THE FUTURE OF READING

posted by James Reel

    About three months ago, Sony unveiled its newest supposedly revolutionary gadget, which it calls the Sony Reader. This is the latest variation on the e-book, a portable electronic device that can download, store and display thousands and thousands of text pages, until the battery dies. (Let’s hope Sony Reader batteries are easier to replace or recharge than the iPod’s.)
    Various iterations of the e-book have been around for years, but the technology has never caught on. Perhaps the Sony Reader has overcome the gadget’s many inadequacies, but I doubt that I’ll be investing one anytime soon. An essay I wrote in the late 1990s, at the height of extravagant claims for the inevitable primacy of electronic storage and display over the traditional book, is now a bit dated, but I still hold to these near-Luddite opinions:

          HOWEVER MUCH NOISE anti-intellectuals and bookburners make, they never have the last word.
In the year 415, a powerful Roman redneck named Cyrillus ordered a Christian rabble to lynch the pagan philosopher Hypatia. After nearly three more decades of failing to win anybody's Mr. Congeniality contest, Cyrillus himself succumbed in 444. A bishop of Alexandria eulogized the old bastard in remarkable terms: "At last this odious man is dead. His departure causes his survivors to rejoice, but is bound to distress the dead. They will not be long in becoming fed up with him and sending him back to us. Therefore, place a very heavy stone on his tomb so that we will not run the risk of seeing him again, even as a ghost."
That's my favorite anecdote from Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (Viking, 1996). Manguel has little to say about the future of reading, but the very act of retrieving that anecdote tells us much about the resilience of the book against an onslaught of electronic innovations.
When I went searching for that lovely eulogy, I couldn't remember the names of the principals involved, so the volume's index was no use. I did, however, recall reading the passage at the top of a left-hand page a bit more than halfway through the book. With a few pageflips, I found the spot.
It would have been much more difficult to locate the story onscreen. Because I couldn't recall any useful keywords, the software's "find" mechanism would have been as useless as the book's index. And because each online chapter would be one long page of scrolling text, I'd have no visual memory of the anecdote's location.
For those of us who return to texts with only vague notions of what we seek, the book remains the most accomodating random-access storage device. Its strength lies in its physical limitation--the text's segmentation into pages , which fence off blocks of words into manageable little realms defined by "top" and "bottom," "left" and "right," "before" and "after," "crisp" and "stained" and "dogeared." It's like getting your bearings in the American Southwest: You may not know your precise coordinates, but you define your place in relation to the mountains ahead, the mesa to the left, and the sage-choked plain behind.
By comparison, an onscreen search is no more scenic than a Kansas country road. When your keyword pops up in obviously the wrong passage, there's no need to linger; clicking with annoyance on "find next" resumes the quest instantly and whips you to the next monotonous field of words without context.
With a book, even failure can be rewarding. You expect your visual search to be inefficient, so you conduct it with greater patience and an open mind. The eye, as it skims down a page, continually snags on the unexpected and the half-remembered. You may not find the passage you seek, but at least you are enriched by the distractions along the way.
Now, the computer is undeniably the vehicle of choice for rapid, no-frills delivery of a narrow range of information. Newspapers, magazines and reference volumes don't stand a chance against the Internet and CD-ROMs. The computer user, like the harem eunuch, knows that certain advantages fall to the swift and sterile.
When we're lucky, we can obtain just the right nugget of knowlege in less time than it would take to phone a reference librarian. But too often we are crushed beneath the wheels of the latest Web search engine. Our amateurish queries return a deluge of close-but-not-quite-right citations--an infoblitz so intimidating that we give up after the first 10 dead-end links.
Yet how much easier it seems to go blundering through some weighty tome off the shelf--the 3,400 pages of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, perhaps. Gibbon is finite, fringed by endpapers and enclosed by covers. The Internet has no comparable boundaries; we are more readily frightened by its mass of information, and more readily outraged by its omissions.
And we are more quickly defeated by its anti-linearity. If you try to go browsing through a document's hypertext links, you are led away from the information you want, and mired in irrelevancies and ephemera. A book, too, may lead you astray, but only within a narrow field--that bounded by its covers.
Curious, that accident is the delight of book-reading but the scourge of online life. It is again a matter of boundaries, of visible and tactile definition. We hold a book in our hands, and we feel that we control a small, riotous component of the universe. We squint at the computer screen, and feel that we teeter over a black vortex of equal parts knowledge and sludge.
Hardware developers are well aware of all this. Within a very few years, our portal to cyberspace won't be a box on the desk. It will be a battery- powered palmtop computer, with a relatively big glare-resistant screen and a CD-ROM drive and a port for cartridges providing high-speed wireless connection to the Internet. The thing may slip into a backpack, rest in an open hand, or, when necessary, prop up a short table leg. In other words, it will impersonate the book.
This evolution is mainly cosmetic. It won't eliminate the terrors and vexations of cyberspace. But it will enclose them in one of terraspace's most practical and therefore most enduring forms.
You can strike out at the book by destroying its creators, as Cyrillus did Hypatia, or by creating an alternative information storage and delivery system. But we will not readily forsake bound printed pages. During the past 500 years, they have become integral to our concepts of both research and relaxation. We may find diversion at the computer screen, but nothing is as rewarding as curling up on soft cushions with a comforting drink, a warm mammal, and a good book.