I spent yesterday, September 26th, at the Word on the Street Festival, the annual celebration of books and publishing. As always, I saw people crowding around the library, bookstore and publisher displays, pitching their book ideas in the Pitch the Publisher event, listening to authors read from their latest books on the various festival stages, and carrying away shopping bags full of…books. Book culture appears to be alive and flourishing in Halifax, but is traditional book culture fundamentally changing? In his 2007 book provocatively titled The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book), Sherman Young writes:
“For anyone brought up with a 21st C digital mindset, the printed book is an anachronism; books are everything that the new media technologies are not. There is no motion, there is no noise. There is no way to interact with the characters or the story. There is no-one else involved. Reading is a solitary experience. You can’t talk back. It’s just you and the words on the page. And all you can do with those words is read them; apparently there is no other way to engage. For a generation raised on newer media forms, the apparent one-sided conversation of a book defies logic.” (p. 66). He concludes his book with the statement that “the immediate future of the book can be assured (long live the book) by disconnecting the ideas from the object, removing the physical constraints of dead trees and building a future without the codex.” (p. 166).
With the growing popularity of e-books, are we moving into a new book ecosystem…and what will this new ecosystem look like? These are questions we will be discussing in INFO 6070 (Reading and Reading Practices) next term, but I’d welcome your comments now.
I’ve been an ebook reader since 1998. To be honest, the thought of interacting with a book does not hold particular appeal to me. Given the amount of interaction with which we are involved every day with social media sites, I actually like the simplicity of focused reading. Ebooks represent convenience and portability, which is why I tend to choose them for daily reading over print copies. What bothers me about ebooks is that, for the most part, the contents are still based on print technology. Over the summer, for example, I was reading a book on environmental pollutants (beach-side reading, believe it or not…), but I could not access any of the charts and tables that accompanied the text. I was provided simply with the equivalent of “insert table here,” which was very annoying and most unhelpful. In this respect, I suppose that interactivity would be useful, as you could click on a link to the tables or figures if you wanted to see them, then click back to the text. Certainly publishing for ebooks needs to move out of the print mode, but with the growth in the popularity of ebook readers, this is in the works already.