But sometimes these links are more implicit than explicit. As great as William Faulkner is, for example, his writing would be nothing if not for Shakespeare and the King James Bible. In fact, cultural and literary references abound in books. This book, for example, tips its hat to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Battlestar Galactica, Samuel Beckett, Socrates, Neal Stephenson, and so many others.
But as I say, there is only one book, the book of all human culture. It should be possible to seamlessly switch between books, as opportunity permits. For example, in an early chapter I wrote how the product code names from Kindle came from characters in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. It should be possible to let readers seamlessly switch over to reading that book, right here, in the middle of this one. That’s how web browsing works, after all. If a book is compelling enough—as I hope this one is—then readers will come back after their jaunts and sojourns into other books.
Not only are all books connected, but so also is all culture. It should be possible to create a link from this book into a related Battlestar Galactica episode—or at least to a clip from it to show its relationship to the current content you’re reading. There should be a hypertextual overlay across all media that lets a consumer flip from book to movie to comic book and back again, as often as the reader pleases, because there is only one book, the book of all human culture. And let me tell you, it’s a great book. But it’s so long that you’ll never finish reading it in your lifetime.
This “one book” is something that we, as readers, would enjoy having, although retailers like Apple and Amazon might object to this—especially if retailers stand to make less money by selling subscriptions to the one book than they would by selling individual books. Publishers might also object to this one book, because they might not want to link their books to one another’s.
That’s because publishers care about their brands. But let’s be honest: a publisher’s brand means little these days. Do you want to buy a Random House book, or are you more in the mood for a HarperCollins title? Is that really the question you ask yourself when you’re inside a bookstore? No. You look for a book that’s interesting, an author you love, or a subject or genre you want to explore, and you often have no idea who the publisher is. The one book I envision would allow this exploration to happen.
Reading 2.0, as I describe it, would give you a conversation with the book and with other readers, as well. For example, let’s say you’re a Harry Potter fan. You’ve finished all the books but still want to read more. What if you could continue reading about Harry and Voldemort? The feature I’m describing would let you continue reading stories written by others as fan fiction or essays about the Harry Potter series and its cultural significance. Linked together as one book, they’d all immediately available, just one page turn away.
Linked together into one vast networked book, just like pages in the World Wide Web, networked books can inform one another. Ideas within books could be related and linked and commented upon. The comments can live on, as can the paths other people take through the books. Maybe you’ll find someone who has interesting reading habits, and you’ll follow the paths they take in the same way that you might subscribe now to someone’s blog feed.
In the same way that YouTube personalities now video-blog about the latest trends, there might be networked book mavens or rock-star book readers you want to follow. Readers can become agents and sleuths and leave inky footsteps behind them as they roam through millions of books. We can follow each other’s trails, like veins of copper or maybe gold.
Google will figure out how to monetize all the world’s books, in the same way they already make money from you, whether or not you explicitly pay them for anything. You’re a gold mine of data to Google, and they already mine your browsing history and chats and every email you care to send or receive using Gmail. They’re creating a genome about you and about everyone else. And of course, yes, they’re going to use this data for inevitable advertising purposes, which, after all, is how Google makes most of its money.
But if you’re willing to overlook the fact that Big Brother won’t be a politician but an ad man and that he’ll have the face of Google, and you’re willing to experiment with the future as an early adopter, then you should take a chance on Google. Because the future of reading belongs to Reading 2.0. And as hard as it may be to see it now, Google seems to be in the best position to build that future.
Not only do they have about the same number of ebooks available as Apple and Amazon and other retailers, but according to a legal affidavit they submitted as part of a recent court case, they have also scanned in twelve million volumes as part of the Google Book project, and they add five thousand more books a day. Google has digitized more of human culture than any other retailer or library. And when it comes to creating a rich network of books, it’s the breadth and depth of content that matter.
And you, as a reader, are the one who benefits the most.
You’ll get all the books you ever wanted to read in one endless, insatiable buffet. You’ll be able to skip and dance from book to book. As it is now, the only textual links in ebooks come from dictionary or Wikipedia overlays, which are a good start but insufficient to encompass the majesty of all human exuberance, art, creation, and imagination. You’ll get all books in one reading experience, and if Google is behind this, it might even be free—except, of course, for pesky ads on the bottom of every page.
Bookmark: Book Discovery
How do you find the next book to read?
A better discovery tool than browsing will likely emerge, one that is based a lot on recommendation engines such as those used by Netflix. These sophisticated engines average the kinds of movies that you like to watch, based on your own habits, with those of other Netflix customers and then blend all these viewing habits together to come up with recommendations. This will happen for ebooks too. Hopefully, these recommendation engines will work as well as the savants who run used bookstores who can zero in on exactly the best book for you just by chatting with you and getting to know you.
Some book discovery services like Goodreads and LibraryThing use individually written reviews as the basis of recommendations, but these suffer from one deep shortcoming: well-promoted books get a lot of reviews, and older or under-advertised books get few reviews. Just because a book is old doesn’t mean it isn’t great. But if a book doesn’t get many reviews, the tacit assumption is that the book isn’t worth reading—which may not be true. A truly democratic book-recommendation engine could automatically review and rate all books, giving Fifty Shades of Grey just as much attention as a hidden gem like A Voyage to Arcturus, one of my favorite novels.
Such a book-discovery system should look at the text of a book as the basis for making recommendations. This would democratize the process and let the text speak for itself. It would allow neglected books to shine and put overpromoted books in their place.
With a democratic book-discovery system, readers looking for a particular niche of content could find hidden gems based on an algorithmic analysis of an author’s style, gender, and time period; by the kinds of tables or equations inside the book or the places mentioned; by measures of the vocabulary used or ratios of adjectives to nouns; by the percentage of functional words like “of,” “to,” and “in”; by sentence length and paragraph count; by dependent clauses and dangling participles; by parentheticals and punctuation; by the use of curses, colors, and capitalized words; by the amount of dialogue and number of dashes; by reading-grade level and density of the text; by the cast of characters and the kinds of plotlines; by the use of footnotes and sentence fragments; by alliteration, sibilance, rhyme, and rhetoric; and finally, by quantifying the subjective, emotional experience of reading a book.