapers on a regular basis in days of old;
either way, you can read the words off the screen,
or you can print them first and read them off paper,
and in most cases it won’t make any difference at all…
as i’ve said before, i read the news on my screen,
and off a newspaper, and i usually _cannot_remember_
where i read it. indeed, i even listen to the news
on the radio and watch it on t.v., and sometimes
i would be hard-pressed to tell you where any bit
came from in particular. it’s a jumble in my head.
and yes, an ever-continuing story _is_ different from
a bounded one — of the type represented by “a book” —
but this has nothing to do with where/how they are read.
and quite honestly, i’m not sure why i’m making this
same old tired response to your same old tired point,
because — as i said — i don’t even get your point.
so i will be getting off the merry-go-round after this.
but “book” is a word that is overloaded with meanings,
so don’t think you can use it to mean the one simple thing
that you seem to think that it means.
-bowerbird
I get your point. As Obama says about war; a lot of little mistakes are not that relevant if they underlie a fundamental mistake. I don’t like the assumption that screen reading and print reading are equivalent. Others like this assumption and connect the measurements made from migrations of one to migrations to another.
So, as a result I advocate for two different kinds of reading rather than advocate for some on-way transformation in reading. And the last major revolution was the advent of electrical power. (Nicholas Carr)
If I am following Gary’s line of reasoning correctly, then I think that he has a good point. Media do matter. We can say that reading from a screen is the same as reading from paper, but like all translations, they are imperfect. (Imperfect may not be the appropriate word since I am not seeking a value judgment.)
Reading something in a hardback is different from paperback. Reading from a folio is different from reading from a quarto. There is an experiential sensation that alters the reading experience, and should be considered in the “future” of the book.
gary said:
> I don’t like the assumption that
> screen reading and print reading are equivalent.
but there’s no such “assumption” being made here.
i am wide open to the argument they are different.
but to me, at least, they don’t _feel_ different,
not in any fundamentally important matter, anyway.
i mean, at least tell me how they _might_ be
different. because the constant assertion that
they _are_ different, without any elaboration,
is not convincing. but i don’t want to have
some blind-spot about it if there really is
a difference.
-bowerbird
p.s. sorry fletcher, that’s not nconvincing.
nor does it fit with gary’s argument that the
clevage runs along the screen/paper variable.
bowerbird:
>tell me how they _might_ be
different
“reading” is not a simple notion: one reads in many places for many very different purposes.
Reading for information (“need to know”), for instance, is significantly “device independant”, as long as all the relevant information is conveyed by the document. Mind, nevertheless, that reading efficiency aspects can impact on the choice of format: synoptic vision, layout, typography are to be considered.
Reading for pleasure might also be tied to places and formats, without even mentioning individual accessibility constraints or choices.
Bowerbird…you will hate me for repeating this.
Exclusive attributes of print include (1) legibility, (2) haptic efficiency and (3) persistence. Legibility is NOT resolution but immediacy of meaning undisturbed by need to deselect and delete from delivered content. Haptic efficiency is full utilization of hands to prompt the mind or the efficacy of transmission of conceptual works by physical objects. Persistence is simple default, rather than cost add-on, preservation or storage.
I know you also dislike the frame of print/screen, but give us another for our digital context.
(Notice how the conversation has gravitated away from qualifiers for Director. This illustrates a legibility issue with the format. Lets post the Institute Mission Statement in CommentPress and see where we go.)
does that mean if we print these comments,
the conversation will not have gravitated?
-bowerbird
Printing is archiving. The suggestion is to run the if:book in CommentPress so that we are on point and not talking past each other. Later the institute could consider the special steps to archive CommentPress if:book to paper if it is desired as a back-up to the accumulation of structured discussion.
Fletcher (3 0ct) has an important point about the way the tactile element affects the nature of the reading experience:
Reading something in a hardback is different from paperback. Reading from a folio is different from reading from a quarto. There is an experiential sensation that alters the reading experience, and should be considered in the “future” of the book.
Maybe, as someone has already said, the argument is about the future of the story. Books will always be themselves, discrete, contained, satisfying to own perhaps; they have never been exactly equivalent to the story/author thing which is wider, deeper, more context-related than some bound pieces of paper with print on them.
I love books. That doesn’t stop me from enjoying radio plays and TV programmes and reading for enjoyment on my laptop. I don’t quite understand why we sometimes slip into an either/or type of discussion.
If reading of text atrophied and ended (compensated or not by an enrichedment of all other modes of reading) print books would still remain. As illegible artifacts they would continue to exemplify the transmission of formal conceptual works out of the body to be conveyed as physical objects. In this way they would continue to fulfill their fundamental function.
The church libraires here in Arequipa, Peru certainly seem dead, filled with latin books on eccesiastical history. The padres wished them dead too as they themselves lost hope in their meaning. But then a miracle occured; the books would not go away. Now five centuries of the importation of one culture into a new world via a technology of printed books suddenly seems relevant again. The styles have changed, but technological importation of one culture into another culture has occured before.