No, the future for books is a return to the imaginative faculty, to the resonance between reader and author that causes the reader’s heart to flutter and his pulse to quicken, which causes him to sympathetically sweat when a zombie crashes onto the page or when a loved character is brutally murdered with a knife through the eye. Movies and TV and video games may win out in terms of production costs and special effects when compared to a humble book, but no movie yet made can let you into its world. Readers inhabit a book. They burrow into Frodo’s hobbit hole and curl up with him for a pot of tea. In contrast, the only way to “read” a video game or movie is when you are not participating in it.
As an example, I’m on an airplane now, heading back to Seattle. As I walk down the aisle to stretch my legs, I see plenty of Kindles. It sometimes seems like there are more Kindles on airplanes than Rollaboards. But even with all the Kindles and iPads, books seem to be outnumbered. On this airplane, at least, there are more laptops and video-game consoles, more people playing games and watching movies. The written word is outnumbered two to one.
When I return to my seat, the kid next to me is playing his video game. He’s utterly absorbed by the blinking dots, hunched over his game like Quasimodo and reacting to the electrons on his screen. It’s reactive. It’s a matter of stimulus and response. And I know this feeling well; I’m no stranger to video games. I know that when you’re absorbed in a game, it’s all-consuming.
But afterward, when the game is turned off, you can reflect, strategize your next steps, and plan ahead. It’s at such times that you really “read” a game. And likewise, the most voracious “readers” of a movie are the fans that obsess about it afterward, who imagine themselves as characters in the movie, or who buy books or director’s cut DVDs afterward to read into the nuances of the movie’s world.
I think this redefinition of “reading” bodes well for the future of books. But it means a shift in thinking. It means that any media experience can be “read” like a book, that there’s no preferential treatment of books over other forms of media, as long as the content is “read” with an active imagination. Because philosophically, I do think the imaginative faculty is important. I couldn’t live without it.
And I think that most of the successful people I know at Amazon, Apple, and Google, as well as among the publishers of the world, are those who are most creative, most imaginative. These are people who “read” into experiences, who don’t just talk to me about what was on TV last night but who imaginatively transplant themselves into the worlds of those TV shows. They’re the kind of people who wonder what it’s like to be a Cylon in Battlestar Galactica, who “read” into a media experience and apply it to their own lives, and who patch in details of the media with their own life experiences to personalize it.
I think any piece of media is capable of such a reading. A movie doesn’t have to be a classic like Citizen Kane. It could be anything, as long as you resonate with it and read into it with your imaginative faculty. Because books demand this form of reading, they’re here to stay for a long time in print or digital form—at least for that select group of people who enjoy imaginative reading.
For such people, books demand to be read. And they demand your attention. And paradoxically, because books by their nature aren’t as visually or auditorily rich as other forms of media, they engage our imaginations more strongly because of our need to patch in details. It’s a wonderful feedback loop: the more we read, the more we need to read and the less satisfied we are by entertainment that panders to our senses but deprives our imaginations. Once a reader is hooked, there’s no way to give up the habit.
As readers who are accustomed to the deep resonance we have come to enjoy when our imaginations are engaged, we’re hooked. And ultimately, because the imagination is so innate, no simple technological silver bullet can be applied to books or ebooks to make people read more. It doesn’t work that way. Reading—whether you’re reading a book or “reading” a movie—is a personal act of volition, of attention, of mindfulness. Reading comes from within. It takes energy. But it’s also so very rewarding. Reading is a gift that keeps giving.
At least, as long as you’re able to pay attention to what you’re reading.
Bookmark: Attention Spans
As retailers move toward tablets to let you consume all kinds of media, we’re finding that our focus often gets diluted and our attention spans get—what? What was I saying? Hold on, let me check my email and do a quick tweet.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve paid more than my fair share of dollars toward Apple’s billions in app sales. And I’ve done this with the drawback that when I do read on my iPad, I often find myself bouncing from the ebook application to the browser or to Facebook or a bunch of other applications. And the single-threaded reading experience that I get with dedicated e-readers or even print books is lost.
The reading I do on my iPad is more like snacking than eating a full meal. That wonderful faculty I have in my brain as I read, the way that my temporal and parietal lobes light up as I explore what-ifs and puzzle out the layers of meaning in the book I’m reading—well, on a tablet, those lights grow dim, and I lose focus. And I’m a fairly disciplined guy, so it’s not a matter of my own susceptibilities. These multifunction devices, which will be a core part of our future, engender a less focused mode of reading.
This is problematic, because as your mind wanders like a moth at a carnival after sunset, bumble-flitting from booth to booth, from light to seedy neon light, it may never return to where it began. Now, this flittering has the side benefit that if we can channel ourselves properly while reading, we’ll be able to use other applications as adjuncts to look up words or to go online and find out the hidden meanings or subtexts. But ideally all this functionality would be seamlessly present in the reading experience itself, so we wouldn’t run the risk of losing our place in the reading or our train of thought.
So we either need better applications that keep us rooted to what we’re reading, or we need to police ourselves—perhaps with lockouts that we apply to ourselves that prohibit us from wandering out of the book to check our email or surf the web or only allow us to do this once an hour while reading. Perhaps future software updates for the iPad will allow teachers to lock devices down into ebook-only mode or give students intermittent access to the non-ebook parts of the device. Lockdown controls like this would probably be useful for a lot of adults I know too.
Lockdown controls aren’t the only thing we could benefit from. I think we can all benefit from a brush-up course on digital hygiene, on learning how to focus. And I think we’re going to learn just how important social networks are. A 2012 study by the Association of Magazine Media showed that Gen Y was reading more magazines than ever, although this reading was tied to an increase in the use of social networking sites. So let’s face it, ebooks are going social, and it’s going to be a strange symbiosis, like that between a hummingbird and an orchid: one without the other would likely not last. Digital books will form an unlikely alliance with social networks, and they’ll both survive the changing tides of fashion and the flighty whims of technology.
Still, one of the reasons I adore dedicated e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook, as opposed to tablets like the iPad, is that they keep your attention on an ebook as you read. Like with a print book, you’ve got a dedicated reading experience with no distractions—no buzzing lights or videos or ads for meeting singles online or tweets to respond to. I worry when reading experiences start to include too much distraction and context shifting. As someone sensitive to media ecology, that’s where I draw the line. I think all of us, our children included, should be encouraged toward dedicated experiences, not distracting ones.