Burning the Page

by Jason Merkoski

  For books, it takes longer to encode an idea than to decode it; in other words, it takes longer to write a sentence than it does to read it. These two sentences, for example, were started at a Chinese restaurant in Albuquerque, improved on while driving to a chile pepper festival near the Mexican border, reassembled a week later during a terrible rainstorm, and edited four months later on an airplane.

  Writing is complex, even though the basic units of writing are comparatively simple. We have twenty-six letters, twice as many when you factor in lower and upper cases, plus a handful of common punctuation symbols. That’s about eighty different symbols, which doesn’t seem like a lot to work with. But consider DNA. Although it only has four basic nucleotides, or four symbols, these encode for all life on this planet, in all its diversity. So writing is complex. With all this complexity, there’s a lot of room for error in between the encoding and decoding of this information.

  So why do we use books?

  Books are good for more than being a barrier against the outside world when you need anonymity and good for more than propping up the occasional table or chair. Books strike a happy balance between price, cost to produce, and efficiency of communication. Pound for pound, few information sources are cheaper than a book. Sources that are cheaper (such as pamphlets) tend not to last as long as a book, so when you amortize the cost of production over time, a book is the clear winner. And because so many books are produced in one print run, the costs tend to be low.

  There are more expensive forms of information transmission, but few of us can afford a polymathic private tutor like Pangloss from Candide to follow us around. Besides, books offer an improvement on a private tutor because you can read and learn at your own pace, as fast or as slow as you please. Even in a college environment with perhaps twenty students to one teacher, you still can’t push a fast-forward button on the teacher to skip the slow parts of a lecture, unless it’s a prerecorded lesson. Even then, no visual or audio cues indicate when you get to an interesting part. But you can easily skim through a book to get to the cool parts.

  Books are priceless. Without them, we’re little more than monkeys who have learned to wear expensive wristwatches and designer sunglasses. We’ve been elevated into an order above all other animals by books, by language, and by story. Books can give us unattainable orients to yearn for. Books can inspire us toward greatness. Books can give us moral guidance or connect with us in ways that even our friends and families can’t. I’m sure you have a few prized books that are almost part of you, part of your identity, books that are worth a tremendous amount to you even though they may be scuffed up and battered or dog-eared and underlined.

  Books are essential. And it’s important that they don’t go away.

  But surely we can improve on books, now that we’re moving into the digital age. If we could redesign reading, what would it look like?

  Books serve many purposes. Sometimes we read for entertainment, and sometimes we read to learn. Sometimes we read for distraction or inspiration or edification or to fight the sheer boredom of a long plane trip. But if I had to distill books down to one core cultural purpose, it would be to teach. Books hold the repository of human knowledge, and then some. Even an innocent romance or mystery encodes social mores, cultural stereotypes, details about a time and a place, and an author’s insights into the world. The primary cultural function of a book is to teach, and other functions are simply stylized elaborations and innovations on this core function.

  So if books, at their core, are about teaching and learning, experiencing and enjoying, then the best redesign of a book would leverage experience itself. Consider, for example, the experience of walking with your dad through the forest as a kid, as he points out all the trees and their names. As you taste some of the cranberries and blueberries growing on the shrubs, he tells you how they grow and what they’re used for. You’re likely to learn and remember more from a genuine experience like this than you would from a dry, uninviting text.

  Perhaps linear line-by-line reading as we know it will fade to a quaint pastime like butter churning or horseback riding once holographic learning is developed—I’m thinking of a Star Trek-ian innovation like the Holodeck.

  In that TV show, the Holodeck was a space the size of a large theater populated by holograms—projections of people, places, and objects—with which crew members could interact. If books could be translated into Holodeck-style experiences, you would not read a book by linearly regarding one row of text after another, line by line, page by page, but by directly experiencing it.

  Instead of reading about the characters in a romance novel, you would be one of them and interact with the others. The novel would be staged and scripted, and you would be a character in the script wearing period-style clothing. Imagine how history lessons, not to mention global ethics, would be revitalized if you had to participate in a simulation of World War II during school instead of reading about it as a series of dry events and facts. Imagine how many more students might take an interest in algebra or topology if they could experience a Möbius strip by walking on its surface.

  That said, Holodeck-style experiential learning isn’t on our immediate technological horizon. In the short term, the future of ebooks might look a lot like an evolved version of Apple’s own iBook product. With tables, 3D rotating images, embedded multimedia, and multiple typographic options, it certainly engages the eyes and ears. Especially on a device the size of an iPad. I think this is great, although sometimes such multimedia enhancements are distracting enough to take readers away from the main points of the text. Sort of like a PowerPoint presentation with too many bells and whistles and too much clip art.

