Expanding The Book
The digital revolution has arrived
The digital revolution has many book lovers wondering whether ink on paper has any future in an electronic world. Will the book, and all its pleasures, go the way of the horse and buggy?
Not likely, claim the experts at MIT. Books are about an intellectual experience, they say, one that will endure regardless of the medium of delivery. Electronic books and traditional books can coexist, complementing one another and expanding access to knowledge, literature, and entertainment.
“There isn’t any reason why you can’t have both,” says Prof. William Mitchell, dean of architecture and planning, who points out that print and electronic media have different strengths. “If you just want to read a text, ink on paper is hard to beat. On the other hand, if you want to interact with the author, search in complicated ways, or crosslink to related texts, then an electronic version is better.”
“Books are wonderful things–why not expand the book through digital access?” asks literature professor Pete Donaldson, who says the future might hold a new form of reading that combines print and digital. “You might still curl up with a paperback, but if you read a passage that interested you, you could speak it aloud and a computer at your side would instantly offer related information–footnotes, background, or even movie clips.”
Explosion of the book
Traditional books will be around for a long time to come, experts agree, because they’re sturdy, portable, and don’t need batteries. But electronic books promise to open up a whole new world centered around the rich intellectual experience of books.
“We are not seeing so much the transformation of the book as the explosion of the book,” says Roger Hurwitz, research scientist in artificial intelligence, who sees books expanding beyond traditional confines. Free of the limits of a bound volume, new narrative forms can entertain and educate in amazing new ways.
It’s the interactivity of electronic texts that brings their intellectual content to life. By interacting with the author, with other readers, and even with the story itself, we can greatly expand what it means to read a book.
In her book Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray, senior research scientist in advanced educational computing, explores such new forms of electronic narrative, from hypertext fiction where the reader determines the plot sequence to virtual reality role-playing games where the “reader” enters the story as one of its characters. Such active audience participation, says Murray, amounts to an invitation to join in the creative process.
“People have consumed genre fiction to such a degree that they can now improvise it with one another in these make-believe on-line worlds,” she says. “This is not the death of literature–this is a sign of a highly literate population.”
Murray compares the advent of electronic text with the invention of the printing press in 1455. “We could be poised to make another leap of collective intelligence,” she says. “The printing press helped us to be smarter than we were before because we could encompass more information in an organized manner. Once again in human history, we have a new, more capacious, more plastic medium.”
Primitive stages
Murray admits the technology she writes about is still in its primitive stages, which is why it seems awkward in comparison with the simplicity of a book. “The book is a mature form that took centuries to evolve,” she points out. “We take for granted print conventions like paragraphing, chapter headings, and page numbering, but similar conventions for electronic text have yet to be developed.”
Perhaps no place at the Institute has explored those new conventions as boldly as the MIT Press, which broke new ground two years ago by simultaneously publishing City of Bits, by William Mitchell, on paper and on the World Wide Web. The results, both intellectual and economic, were overwhelmingly positive.
“I’ve written lots of books before, but I’ve never had the same relationship with an audience as I did with readers of City of Bits,” notes Mitchell. “I was astonished to get perspectives from 11-year-olds, 80-year-olds, and people in Indonesia, China, and Australia.”
“City of Bits sold twice as many paper copies as we expected it to, and we credit the exposure it got on the Web,” says Frank Urbanowski, director of the MIT Press, who admits the experiment was risky. No one knew whether people would buy a book they could read free on-line.
The lesson learned, according to the MIT Press, is that electronic publishing is not a replacement for conventional ink on paper, but rather a complement to it. “I don’t expect one publishing protocol to replace everything else,” says Urbanowski. “There will be room for everything–paper, electronic, print-on-demand, or whatever else you can imagine.”
On Topic: innovation+inventions, technology+society
