It’s heart-warming to beat Tim O’Reilly in trendiness. Tim just posted an article on Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web.

But simply putting books onto electronic devices is only the beginning. As I’ve said for years, that’s a lot like pointing a camera at a stage play, and calling it a movie. Yes, that’s pretty much what they did in many early movies, but eventually, the tools of production and consumption actually changed the format of what was produced and consumed. Camera angles, pacing, editing techniques, lighting, location shooting, special effects: all these innovations make the movies (and television) of today very different from the earliest movies. YouTube is pushing the envelope even further. Why should books be any different?

Discussing his new Twitter Book, Tim notes:

The web has changed the nature of how we read and learn. Most books still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle. Here, we’ve used a web-like model of standalone pages, each of which can be read alone (or at most in a group of two or three), to impart key points, highlight interesting techniques or the best applications for a given task.

Writing about authoring in PowerPoint, Tim points out:

The idea to write the book in powerpoint came to me while I was thinking about how quickly I write a new talk: I generally use pictures as visual bullets, to remind me about the order of my main points; I know what I want to talk about when I see each picture. And pictures are a memorable, entertaining way to tell a story. All I needed to do, I realized, was to write down some notes equivalent to what I’d be saying if I were giving this as a talk.

My book on Learnscaping was written entirely in PowerPoint.

Tim has more to say about unbooks in the age of the web:

But I like to remind publishers that they are experts in both linking and in crowdsourcing. After all, any substantial non-fiction work is a masterwork of curated links. It’s just that when we turn to ebooks, we haven’t realized that we need to turn footnotes and bibliographies into live links. And how many publishers write their own books? Instead, publishers for years have built effective business processes to discover and promote the talents of those they discover in the wider world! (Reminder: Bloomsbury didn’t write Harry Potter; it was the work of a welfare mom.) But again, we’ve failed to update these processes for the 21st century. How do we use the net to find new talent, and once we find it, help to amplify it?

I don’t exempt O’Reilly from that criticism. While we’ve done many pioneering projects, we haven’t fully lived up to our own vision of the ebook of the future. For example, Safari Books Online, our online library, recognizes that the reference work of the future is far larger than a single book. But we’ve done a poor job of updating the works in that library to be more “web like” in the way I’ve just outlined. It is still primarily a collection of books online. (We’re adding video, more web content, and working to update books to be more link-rich, but we’re not as far along as I’d like.)

Given that O’Reilly Media is one of the most forward-thinking publishers in the world, it’s great to see Tim picking up on the unbook motif.

jay

Donald Clark has posted a wonderful synopsis of Pierre Bayard’s book on books, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

Reading is forgetting
Books have a special status as ‘almost objects of worship’ and non-readers are stigmatised. Yet reading is often non-reading, as we forget most of what we read almost as quickly as it is read. As we forge forward content is forgotten in the wake of memory that disappears behind. Most reading is forgetting. He’s really on to something here. I habitually underline, mark, comment and summarise on the books I read. Yet it is almost taboo to underline, mark and blasphemous to tear out a page or chapter Life is short and books are long. It’s OK to skim, as many books are padded out to conform to the standard £9.99/250 page norm. In fact, for many, the fact that most of what you read will be forgotten, a summary is adequate.

You can’t judge a book by its lover
So reading is not what you think it is. It’s full of deceit, snobbery and false claims. Bayard exposes many of these taboos. Take a leaf out of his book and see reading, not as being synonymous with books, but in all its wonderful variations in terms of style, length, authors and media. New media and self-publishing are tearing apart the myth that reading is synonymous with books. Reading in many ways has freed itself from the tyranny of books.

If you don’t know Donald’s blog, Plan B, you should check it out. It’s one of the best critiques of the learning field you’ll find. I wouldn’t dream of missing a single post.

I’ll note that Bayard is talking about books that are filled with words. Visual books would fare better, at least in the memory department.