The books we read now are laboriously constructed. Their authors are sensitive to rhythm and rhyme, sonance and sibilance, rising and falling action, and intricate symbolism that sometimes takes a team of scholars to decode. We read these books because we understand the codes and conventions. It’s like an author carefully wraps something up for us, a present that we subsequently unwrap, and the act of unwrapping is reading itself. We’re taught from an early age what the codes are and how to decode them.
Over time, I think a different form of book will eventually emerge, one that’s more rooted in the mind itself. Just as authors type or dictate content now, I think the future might hold some sort of high-speed plug that goes into an author’s head, some way of taking an author’s imagination and converting it directly into a digital format. The same high-speed cables will connect you to the author’s original experience. The act of encoding and decoding will become relegated to artistic flourishes, and we’ll be able to participate in the more immediate action of the author’s own mind and flights of fancy.
The firsthand experience of life itself will come through unmediated by the encoding and decoding that we currently use in books. Words are often the worst culprits in this. They are ornaments that often get in the way of the book. Like shifting, ambivalent snakes, words are capable of so much suggestion and meaning, but they squirm when you try to pin them down.
I anticipate instead that we will be connected mind-to-mind to the lived experiences of an author—such as the experience of nervous anticipation the next time Jeff Bezos stands on a stage to announce a new Kindle, or the terrifying experience of Felix Baumgartner jumping from a balloon in the stratosphere.
Whether they’re more inky or phosphorescent in nature, books will follow the human spirit as it endeavors into the unknown. And though books have been relegated behind video games and movies and TV shows for their share of leisure time in America—the average person spends two hours watching TV every day, which is twenty times more than an average person reads—the art of reading will continue, although its form will surely change. Books are being replaced by ebooks, and in turn, ebooks will be replaced by another seemingly science-fictional innovation, but reading in some form is here to stay.
And though the average American only reads seven minutes a day, and that number is dwindling, I’ll take it. I’ll happily trade an ounce of blood for a moment with a great book.
Bookmark: Indexes
Indexes are a part of the book where ebooks suffer the most. Textbooks and most nonfiction books often have a section at the end where someone intimate with the text has scoured the book for its main subjects and created an index with the page numbers of when those subjects are mentioned. The best indexes are done by hand and are sometimes as lovingly long as a chapter in the book itself.
One of my favorite nonfiction books, the aforementioned The Road to Xanadu, is great in part for its index, because it lists such subjects as icebergs and water snakes, opium fumes and alligator holes, green lightning and the horns of the moon. The diverse list of subjects ranges from bacon and beans to demonology and to the palace of Kublai Khan itself, from slime fishes to ice blink, and from Neoplatonism to the noise made by earthquakes.
The current generation of ebooks ignores all the wisdom inside indexes like that one. True, many ebooks have indexes tucked away at the end, but they’re rarely integrated with the text of the ebook. And they’re not often hyperlinkable, allowing the reader to jump right to a topic. They often just list page numbers instead, which makes no sense, as many e-readers don’t even display page numbers! This is a shame, because when you search for a word within an ebook, your Kindle or Nook should be able to use the index to help find exactly what you’re looking for. Instead of just looking for whenever a word appears inside the text, which is how e-readers do searches now, they should give first-class treatment to words in the index, rank those results higher.
I think we’ll see this improve over time, as innovator-entrepreneurs build out the index feature. Some genres of content lend themselves better to having great indexes—travel guides come to mind. It’s hard to mourn the loss of an index—it’s sort of like grieving for an Excel spreadsheet—but the index is just as important for ebooks as for print books. And unlike print indexes, digital indexes can benefit from innovation.
After all, it’s not hard to imagine a project that crowd-sources the creation of indexes. Such indexes could become collaborative experiences, ways of building community. We see similar bottom-up contributions on Wikipedia or on specialty wiki sites on the web, where fans lovingly edit content to help future fans. Wikis for Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Battlestar Galactica assiduously index each episode of every season’s TV show, introducing the places where new characters enter or old ones leave. The same could easily be done for ebooks, once e-reading platforms start to open up and allow collaborative access.
That said, I’m not sure indexes will integrate in a fluid, seamless way with the Holodeck-style experiential books I wrote about earlier in this chapter. Earlier, I mused about which books can (and can’t) be made into immersive, experiential ones. As I said, I’m partial to the works of Borges and Coleridge, and I don’t think they’ll ever translate well into rich multimedia experiences—but what about you? Do you have any ineffable books, inscrutable plays, or downright diabolical short stories that you would feel proud to recommend online as examples of great writing that can never be made into immersive experiences?
Igniting Readers at Last!
How will readers engage with one another in the future? How will they engage with authors? And how far away is a future of direct reader-to-reader and reader-to-author engagement?
Engagement takes many forms. For example, my aunt mails my dad a box of mystery books to read every month, books that she’s gone through and wants to share with him. My best friend burns audiobooks onto CDs and mails them to me. My girlfriend loaned me her favorite book when we first started dating as something of a test—as a way of gauging my personality by whether I liked the book. The act of sharing a book is a close connection, often as close as a touch and perhaps more intimate.
You can share digital books, but the experience is less warm than when you hand over your favorite paperback. You won’t connect with your friend or loved one over the same cover and talk about the same dog-eared pages.
Digital book lending is swift and soulless right now. At least two retailers offer this feature. It’s a testament to Barnes & Noble that they were the first to offer this, that they understand the connection one reader has with another through a loved book that’s shared between them—because it’s Barnes & Noble, after all, that encourages people to get together in their stores and read books on comfy chairs and that hosts book discussion groups that gather like-minded friends of the written word.
The digital experience of book sharing has a long way to go, and it’s a bit crippled now. You get a soulless email from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and then the book magically appears on your device the next time you’re within wireless range. Like much in the world of digital books, it’s a bit clinical, designed by technologists instead of humanists. But it works, with the benefit that you no longer have to worry about your friend holding on to the book for years and neglecting to return it to you.