Here and elsewhere in the blogosphere, much ink has been spilled — or rather, many pixels generated — regarding Sven Birkerts’s “Resisting the Kindle,” which contends that the e-reader’s rise augurs ill for our ability to contextualize information. The argument hinges on a conditional premise, the soundness of which I doubt: “If … we move wholesale into a world where information and texts are called onto the screen by the touch of a button … [then] we will not simply have replaced one delivery system with another.” At his most dystopian, Birkerts foresees “an info-culture … composed entirely of free-floating items of information and expression, all awaiting their access call.”
Birkerts’s skepticism seems more an indictment of human nature than of the Kindle itself, and I think his assumptions about our capacity to “replace” are misguided. In defending or repudiating his stance, bloggers have invoked everyone from McLuhan to Pascal to Derrida. Bearing this continental mélange in mind, I’d like to call to the stand Herr Martin Heidegger, existentialist and phenomenologist par excellence.
Don’t worry — I’ll try to keep this painless.
In his seminal Being and Time, Heidegger considers equipment and utility: how we relate to our tools, how the tools relate to one another, and how a network of tools mitigates our surroundings. “Equipment,” he avers, “can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its own measure” (98).* Well-designed tools possess something he dubs “readiness-to-hand.” Roughly defined, the more something is suited to the use it is made for, the more ready-to-hand it becomes. Readiness-to-hand entails a kind of integration with the environment, an invisibility; the tool belongs so much in the world that we seldom realize we’re using it as we work. So that we may gape at his obscurity, here’s how Heidegger puts it:

The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work — that which is to be produced at the time; and this is accordingly ready-to-hand too. The work bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered. (99)

Consider, for example, a computer keyboard. When I type on mine, I’m ordinarily unaware of it. Since it’s well-designed and fully functioning, I have no phenomenological reason to take notice of its existence — instead, I concentrate on what I’m typing. The keyboard is incorporated in my location, existing in tandem with my monitor, my lamp and, yes, the intimidating paperback edition of Being and Time resting on my desk.
Of course, if the keyboard broke, or if it were inherently flawed, this wouldn’t be the case, and it’s for this reason that Heidegger introduces “obtrusiveness,” one way of distinguishing between well-wrought equipment and defective tools. The latter make us increasingly aware of their presence and less at ease in our environs; they simply don’t seem to fit into the world as we’ve constructed it. This is the last time I’ll quote our man:

When we notice what is un-ready-to-hand, that which is ready-to-hand enters the mode of obtrusiveness. The more urgently we need what is missing, and the more authentically it is encountered in its un-readiness-to-hand, all the more obtrusive does that which is ready-to-hand become — so much so, indeed, that it seems to lose its character of readiness-to-hand. It reveals itself as something just present-at-hand and no more, which cannot be budged without the thing that is missing. The helpless way in which we stand before it is a deficient mode of concern, and as such it uncovers the Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more of something ready-to-hand. (103)

Onto Birkerts, then. The Kindle may feel, at present, isolated and bereft of context, but this is because its readiness-to-hand is concealed by a lack. Something is missing, or, to use Heidegger’s jargon, “obtruding.” Birkerts maintains that the issue is one of context, but this is perhaps irrelevant. What matters is not the nature of what’s missing but that something is missing at all. In Heidegger’s philosophy, people will resist imperfect equipment, especially when its faults obtrude upon their interactions with the world.
If designers solve the Kindle’s problems — whatever they may be — satisfactorily, e-readers could supplant traditional, printed books. We might, that is, come to use the Kindle for identical tasks, in otherwise identical environments, and so enable a radical shift in information access without surrendering anything. But if designers can’t remedy this sense of Heideggerian obtrusiveness, then the risk of wholesale displacement is practically nil. Unless its successor is fully accommodating, the “delivery system” will not be replaced. What obtains for e-readers instead will be tenuous coexistence at best and outright failure at worst.
Thus, the most tendentious part of Birkerts’s argument has little to do with the Kindle or context. It’s that he believes humanity would wittingly adopt deficient tools at the expense of effective ones. This fundamental cynicism is, to a point, understandable; much of marketing and advertising, after all, devotes itself to convincing us that what’s new is necessarily superior, and in the marketplace we’re suckers for such baseless claims. (At this point, any sticker that reads “New and Improved!” seems almost redundant.) But Birkerts underestimates, I think, the functional and aesthetic requisites of an average reader. If Heidegger is right, then the catastrophic, decontextualized info-culture of Birkerts’s imagination is patently absurd — readers won’t, in the short- or long-term, shutter our libraries just because some novel, convenient alternative has asserted itself.
“We misjudge it,” writes Birkerts of the Kindle, “if we construe it as just another useful new tool.” But this is exclusively what it is, at the moment. In order to advance as equipment, the Kindle must demonstrate the readiness-to-hand of that which it endeavors to replace. It hasn’t. Until it does, any talk of supersession strikes me as alarmist.
—
*These citations come from the John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson translation. Heidegger’s style, especially in English, is notoriously labyrinthine and often straight-up unreadable. If, someday, someone can endure the entirety of Being and Time on a Kindle, I think we can safely say the e-readers have won.