  Experiential reading may well become the next stage in reading’s redesign—for certain kinds of books, at least. I think the only time reading will still be preferred in the traditional linear line-by-line style is when it’s no longer used for teaching purposes. There are some palaces of the imagination too tenuous to build from celluloid, some stretches of the mind for which no map suffices but the reader’s own personality. Some books need to be presented in their original form, and any additional visual or auditory or virtual details would be an imposition, an interpretation. Creating an experiential, Holodeck-style simulation of a book requires one or more people to script the book, and that scripting locks the book into just one interpretation.

  Indeed, we see this with movies now. There have been many remakes of classic plays like Hamlet, each subtly different, owing to each director’s interpretation. Such interpretation isn’t just stylistic or related to which actors are cast in the starring roles; sometimes whole scenes are cut. At this point, the play is no longer true to the original. The only way to understand the author’s original intent is to read it in the original line-by-line form yourself or to sample multiple directors’ takes, hoping that the author’s intent corresponds to the average interpretation of all the variants and remakes.

  Strange as it sounds, it may be impossible to experience certain kinds of books in any way other than a line-by-line read. Neither Franz Kafka nor Jorge Luis Borges will yield to the virtual, because their books are too much like poetry.

  You can’t adequately experience James Joyce’s Ulysses as a movie or a video game. You have to be bludgeoned with it as a book, overwhelmed with the magnificent, inchoate details of Dublin. Paradoxically, the only way to read this book, which takes place in the span of one day, is to read it over a lifetime.

  There’s no computer graphics studio in Hollywood that can create an ancient monster from an H. P. Lovecraft story, because the monster only lives inside the reader’s imagination. To show the face of the lurking horror, the unspeakable dread, would be to tell a different story, and not the one which Lovecraft intended.

  Of course, this is just as true for ebooks as for traditional print books. And that’s why reading will never be replaced, although it certainly will change.

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  We can’t possibly kno
w with any accuracy what the future of reading will be like. But that won’t stop me from guessing. I think ebooks will one day evolve into something like a movie and a video game combined with the authoritative intent of an astute storyteller. I can suggest that it will be wrought and wired so deeply in our brains that the emotions we perceive from the author will be genuine as far as we’re concerned.

  We’ll feel genuine terror or elation, and we’ll be transported into another state entirely, half crafted and half real, as any good story should be. After all, the best stories are half true, half how they should have been, and half cloud. I know that doesn’t add up, and that’s as it should be. The part in the clouds is where you find yourself imagining and wondering what-if thoughts. It’s where your temporal and parietal lobes measure out ideas and your brain’s limbic system responds with affect and emotion.

  The books we read now are laboriously constructed. Their authors are sensitive to rhythm and rhyme, sonance and sibilance, rising and falling action, and intricate symbolism that sometimes takes a team of scholars to decode. We read these books because we understand the codes and conventions. It’s like an author carefully wraps something up for us, a present that we subsequently unwrap, and the act of unwrapping is reading itself. We’re taught from an early age what the codes are and how to decode them.

  Over time, I think a different form of book will eventually emerge, one that’s more rooted in the mind itself. Just as authors type or dictate content now, I think the future might hold some sort of high-speed plug that goes into an author’s head, some way of taking an author’s imagination and converting it directly into a digital format. The same high-speed cables will connect you to the author’s original experience. The act of encoding and decoding will become relegated to artistic flourishes, and we’ll be able to participate in the more immediate action of the author’s own mind and flights of fancy.

  The firsthand experience of life itself will come through unmediated by the encoding and decoding that we currently use in books. Words are often the worst culprits in this. They are ornaments that often get in the way of the book. Like shifting, ambivalent snakes, words are capable of so much suggestion and meaning, but they squirm when you try to pin them down.

  I anticipate instead that we will be connected mind-to-mind to the lived experiences of an author—such as the experience of nervous anticipation the next time Jeff Bezos stands on a stage to announce a new Kindle, or the terrifying experience of Felix Baumgartner jumping from a balloon in the stratosphere.

  Whether they’re more inky or phosphorescent in nature, books will follow the human spirit as it endeavors into the unknown. And though books have been relegated behind video games and movies and TV shows for their share of leisure time in America—the average person spends two hours watching TV every day, which is twenty times more than an average person reads—the art of reading will continue, although its form will surely change. Books are being replaced by ebooks, and in turn, ebooks will be replaced by another seemingly science-fictional innovation, but reading in some form is here to stay.

  And though the average American only reads seven minutes a day, and that number is dwindling, I’ll take it. I’ll happily trade an ounce of blood for a moment with a great book.

  Bookmark: Indexes

  Indexes are a part of the book where ebooks suffer the most. Textbooks and most nonfiction books often have a section at the end where someone intimate with the text has scoured the book for its main subjects and created an index with the page numbers of when those subjects are mentioned. The best indexes are done by hand and are sometimes as lovingly long as a chapter in the book itself.

  One of my favorite nonfiction books, the aforementioned The Road to Xanadu, is great in part for its index, because it lists such subjects as icebergs and water snakes, opium fumes and alligator holes, green lightning and the horns of the moon. The diverse list of subjects ranges from bacon and beans to demonology and to the palace of Kublai Khan itself, from slime fishes to ice blink, and from Neoplatonism to the noise made by earthquakes.

