Old habits die hard. And while books linger on in our cultural consciousness, so will bookshelves.
Is the feeling of warmth we get from a well-stocked library or drawing room genuine, or is it simply something accultured into us? Would we feel just as cozy in front of a fireplace in a room bereft of everything but a Nook set alone on a pedestal? Clearly this feeling comes from our culture. We associate poverty with an empty environment and wealth with a richly appointed one. But can these perceptions change? Can we collectively become comfortable with simplicity and minimalism? Can nothingness become the new black, as they say in fashion circles?
We’ve yet to see Swarovski-crystal Kindle cases or cashmere iPad protectors, but as ebooks penetrate into the echelons of the ultra-wealthy, you may see gold-plated styluses and Kindle chargers with prongs made from polished rock from the top of Mount Everest or Mars. Then again, perhaps we will come to appreciate the austerity of style that the cloud brings. If all your ebooks are a download away in the cloud, why display them ostentatiously?
Cicero said that a home without books is a body without a soul. So what does that mean now as we start to relegate our bookshelves to our garages or sell them off at yard sales? Do we not have souls? What does it mean to our spiritual lives if we stop accumulating physical books, these printed volumes that once graced our lives? Are we going to have vast, ornate Edwardian mahogany bookshelves with just a Kindle or Sony e-reader or Apple iPad by itself on one shelf?
As digital goods, books are just pieces of media now, like TV shows and movies and songs and apps, there on a skeuomorphic, digital simulation of a bookshelf on an iPad. “Skeuomorphic” is the word for a design philosophy that Apple, in particular, believes in. It’s a philosophy of ornamenting the digital with useless and irrelevant aspects of the physical goods they were copied from. For example, on Apple’s iCal product, you can see a leatherette blotter to make the digital calendar seem more like a physical one. Likewise, in Apple’s iBooks app, the whorls and burls of wood on a bookshelf have been replaced by a digital texture.
The move toward digital books democratizes fashion and style. It’s no longer necessary to buy teak bookshelves, no longer necessary to display your books in a place of pride in your home. Bookshelves are being relegated to that great consignment shop in the sky, where you can also find CD towers, videotape cabinets, decorative typewriter-ribbon canisters, and home darkrooms for processing 35mm film.
Of course, on the flip side, doing away with bookshelves is another nail in the coffin for books, as relics of an elite aristocratic age when we judged one another by what we read. As homes lose their bookshelves, books lose their elite status. In fact, we all lose.
Surprisingly, as a culture, we seem to be okay with this. But what do you think?
Google: A Facebook for Books?
When I speak of Reading 2.0, I’m using a metaphor from Silicon Valley. The first release of a software product is Version 1.0, the second is 2.0, and so on.
Reading 1.0 is the experience we’re all familiar with: reading a print book from the title page to the author bio at the back. That experience hasn’t changed much in thousands of years, not even since Gutenberg’s printing press. Reading is still a linear experience, a static experience. Whether you read a clay tablet or a scroll, you read in one direction—from the start to the end of the text.
But now, we’re at the threshold of Reading 2.0, a seismic shift, because with this development, reading is no longer linear, no longer static.
Although the idea of nonlinear, weblike reading was discussed as early as 1945 by Vannevar Bush, a computer theorist at MIT, it wasn’t until the advent of hypertext and the web in the late 1980s and early 1990s that we saw the first glimmering of this new form, where we could jump around within a book or in a collection of them.
Now, we already understand that ebooks can be fluid. Their content can change seamlessly as they’re updated, as the author or the publisher sends down new changes to the text. But more importantly, the texts themselves could be collections of other texts that are constantly changing. Reading could become dynamic.
The reading experience could become more social too. Ebooks allow you to interact with other readers. You can’t look at a print book and see who else is reading it and then tap their names to tweet with them about your favorite plotlines or passages. But you could with ebooks.
With all its cross-linked books, Google may be on the verge of making Reading 2.0 possible. They may do it in a number of ways. But my hope and suggestion is that they do so through an idea I have, which I call “the Facebook for Books.”
You see, I believe there’s ultimately only one book. All books, digital and physical, are part of this one book. No book exists in a vacuum. Even a book of fiction like The Lost Symbol mentions outside references. All books are linked in this tangle of intertwining roots, which you can think of as hyperlinks.
In the future, there’s going to be just one book, a vast book that includes all the others inside it, which I call the Facebook for Books. You’ll be able to start reading from any book and naturally segue into a different one, just by following a link. It could be a bibliographic link or just a link to a book that influenced the author and that’s been annotated as such by a reader like you or me. You will be able to link forward or double-back and keep reading. It’s social networking, if you will, for books.
For this to work, a critical mass of books will have to be digitized. That’s because there’s a network effect, a compounding effect. The more content you get, the more cumulative the connections are between books, and the more intertwined and rich the network becomes. A small network will only have a few books and a few connections, while a rich network will be able to link in more. Having more links provides more pieces of the puzzle, more ways of seeing how one book influences or leads to another. And ultimately, readers will have more interesting reading experiences as they follow all these links.
As a reader, you will have a richer appreciation of a book’s subject matter and different insights from multiple authors—sometimes contradictory—all just a click away and all of which give you a better appreciation of the whole. This kind of deep linking lets authors have a debate right on the page you’re reading, and you get to judge which author or which idea wins. The often-overlooked hyperlink can make this happen. I truly believe that the hyperlink was a twenty-first-century invention that was somehow discovered too early in the twentieth century, an invention we still haven’t managed to fully exploit.
Google is in a great place to make this happen. They know search engines, and they can figure out how to continually process the content of all books to make these hyperlinks, so that all the references between books are intact and up to date.
We can already see hyperlinks in the indexes and footnotes of science journals and nonfiction books, as one book bows its respectful head toward another and as one author acknowledges another. But those are just labels. They’re not yet working hyperlinks. Such bibliographies and footnotes could form the basis of explicit hyperlinks between books, although you can’t click on an entry in an ebook bibliography and go right to the destination. Not yet, at least.