Rethinking the Book (Online)
In this week’s Academia discussion, we asked the question, “with the death of chain bookstores, and in many towns, any bookstores, where does this leave the book? What if a generation grows up without being able to buy and handle physical books? How will that not only change the idea of books, but how we tell stories?”
This sounds like a silly question on first blush: duh, nothing will change—we’ll just read the same books online. However, think about it for a moment. While print books will probably always exist, you really have to seek them out in a world without bookstores (even if a few used bookstores and boutiques still hang on in the margins). Many kids, who are not naturally drawn to reading, might never hold a physical book in their hands. They won’t know the feel of turning page after page to get to the middle and end of a story. They won’t understand the term ‘dog eared’ or the origin of a ‘bookmark.’ These readers of the future will still read—no getting around that—but they won’t do it the way we did growing up. And every change in technology is also a change in thought.
You don’t read the same when looking at a computer as when you thumb through a book. It’s different technology. Try it sometime: reading an article on-line, you tend to skim, your mouse impulsively advancing the text. Rarely will you read every word. With a physical book, there’s a sense of static calm: you might skim, but you’re less anxious and more prone to let your eye dance gently across each sentence. I read better with books and read slower. Not that everyone does it this way, but I think it’s built into the on-line experience, where most information is skimmable and not literary in content. It’s designed like a buffet: grab this or that and move along. Page reading is a feast over multiple glasses of wine and endless bottles of conversation.
So what happens when we translate this experience—and these books—on-line? E-books are the same as real books: the same words, the same chapters, even the same footnotes (very helpful, with Shakespeare!). E-books mimic the books they’re descended from since that’s all we know. For now. Remember that early films were basically filmed staged plays since “movies” didn’t exist (not yet). Gradually, however, watching in a new way changed the experiencing of “seeing” a film. It was faster, more intimate (you could hear someone breathing), and boundless (forget the stage—you had the world!). After all, the word “audience” comes from the term “audio,” meaning to listen. We go to a play to listen above all, whereas in a film, we’re there to watch—we become viewers. A change in technology leads to a change in thinking.
Compare Black Panther to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Both are concerned with fantasy, but the storytelling (and language) is miles apart. The same is necessarily true for books once they decisively convert to an on-line experience. How? And why? Consider the following examples...
Once books are primarily digital, they no longer need to be linear because they don’t exist in space. They are limitless, not bound to a set number of pages or an experience of turning them. So couldn’t a book technically go on forever? Or move in different directions? Or tell more than one story at once?
A book cover is necessary as a quick visual blurb, really a poster, to capture a reader’s interest. But a digital book has no front or back. It doesn’t need a cover. Or better yet, the artwork doesn’t have to be limited to a single image prefacing a series of text. Pictures could be anywhere, at any part of the story, changing how we read the work. I see books of the future merging with comics to provide a more visual, more expansive form of storytelling.
In a physical book, there’s only so much text a page can hold before you need a new one. But you really don’t need pages in the digital environment. So how do you know when to “turn the page”? There are no pages! Sure, there are now, but eventually digital books will stop mimicking the paper experience. So the text could just exist in space for the reader to decide where the breaks are—or if we even need chapters at all.
Sure, you can write notes in a book and even write your own fan fiction based on one. But in the digital world, why couldn’t you change the book on the spot? Make your own version of the book as you read? Why would a book have to be a single, static entity? I imagine books becoming collaborative the second they’re released to the public, with everyone editing and expanding the content. A book is an object, a story created by a single author. Without the object, why does it have to be one book?
Related to the above, why do we need authors if we don’t have books? Ironically, we could go back to oral storytelling, where each person re-tells and re-writes a story that’s been passed on from one digital environment to another. Authorship didn’t exist in the ancient world since texts were communal, part of a given society and culture. Now we can all own books and all write them. A story would constantly change and adapt to new times and new worlds. Again, if it doesn’t have to exist, why does it have to be frozen in time? It would be more like a jazz riff, more a beginning than an end in itself.
These are just a few ideas why changing a form will change the ideas inside it. Hopefully we’ll always have physical books, since that’s an experience that is rich and exciting—the idea that a single story can last forever.
However, that’s just one experience; by erasing the book, we also erase our fears and age-old conceptions of what storytelling can be. In a generation or two, we might forget what books were supposed to look like and make our own. There’s an entire universe to explore and millions and millions of readers willing to undertake the journey. The only question is, will the bestsellers of the future be written by a Steven King...or an Anonymous?
