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We need to kill the book to save books. Now relax. I'm not suggesting burning books, nor replacing them with electronic gizmos in some paperless future of fable and fantasy. Instead, I'm merely arguing that the book is an outdated means of communicating information. And thanks to the searchable, connected internet, books could be so much more.
Yet efforts to update the book are hampered because, culturally, we give extreme reverence to the form for the form's sake. We hold books holy: children are taught there is no better use of time than reading a book. Academics perish if they do not publish. We tolerate censors regulating and snipping television but would never allow them to black out books. We even ignore the undeniable truth that too many books, and far too many bestsellers, are pap or crap. All this might seem to be the medium's greatest advantage: respect. But that is what is holding books back from the progress that could save and spread the gospel of the written word....
....Today, any medium that defines itself by its medium is in trouble: newspapers, broadcasting and books must be valued for their substance over their shape. Is a book bound paper? Or is it the ideas and information within? If there are better ways to share knowledge, why should it suffer the limitations of the page?
Books are frozen in time, yet in digital form, they can live in never-ending editions. Short of footnotes and bibliographies, books have little connection to related sources and debates; online, the simple link solves that. You cannot link straight to an idea in a book, nor search for it - though Google could fix that, if only publishers would let them. Hear Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book in the current Library Journal: "Parts of books will reference parts of other books. Books will be woven together out of components in remote databases and servers." And Kevin Kelly: "In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages." - link
Personally, I cannot wait until the various creative mediums begin to fundamentally converge. The digital age turns information into raw material again from which new vageries of thought can be sculpted.
My ultimate dream in this world is to get my thoughts into print, whether that ends up being fiction or non I am not yet sure, only thing I know is that I have wanted that to happen for as long as I could read sentences. But why do I want this? Some internet blogs are becoming as widely read as newspapers, many computer games are blossoming into worlds which the very best 'traditional' fiction author would be proud of creating. The book doesn't need to be the highest prize realm of imagination anymore.... Things are ready to change.
If a digital book was released tomorrow whose pages were paper thin, within which a thousand digitised books could be stored and called up at will, then the days of the paper companion would be ended. Music cassettes never killed the vinyl, and MP3 has not yet succeeded the music CD, yet in time the new mediums tend to overwhelm the old, and the old mediums become new worlds in themselves (DJ mixing comes to mind). How long has the book left before it is nought but a collector's item; a novelty? What new forms of fiction can you imagine arising from the pages of a fully digital, interactive, multi-media book?
The internet is humanity's new favourite thought stream. Does the future of the book have to reside there? -
Your thoughts are already in print, thats how I hear them...besides, what will I read at the commode? certainly not a magazine!
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CommentAuthoralexanderj
- CommentTimeJun 9th 2006
I think I'm going to miss the good old books... Everything is changing so fast nowadays - what will happen to the cosy giant libraries?
See the link? Go for it!
http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?section=platforms&id=1367 -
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