If:book certainly isn’t an obvious venue for a John Updike remembrance. In 2006, his “The End of Authorship” vehemently misconstrued the ideals of digital publishing. At remix culture, he bristled; at collaborative reading, he balked; at the notion of books on screens, he cringed, seeking the refuge of his conventional library and its dusty tomes. In a single, hair-pullingly obtuse sentence, Updike pegged his era’s headstrong mentality: “Books traditionally have edges.”
At the time, if:book responded, to much less fanfare, with a scorched-earth rebuke in which Updike’s entire oeuvre was reduced to “juvenilia,” his brain purportedly “addled” by decades upon decades of “hero worship.”
And yet.
Updike, who died last week at 76, came to me on the recommendation of my high school English teacher, shortly after I’d realized that reading was not an altogether painful pastime. I fawned over the glittery prose of his early fiction and promptly tackled the Rabbit tetralogy; soon enough, I was writing the requisite rip-off stories and mimicking his vow “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” By now an unseemly number of Updike imitators have weaseled their way into print, but without his delicate touch, the mundane only yields the saccharine.
No detail was too minute for Updike — he was at his best when he pursued the microcosmic, finding analogs for the Big Questions in the small ones. Atomically, his sentences were as expansive and accommodating as any I’ve read. At Slate.com, Sven Birkerts eloquently elected him “the sentence guru; he showed me just what lyric accuracy a string of words could accomplish.”
Lyric accuracy, indeed. Updike’s brand of prose, however stylized, rarely sullied the acuity of his observations. The people and places that he conjured felt alive to me in a way that few had, prior to then. Those worlds were immediate. Puzzlingly, their immediacy materialized from the calm, considered measure of the prose. The perspective of an Updike piece is always enveloping. I’ll outsource my thoughts again to Birkerts: “Harry Angstrom working the remains of a caramel from his molar is a straight shunt to the living human now.”
Nowadays, I find those tribulations of suburbia moderately less gripping, but some of the passages I marveled over have retained their luster. Though it may be damning it with faint praise, I regard Updike’s work as a kind of gateway drug. Certainly it whetted my appetite for capital-L Literature, for words that faced the thrum of contemporary life without further obfuscating it. What he generated in his finest work is the crackle of a full-fledged consciousness, a voice: the sentences have a cadence, the cadence has a tone, and the tone, somehow, becomes human.
His death is, in a sense, another nail in the coffin of a kind of literary vanguard. I can understand why this blog’s readership might relish, openly or in private, the extinction of these writers, particularly given the old school’s knee-jerk aversion to new methodologies and shifting boundaries. By 2006, as the sensationally-titled “The End of Authorship” attests, it seemed that Updike opposed progress in the humanities more than he furthered it. The voguish sentiment, for better or worse, was disdain for his belletristic ways.
Still, I’m saddened by his passing. Updike and his ilk presided over fiction when more Americans read it, debated it, engaged with it. He took his writing seriously, yes, without proffering it as panacean. By the time I picked him up, to be sure, his heyday had come and gone. Legend has it, though, that the phrase “man of letters” was in those days uttered without an ironic smirk, and that one could reasonably endeavor to devote his or her life to words without appearing highfalutin or deranged. Writers could even expect to see their work in mass-market paperback editions. Imagine that.
I hope that, through the very transformation that Updike disparaged, literature in any and all forms will see an era of renewed relevance, and soon. Even he, after all, regarded books as “an encounter, in silence, of two minds.” There’s plenty to cavil about, sure — the degree of silence, the number of minds, the mode of the encounter — but at an elemental level, his assessment rings true to me. To millions of readers, Updike demonstrated the solicitous vitality of that truth, of those encounters. He will be missed.