  The current generation of ebooks ignores all the wisdom inside indexes like that one. True, many ebooks have indexes tucked away at the end, but they’re rarely integrated with the text of the ebook. And they’re not often hyperlinkable, allowing the reader to jump right to a topic. They often just list page numbers instead, which makes no sense, as many e-readers don’t even display page numbers! This is a shame, because when you search for a word within an ebook, your Kindle or Nook should be able to use the index to help find exactly what you’re looking for. Instead of just looking for whenever a word appears inside the text, which is how e-readers do searches now, they should give first-class treatment to words in the index, rank those results higher.

  I think we’ll see this improve over time, as innovator-entrepreneurs build out the index feature. Some genres of content lend themselves better to having great indexes—travel guides come to mind. It’s hard to mourn the loss of an index—it’s sort of like grieving for an Excel spreadsheet—but the index is just as important for ebooks as for print books. And unlike print indexes, digital indexes can benefit from innovation.

  After all, it’s not hard to imagine a project that crowd-sources the creation of indexes. Such indexes could become collaborative experiences, ways of building community. We see similar bottom-up contributions on Wikipedia or on specialty wiki sites on the web, where fans lovingly edit content to help future fans. Wikis for Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Battlestar Galactica assiduously index each episode of every season’s TV show, introducing the places where new characters enter or old ones leave. The same could easily be done for ebooks, once e-reading platforms start to open up and allow collaborative access.

  That said, I’m not sure indexes will integrate in a fluid, seamless way with the Holodeck-style experiential books I wrote about earlier in this chapter. Earlier, I mused about which books can (and can’t) be made into immersive, experiential ones. As I said, I’m partial to the works of Borges and Coleridge, and I don’t think they’ll ever translate well into rich multimedia experiences—but what about you? Do you have any ineffable books, inscrutable plays, or downright diabolical short stories that you would feel proud to recommend online as examples of great writing that can never be made into immersive experiences?

  http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/8.html

  Igniting Readers at Last!

  How will readers engage with one another in the future? How will they engage with authors? And how far away is a future of direct reader-to-reader and reader-to-author engagement?

  Engagement takes many forms. For example, my aunt mails my dad a box of mystery books to read every month, books that she’s gone through and wants to share with him. My best friend burns audiobooks onto CDs and mails them to me. My girlfriend loaned me her favorite book when we first started dating as something of a test—as a way of gauging my personality by whether I liked the book. The act of sharing a book is a close connection, often as close as a touch and perhaps more intimate.

  You can share digital books, but the experience is less warm than when you hand over your favorite paperback. You won’t connect with your friend or loved one over the same cover and talk about the same dog-eared pages.

  Digital book lending is swift and soulless right now. At least two retailers offer this feature. It’s a testament to Barnes & Noble that they were the first to offer this, that they understand the connection one reader has with another through a loved book that’s shared between them—because it’s Barnes & Noble, after all, that encourages people to get together in their stores and read books on comfy chairs and that hosts book discussion groups that gather like-minded friends of the written word.

  The digital experience of book sharing has a long way to go, and it’s a bit crippled now. You get a soulless email from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and then the book magically appears on your device the next time you’re within wireless range. Like much in the world of digital book
s, it’s a bit clinical, designed by technologists instead of humanists. But it works, with the benefit that you no longer have to worry about your friend holding on to the book for years and neglecting to return it to you.

  When I first started dating my girlfriend and she loaned me her favorite novel, I accidentally ripped the cover off it while reading. That almost ended our relationship right then and there! With ebooks, there’s no damage and no worry. The ebook boomerangs back to you after two weeks. That’s a lifesaver and a relationship saver.

  Ebook sharing demands to be more personalized, though. It should be as personal as sitting with friends in a café or someone’s living room. Ebook sharing needs a major innovation that breaks through the glass of Kindles and iPads, shattering the wall between readers. This needs to be something immersive, like perhaps video windows, to provide joint experiences where all the readers are in the same room. This is what we’re really looking for when we share a book with a loved one—a connection with that person. We send the book’s author out as an emissary and hope to connect over his or her words.

  In a way, we need to combine book sharing with book clubs.

  The great potential for ebooks is that they can give you the opportunity to share and discuss a given book not just with your nearest neighbors, but with people in distant cities and even distant countries. You’ll have an opportunity to talk to them within the book, face to face perhaps, like with the iPad’s front-facing camera. You’ll have opportunities to become part of social networks that will emerge from the book itself after being inspired by it.

  Perhaps Amazon or Apple will acquire a social network of their own and create “channels” within the network, one for each book. This way, there will be a conduit for discussion built right into the reading experience. Perhaps these channels will be moderated by passionate enthusiasts of each book. Members will contribute discussion topics, and perhaps there will even be opportunities for the author herself to jump in and become part of the book circle, available for question-and-answer sessions.