(2008-07-01) Klein Ebooks Reading And Writing

Ezra Klein on what the EBook (and he uses the Kindle in particular) means for the Publishing Industry. Compared to this, electronic text is a GPS system. You tell it where you want to go, it finds the route. The whole book is searchable. So, for that matter, are your notes, which can all be stored. Favored passages can be clipped and saved in a separate file to facilitate more rapid review. When text ceases to be fixed, when margins swell to an infinite expanse, when every word can be sorted and searched, the failings of our brains are hardly noticeable. Your bookshelf becomes your mind's external hard drive (Outboard Brain). It's a shiny new e-brain, a Google that searches your personal intellectual universe... It's not only the relationship between writer and reader, however, that could deepen in the age of electronic text. Reading, mostly a solitary pursuit, could become a social act (Social Media). It's now common for newspapers to host comment sections where readers can weigh in on their articles, and books could do much the same. How much easier a dense work of philosophy would be if we could communicate with others struggling through the same chapters, and even be helped along by the author. Indeed, once we were open to the idea, much of what we do with books could be dragged into the public sphere... At the end of the day, the true advances won't come in the Kindle, but in the content. Just as the capabilities of the device will shape what authors decide to do with it, so too will the decisions of authors shape the evolution of the device... But if the Kindle's successor or competitors are to succeed, it will be because Amazon used its status as the world's largest online bookseller to force authors to think seriously about creating content that works better than the book, that goes where the book cannot, that's interactive and cooperative and open in ways that printed text will never be.