Wyatt Mason, the keenly observant Harper’s literary critic, blogged last week about the difficulties inherent to film criticism. “[B]ecause film is a waterfall of particulars,” he believes, a movie review “is the hardest place to get any serious critical footing.” He’s frustrated by attempts to verbalize what he sees and hears:

I tried, not so much valiantly as in vain, to put into words what I thought of the movies of Tennessee Williams. There are a great many of them, and they are very unusual, or so it seemed to me. Trying, though, to explain that particularity proved disabling. Rather than write eight lines, I wanted to play eight seconds of a scene from Baby Doll, so I could point to the glint in Eli Wallach’s eyes, and say something wise like, “Wow, look at his eyes.” Alas, that was not a means at my disposal.

But what if it were? Mason’s insights accent the coming sea change in our dissection of films. Given the ascendancy of digital video and the ease with which we share media, why can’t more scholars and critics say, “Wow, look at his eyes”? The technology for close, second-by-second readings of films is readily available. In classrooms and critical organs alike, though, few seem to have taken up the practice. (This is not to say that video clips aren’t finding their way to more blogs and websites–far from it. But in my experience, the clips are seldom cinematic: instead, there’s a lot of television floating around. As a part of their ongoing feature on “The New Cult Canon,” however, The Onion A.V. Club has embedded excerpts from the films in their reviews, and the results are worth exploring.)
We’ve grown all too accustomed, it seems, to talking about films without really quoting them. The capacity to quote is a terrific boon, no doubt, and yet few film buffs are tossing their hats in the air. Legal hindrances might be largely to blame–it’s hard to display film fragments publicly when you don’t have the rights to cite them–but I think there’s also some head-scratching as to how film quotations might alter the nature of the criticism. Being able to include the salient clips in, say, a digital paper on Tennessee Williams’s movies would completely upend one’s analytic strategy. Readers, too, would find themselves with more freedom in digesting a critic’s approach alongside the film itself; the critic’s interpretation becomes increasingly palpable as the reader is immersed in the source material. Mason indicates as much:

…[A] classroom–equipped with projector and laser pointer–would seem the best environment in which to take apart a moving picture. One can watch; re-watch; isolate; conflate; pause to listen, intently and with closed eyes, to a moment in the score, and then open those eyes to see how what was heard underscores the seen.

An arresting possibility, yes, but I see no reason that such dedicated viewing can’t occur outside the classroom, too. In this sense, Mason’s notion of “the best environment” raises some excellent questions: how best to replicate the studious solitude of the classroom on a networked screen, in a way that engenders conversation and annotation? Presented with this more dynamic (and, presumably, more efficacious) mode of criticism, what changes obtain in the mission of the critic and the expectations of the reader?

Uh-oh. While if:book slept, the publishing industry was cast into a tumult from which it’s unlikely to soon recover. Having weathered an increasingly turbulent economic downturn, the industry’s already rickety business models look all the more enervated. The headlines are glum.
Thus far, magazines and newspapers have sustained most of the damage. The Christian Science Monitor announced in late October that it’s shuttering its print iteration; effective in April, the paper’s weekday editions will appear exclusively online. Glossy conglomerates like Time Inc., American Express and Condé Nast have cut hundreds of jobs and folded their lesser brands. (They’ve also canceled their holiday parties.) Even the venerable Times — whose web presence has been valiantly, if exhaustingly, experimental — reported significant decreases in both total and ad revenues for the month of October.
Meanwhile, Playgirl‘s final print issue hit newsstands on 18 November.
Book publishers, too, have suffered. Hoping to occlude further losses, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt opted to halt all acquisitions. Atlas & Co., a notable independent publisher of nonfiction, has postponed its spring ’09 lineup, and Doubleday is in the midst of layoffs. With a consortium of authors and publishers, Google signed a deal to digitize millions of copyrighted, out-of-print books. The publishers’ settlement? $125 million — a drop in the bucket for Google, whose traffic will benefit tremendously from the agreement. Which side got the better bargain?
Amidst such dire circumstances as these, advice is coming from all sides. Lee Abrams, the so-called “Chief Innovation Officer” of the flagging Tribune Co., advocates revolutionary vigilance, by which he means falling in line with the corporate structure. Yesterday, he admonished every Tribune employee in an email littered with solecisms. Its rhetoric is painfully hawkish:

Revolutions are about “we”. The leaders need to engage EVERYone. And EVERYone needs to engage the cause. You are either WITH the revolution or AGAINST it. You will either be embraced by the company and win or the company will beat you. No middle ground. If you are IN–cool–Bear down for battle. If you are OUT—Cool–Good luck with your future. Just figure out where you want to be… Middle ground wastes EVERONES time.

