Future of Reading
Wired, May 27, 2009

Books are the last bastion of the old business model—the only major medium that still hasn’t embraced the digital age. Publishers and author advocates have generally refused to put books online for fear the content will be Napsterized. And you can understand their terror, because the publishing industry is in big financial trouble, rife with layoffs and restructurings. Literary pundits are fretting: Can books survive in this Facebooked, ADD, multichannel universe?

To which I reply: Sure they can. But only if publishers adopt Wark’s perspective and provide new ways for people to encounter the written word. We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading.

Every other form of media that’s gone digital has been transformed by its audience. Whenever a newspaper story or TV clip or blog post or white paper goes online, readers and viewers begin commenting about it on blogs, snipping their favorite sections, passing them along. The only reason the same thing doesn’t happen to books is that they’re locked into ink on paper.

…which gets me to thinking about interactive un-books.

Since unbooks are intended to be continuously revised and printed on demand, why not include reader commentary directly in the printed text?

jay

Finnish poet and literary scholar Teemu Manninen on unbooks and more. Excerpt:

Sometimes I like to imagine that the papernet could represent a return to pre-print ideas of written communication, where important texts were compiled into ‘commonplace books’, or personal, annotated anthologies. They were singular objects made by their users to fit their personal needs. Text and authorship were malleable, pliant, and much more organic than in our time. What if the poetry books of the future were like that: ‘paper ipods’, or anthologies that readers could themselves compile and print?

Read the article.

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

Some very interesting experiments by Russell Davies.

The unbook process, originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

A couple of people have asked how unbooks differ from wikis. That’s a great question and led to some reflection and a conversation with my friend Alan Smith (Thanks Alan!) which yielded a few insights.

The top line: Unbooks and wikis are similar in some ways but different in others.

Similarities: Both wikis and unbooks:

1) Are subject to constant and continuous change.

2) Involve communities who are interested in developing content or topic areas.

3) Can have multiple authors.

4) Have multiple defined roles within the community, i.e., reader, author, editor, etc.

Differences:

1) A wiki community is centered around online content in the form of hyperlinked web pages, while an unbook community is centered around printed content in the form of a book.

2) The number of pages in a wiki is conceptually unlimited, while the number of pages in an unbook is limited by its presence in the physical world. The limits may vary but my self-imposed limit is around 400 pages. This forces constant winnowing of the content to a finite set.

3) Because of the size limitation, an unbook’s online content has a tendency to greatly exceed the printed content. This forces more rigor into the editorial process for the printed content. The online content supplements and reinforces the ideas in the book, and also forces change in the book over time. The result is that the unbook is a tightly edited, up-to-date summary of what can be found on the web.

4) A wiki does not have a linear narrative while an unbook does: Before a physical book can be printed the order of its pages must be determined.

5) An unbook has natural offshoots (the physical objects) where the content is frozen in time. This allows one to take a historical look at an unbook in a different way than a wiki. In a wiki, you can look at the evolution of individual pages but it’s difficult to have an “entire snapshot” of the wiki at a particular instant in time.

6) A wiki can include motion and video while an unbook can only point to such things — the print media has constraints. These constraints can be valuable and are well-known: The unbook needs no electicity and never goes down. It can be archived for thousands of years. When reading an unbook one is less subject to interruption by IM, email, dings and beeps, etc.

7) I suppose the primary difference is one of intentions and expectations.

An unbook is a narrative object: a developing account that may change significantly over time, like a children’s story that is told and retold with additions and changes by multiple authors. Like a story an unbook has a clear beginning and end, although those things might change over time.

A wiki is a map object: a virtual space that can be searched, explored and navigated in various ways. A wiki, like a physical space, has many starting and ending points. You can enter a wiki many ways and there is no “end” to a wiki.

These are just one person’s thoughts. I hope you will add your thoughts and comments to this interesting thread.