Reading and Writing the Electronic Book
Publishers and technologists have been promising us electronic books of one sort or another for well over two decades. Indeed, many of them delivered products in the marketplace in what amounted to at least three distinct waves of technology and content. Each wave was heralded by hyperbolic claims about the disappearance of the print book, the death of text, and other ways in which literacy would be forever changed -- claims that excited critics' wrath and sometimes their derision in the wake of the products' disappointing showings in the marketplace. Not only did the products fall short of readers' expectations, but also the changes were slower to arrive than the more optimistic forecasts predicted and the products themselves demonstrated limited economic viability. For those of us whose lives have been inexorably intertwined with electronic texts all along, the immediate source of the disappointment has varied: reading on the screen just was not engaging enough; there were not enough titles in enough genres to satisfy our most immediate and fundamental textual desires; and beyond-the-book functionality was inadequate. More importantly, the hardware was too clunky and battery life was too short to make electronic books any more than a novelty purchased by early adopters, then stored unused in a drawer or forgotten in a hotel room.
Yet -- like Charlie Brown running at the football one last time, hoping to pull off one solid kick at the goalposts -- we kept on trying to read and write the electronic book.
Each wave of electronic books was spurred by somewhat different social and technical forces. Each anticipated different changes and each foundered on a new set of challenges that the products quickly revealed. It is instructive to look at the waves one by one if we are to understand the separate (but not separable) facets of the new medium.
1.1 GENERATION 1: A NEW WORLD OF HY PERMEDIA
The first wave of electronic publishing focused on what we could do with the new medium using pixels and fonts instead of ink and moveable type, screens in lieu of paper, and hypertext links in place of page flips. Companies like Voyager and Eastgate Systems not only developed electronic book software and figured out a way to distribute titles and sell them like most publishers would; they also worked through an initial economic model for the endeavor and nurtured a stable of writers and content preparation technologies. A small number of first-wave titles emerged. Writers learned how to create in the new medium. Dissemination depended on (relatively) inexpensive digital media such as laser disks (for high-end multimedia titles) or floppy disks (for experimental electronic literature, hypertext fiction, or documentary projects).
Multimedia was Voyager's strong suit as an early publisher of electronic content; the company initially adopted the laser disk as a primary means of distributing content and developed a series of titles that were well suited to multimedia. Consumer-friendly titles included history books such as Who Built America?; the work of more accessible performance artists such as Laurie Anderson; an electronic version of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus; and A Hard Day's Night, which drew on the Beatles' music. Laser disks were quickly replaced by CD-ROMs, but the focus of these companies remained on multimedia.
The ability to transcend other intellectual limitations of linear text -- limitations initially explored in Gedanken experiments by writers like Jorge Luis Borges (Garden of Forking Paths) and Julio Cortazar (Hopscotch) -- appealed to a small set of literary pioneers, and hypertext fiction publisher Eastgate Systems was born. Research prototypes like Bellcore's SuperBook System transformed marked-up files into hypertext that included a dynamically generated table of contents and index to facilitate what were then new kinds of reader navigation.
Thus, the initial wave of electronic books produced a highly diverse (but sparse) selection of titles and a handful of research systems developed to explore issues associated with reading on the screen. In some sense, if you wanted to read an electronic book, you would have to adjust your reading preferences to what was available. Availability was further constrained by hardware platforms (some electronic titles were only available for Macs; others were only available for PCs), by limitations in how the titles were delivered (just how much content fits on a floppy?), and by primitive reading hardware (color monitors were new, heavy, and expensive, and their resolution seems so low by today's standards as to be utterly unusable). Furthermore, readers were tethered to their desktop computers; laptops, although available, were far from ubiquitous and were only portable if your arms were strong.
I began Chapter 2, the chapter about reading, by calling into question the assumption that reading is a solitary activity. It isn't: I invoked document scholar David Levy to assert that reading is inherently social. This is not to say that people don't read alone; of course they do. They may even go to some lengths to separate themselves from other people in the name of quiet and to prevent unwanted interruptions. But reading is social in a way that crosses several dimensions beyond the immediate stereotype of a scholar deep in thought in a library carrel or a child curled up with A Wrinkle in Time in a picture window.
To tease out these social dimensions, let's call to mind the old but serviceable computersupported cooperative work (CSCW) two-by-two matrix that divides up the world (albeit somewhat artificially) according to place and time. These dimensions will give us four quadrants characterized by events happening in the same place versus events happening in distant places and events happening at the same time versus events happening at different times. Figure 4.1 sketches out this matrix, styled after.