But there’s sounder and simpler counsel. As far as the printed page is concerned, Authors Guild board member James Gleick exhorted publishers in a Times op-ed piece yesterday:

Forget about cost-cutting and the mass market. Don’t aim for instant blockbuster successes. You won’t win on quick distribution, and you won’t win on price. Cyberspace has that covered. Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.

I don’t mean to be glib; it’s not as if a better business acumen could have prevented the hard truths of this recession, nor is it true that other media have somehow escaped unscathed. Furthermore, the straits of the aforementioned companies in no way suggest a pandemic of layoffs and failures — Hachette, after all, is giving its employees a bonus this year.
Publishers, though, have been notoriously intractable in seeing the threats to their livelihood, even as the music and movie industries have fallen on calamitous times. And yet a stumbling block may prove to be a stepping stone, as the saying goes. If, as predicted, the economy continues to falter, publishing will be forced to abandon its languishing strategies and innovate. Such innovations might well require an acknowledgment that there’s more to life than ink on paper. The long-term result, with any luck, will be more books, better books, and an overdue recognition of how broadly “book” can be defined.
The writing, it seems, is now on the wall — and that’s likely the only place it will appear in print.

ADDENDUM: But wait! There’s more! Among others, Mediabistro.com reported today on what is being known as “Black Wednesday” in book publishing. A brief survey of the destruction? A Random House memo told of the company’s imminent restructuring, sparking fear of ineluctable layoffs; Simon & Schuster scrapped thirty-five employees; Penguin declared that no upper-echelon personnel would receive raises in 2009, and that it could not guarantee job security in that forthcoming annum; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt continued to scale back, faced with the resignation of its publisher and more firings. Black Wednesday, indeed.

In addition to the demo books themselves, we’ve posted several movies demonstrating the capabilities of Sophie 1.0. At about a minute each, these clips provide a cursory glance at a variety of our books, complete with hopefully unobtrusive narration by yours truly.
[1] Candyman — A digital edition of John Gibbs’s “Candyman” essay, originally published by Wallflower Press.
[2] Cookbooks — Librarian and avid cookbook collector Kim Beeman shares some of her favorite rarities.
[3] Gettysburg Address — As Holladay wrote earlier this month, this is a multimodal presentation of the Address’s five drafts.
[4] Nomination Speech Visualizations — Also mentioned in a previous if:book post, this book combines worldle.net visualizations with transcripts and audio recordings of presidential nomination speeches.
[5] Robert Winter’s Mozart — A close reading of Mozart’s Dissonant Quartet, ported from a popular Voyager CD-ROM with new features.
We welcome any and all feedback.

With October just around the corner, American universities and high schools are gearing up for homecoming celebrations, those unabashed nostalgia fests. There’s just one problem: the yearbook, one of nostalgia’s favorite vessels, is obsolete.
This summer, the Economist reported on the slumping sales of college yearbooks, rightly citing the ascendancy of social networking sites as a major factor in the decline. The article, otherwise well-reported, is sullied by some editorializing in its final paragraph:

Although today’s students find yearbooks old-fashioned, they may one day miss their vanished youth. Long after Facebook and MySpace have become obsolete and the electrons dispersed to the ether, future alumni might just wish for the permanence of ink on paper.

