The Future of the Book

Posted by Adrian Toll on March 6th, 2009

Sven Birkets writes in The Atlantic about his fear that the Amazon Kindle will mean the end of the “deep” contextualisation that physical books give – libraries, book shops, history.

What’s at stake here is not so much the physical / digital book divide, but culture and human psychology: what digital books will do to culture that is expressed through the written word and its environs.  Birkets’ view seems to be based on a pessimistic view of readers – that they would willingly give up their human need for deep context for the sake of convenience.  But I can’t help feeling that the human need for deep context is deep itself.  There may be a period of time when people do give up that context for convenience’s sake.  However, I think that the need for it will start to reassert itself – you don’t miss the water until your well runs dry, but when it does you don’t just sit and die of thirst, you dig a new one.

A comparison might help to explain my optimism.  When we first moved to a village near Frome, Somerset, in the early 1980s, it was a bit of a desert – a supermarket had opened up in the centre of town, which had put family butchers and small shops out of business.  Everyone wanted in on this new phenomenon of cheap convenience, but over time it just wasn’t enough.  The town now has two family butchers, a fruit & veg shop, a weekly farmer’s market, a bustling café and a fantastic delicatessen amongst many other things.  Most of these are luxuries – particularly the café and delicatessen – and Frome is by no means poor compared to other towns.  But I think people eventually felt the emptiness of a shop dedicated purely to cheapness and convenience – people’s needs to feel part of a community, to know that more of their money was going into the local economy, to be offered something new by a shopkeeper, reasserted themselves.

Reading is definitely going to change, and there are lots of issues to contend with – many of which are talked about on the excellent if:book, the blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book.  Some are very basic – the Kindle, for example, only has a black and white screen, so can’t show anything with colour pictures.  However, I recently surprised myself by reading an entire 400-page book on my iPhone on the train from Edinburgh to London (the fantastic Your Name Here available for a suggested $8 as a PDF from Helen DeWitt’s site) and didn’t feel frustrated by the small screen or having to cover part of the text with my finger to scroll.  The current form of deep context will perhaps disappear – but, particularly given the possibilities for audio, video and image opened up by the internet, I’m confident that something else will develop to take its place.

Other interesting sites:

My Own Private Alexandria
textsound
Project Gutenberg
Stanza for iPhone
Readability

Splash image by Nic McPhee