This matrix gives us a simple framework to examine the social side of eBook use. Use that occurs in the same place at the same time implies that people are reading together. Reading together may mean that the situation has been deliberately organized as an opportunity to read together: reading groups or classroom discussions are both examples of such a situation. It may also mean that people have contrived informally to read together: two students push their chairs together to share a computer display or two friends talking on the phone browse the same Web pages together. The second variant, reading together over the phone, represents use that occurs at the same time, but in a different place. Activity in this quadrant of the collaboration matrix is usually intentional because it involves a communications technology; that is, the distance must be bridged by some kind of connection.
Once people are reading at different times, some sort of persistent artifact of their reading activity must be involved: annotations, clippings, bookmarks, recommendations, page views, or the books themselves may be used as a record of the activity; otherwise, collaboration or some other kind of reading-related social interaction would be difficult. Hence, this aspect of sociality involves sharing records of reading. These records can be explicit, such as annotations, or implicit, such as page views recorded in a log. Asynchronous sharing can likewise be something intentional and planned, such as a discussion of assigned reading conducted in an online annotation system or the recommendations of books or authors that we might see in a social cataloging Web application like LibraryThing, or the sharing may be serendipitous and may take advantage of large-scale collective effects such as an online newspaper's most emailed story.
In the end, it seems that we have posed two basic distinctions that make very different demands on eBooks and their users. First, there are synchronous activities that involve reading together, i.e., either in a way that is co-located (e.g., reading together in a classroom) or remote (e.g., browsing the Web together over the phone). Then there are asynchronous activities that involve sharing records of reading. These asynchronous activities can be further divided into those in which the records of reading are intentionally shared (e.g., clipping a story from the local newspaper and mailing it to a friend) versus those in which the records of reading are aggregated and shared in a way that represents collective intelligence or the wisdom of crowds (e.g., assembling a bestseller list or a citation index).
Taken together, these variations give us an interesting way to explore the diverse social side of eBooks.
This lecture has covered eBooks from a number of different perspectives: how people read and interact with eBooks; how readers use eBooks socially; how writers and publishers prepare content; how print genres are realized as digital forms and how digital genres emerge; how eBook functionality can go beyond the print book; and finally, how eBooks and records of their use can grow into personal digital libraries. We have also explored types of studies that researchers might do, given what we know and don't know about eBooks.
In the end, it is important to remember that there is no single way that people will read; there is no single device that people will use for reading; there is no single format that will make content universally accessible; and there is no single role for eBooks in our social affairs.
Instead of putting all our eggs -- or our eBooks -- in one basket, it is more realistic to consider how reading will grow to encompass constellations of reading technologies. While this lecture strives to point out some universals -- that it is important to support reading comfort; that it isimportant to provide access to external resources such as catalogs, search engines, document repositories, and digital libraries; that mobile devices are a significant enabler to reading when and where we choose -- I am also convinced that there is no single reading solution for the mobile worker in the digital or physical library.
An eBook can be the principal venue for reading a novel; it may also serve as an auxiliary display, almost like a sheet of paper, or as a reference while the reader writes using a different computer. As we look at the people around us, we might see them reading on the small screen at hand (e.g., an iPhone) because that's what they have and it can be used on a crowded subway with little ado.
On the other hand, the future of reading may not be so closely tied to a single platform. Figure 7.6 shows a typical work area with many screens that represent diverse form factors. Readily visible are two landscape-oriented displays and one portrait-mode display. But wait! Look more closely. There are two smaller screens all but hidden on the desktop: one on her mobile phone and one on a controller for some communications hardware. Because I'm familiar with this office, I also know there are several other displays that are just off-camera and a laptop that is blocked from view.
It's not difficult to envision a Kindle in this picture nor it is difficult to imagine the study participant reading on any of the screens she already has on her desk. Perhaps she will even carryone of them with her to a quieter place to read.
Yes, it does have implications. For some, the seams between the genres have meaning; others wish the seams would simply disappear. It seems impossible (or at least inadvisable) to predict the future of reading.
What it is possible to say from all of this is that reading is a hybrid. It is neither the little girl curled up in a window seat in the sun with her copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince nor is it the graduate student sequestered in her library carrel, surrounded with the source materials for her dissertation. It is both. Readers do focus on a single reading surface or display at times, but then they bring it into a broader context. Reading is an unselfconscious orchestration of many things; the success of a next generation of eBooks relies on our ability to see them as part of a larger system of diverse genres, technologies, and activities.