Callers on an NPR Digital Culture segment had similar misgivings, as did those interviewed by the Toledo Blade. Though I’m by no means a Facebook apologist, their argument strikes me as specious. It conflates intangibility and impermanence; because we can’t hold the website in our hands, it says, those electronically-stored memories are liable to disappear on us overnight. While I’d never bet that Facebook and its ilk will be around forever, I believe its information can and will persist at one venue or another — there’s little to suggest that digitized content is somehow more ephemeral than its print counterpart. In fact, at present, more users are concerned about their ability to destroy that information than to preserve it. If anything, Facebook might be too permanent. So much for that pesky electron ether-dispersion…
Despite the presence of “book” in its title, few critics to my knowledge have construed Facebook as the ultimate electronic yearbook. They focus instead on its broader “social network” applications. That’s all well and good, but what is Facebook if not the quintessential model of an electronic book done right?
Like its conventional print brethren, Facebook chronicles the lives of a certain network’s members. It’s teeming with photos and groups; its wall posts are the digital equivalent of those slangy well-wishes from your friends and acquaintances (and maybe a stranger or two).
Since users provide the data, it’s matchlessly comprehensive — and most of this data, if not all of it, is driven by nostalgia and memory-making, the desire to memorialize your glory days. Certainly it’s no coincidence that, when it launched, Facebook catered exclusively to college students, with high-schoolers hot on their heels. This demographic overlaps perfectly with “the yearbook years.”
One of the yearbook’s biggest drawbacks has always been its linearity: how many people do you know who read them from start to finish? Facebook’s search bar bypasses that structural issue, providing a degree of accessibility that strikes fear in the hearts of yearbook indices everywhere. Facebook’s contents are individually tailored, fully customizable, and unconstrained by timeframes.
It’s also totally free.
The site, then, is a better yearbook than any yearbook can be. It suggests that the networked screen is, at least for this purpose, an infinitely more versatile medium than the static page. In considering Facebook as an electronic book rather than as a mere web franchise, we see how this new medium can improve upon the tried-and-true formulas of the print age.
To be sure, I’m not championing the sort of navel-gazing, quasi-addictive Facebook usage that consumes some of my generation. (Full disclosure: I’m 22.) Nor am I claiming that social networking sites are the only cause of waning interest in yearbooks as an institution. I’m just saying that the turning point has come and gone. Consider that a Bethesda, Md. high school recently republished Facebook photos in its yearbook; consider that DePauw University’s 2008 yearbook modeled itself after Facebook to woo buyers. If this isn’t the simulacrum replacing the original, I don’t know what is.
There’s arguably another, bleaker lesson to be learned here, which is that Facebook’s true victory over print is predicated on its ability to massage our narcissism. Perhaps MicCalifornia, a commenter on the Economist piece, says it best: “The first thing we do when we get our yearbooks is see how many pictures we are in. Who needs it when with Facebook, I am in all the pictures.”

Microsoft Multimedia Schubert was published fifteen years ago, in 1993. Developed by the Voyager Company, the program was one of many in an early “Microsoft Multimedia Catalog.” It allows users to engage in a close reading of Schubert’s Trout Quintet, illuminated with Alan Rich’s moment-by-moment commentary. Rendered in text, Rich’s comments are programmed to appear at specific instances during each movement.
Though such multimedia CD-ROMs are commonplace by today’s standards, MS Schubert and its ilk came at a time when designers were seriously rethinking what was possible in the realm of multimedia. There’s much to learn from their spirit of innovation.
For instance, Voyager, Rich and co. flesh out their disc with a glossary of musical taxonomy, a brief history of the sonata form, and encyclopedic accounts of Schubert’s life and work; there’s even a modest Schubert game, in which listeners attempt to identify randomly-generated audio fragments of the Trout Quintet. (My high score: zero.) All in all, I think the CD-ROM constitutes an elegant combination of aural, textual and visual elements. It’s an inspired precursor to more comprehensive CD-ROM encyclopedias like Encarta, and its close reading is still valuable today. Not too shabby, for ’93.

Obviously, the intervening years have seen enormous advancements in computing and the rise of the Web, which could give the Schubert multimedia suite a new lease on life. In the coming months, we’ll ask scholars and musicians what they want out of a multimodal close reading, and how a new generation of electronic books can serve those needs. How can we abet in-depth listening and foster a discussion of music’s nuances? For that matter, which musicians and works ought to be included in an initial library of close readings, and who (if anyone) should lead them?
Of course, not every ’90s idea was an earth-shattering success, but there are lessons in the failures. In 1995, for instance, Microsoft debuted its oft-derided Bob operating system, which immersed novices in a house-like virtual environment where program icons took the form of everyday domestic objects: shelved books, rolodexes, bank ledgers left on coffee tables. Was it horrendously executed and functionally flawed? Yes. Tacky, juvenile? Those, too. But the Bob OS was also giddy with multimedia possibility – it was a dicey proposition in an industry with damn too few of them. See for yourself:

The thought of spending my days in Bob’s syrupy universe is a frightening one. But I wonder: did it flop because of its gung-ho cuteness, or because of its experimental premise?
It’s crucial, I feel, to approach our new projects with the “what if…?” mentality that reigned, however briefly, in early-’90s projects like Schubert and Bob. The latter bombed, yeah, but it was a well-intentioned failure. In some ways, it attempted to change how operating systems should look, feel and perform – even if those attempts were half-hearted and immediately superseded by Windows 95.
As the norms of our gadget-usage continue to cement themselves, it’s going to get harder and harder to abandon our preconceptions of what multimedia can accomplish, i.e., of how stuff should work. In revitalizing and updating projects like Schubert, we have a perfect opportunity to learn from the past: what it got right, what it botched abysmally, and its wide-eyed awe as to the future’s potential.