The iPad’s iBooks application may or may not become our e-reader of choice – even uber-fanboy David Pogue seems a mite skeptical this morning – but the model of book reading (and hence book writing) the iPad promotes seems fated, in time, to become the dominant one. The book itself, in this model, becomes an app, a multihypermediated experience to click through rather than a simple sequence of pages to read through. To compete with the iPad, the current top-selling e-reader, Amazon’s Kindle, will no doubt be adding more bells and whistles to its suddenly tired-seeming interface. Already, Amazon has announced it will be opening an app store for the Kindle later this year. “People don’t read anymore,” Steve Jobs famously said, and the iPad emanates from that assumption.
John Makinson, the CEO of publishing giant Penguin Books, is thrilled about the iPad’s potential to refresh his company’s product line. “The definition of the book itself seems up for grabs,” he said at a recent media industry powwow. Unlike traditional e-book readers, which had a rather old-fashioned attachment to linear text, the iPad opens the doors to incorporating all sorts of “cool stuff,” Makinson continued. “We will be embedding audio, video and streaming into everything we do.” He foresees sprinkling movie clips among Jane Austen’s paragraphs in future editions of “Pride and Prejudice.” No need to conjure up a picture of Lizzie Bennet in your own mind; there’s Keira Knightley stomping through the grounds of Netherfield, cute as a mouse button.
Makinson gave a preview of the post-book book, which seems unsurprisingly toylike:
A sentence from The Shallows may be pertinent here: “When a printed book is transferred to an electronic device connected to the Internet, it turns into something very like a Web site.” Makinson’s presentation leads Peta Jinnath Andersen, of PopMatters, to ask, “What makes a book a book?” A book, she concludes, is just “a delivery system” for text, and one delivery system is as good as another: “How the words are delivered doesn’t matter.” A stone tablet is a scroll is a wax tablet is a scribal codex is a printed book is a Kindle is an iPad. And yet history shows us that each change in the physical form of the written word was accompanied by a change – often a profound one – in reading and writing habits. If the delivery system mattered so much in the past, are we really to believe that it won’t matter in the future?
Jobs is no dummy. As a text delivery system, the iPad is perfectly suited to readers who don’t read anymore.
I knew it was going to happen since the Kindle came on the market. Ebooks won’t make books extinct but will slowly e-clipse the inner experience of reading books. Links, videos and social networking capabilities won’t allow much reflection or inner silence.
Coming at Andersen’s strange claim from another direction: If the delivery system doesn’t matter, there’s no reason to change it — in fact, we’d as well go back to the stone tablet as move to the e-reader.
I just left a comment on Peta’s article saying basically the same thing. I do agree with her that a book is fundamentally a bunch of words strung together to tell a story, as I argued in an article, also for PopMatters, called “The Cult of Kindle”. The problem is that this argument–how the words and ideas are transmitted doesn’t really matter–is a gloss spread by Bezos and Jobs, et al. Because words and ideas are precisely what’s not important anymore.
More convergence here:
“Steve Jobs said that the Kindle would fail because people don’t read anymore, and he was basically right. The days of the dedicated e-reader are numbered. Eventually there will be an all-purpose tablet-like device (Kindle-sized) that is relatively affordable, and that’s what people will use to access books.”
(I just discovered your blog recently, Nick. Good show.)
So Nick, how should we read The Shallows then..? Or will we download it from an App Store..?
Actually, it comes preloaded on the iPad.
April Fools!
Just in case anyone is interested, someone has scanned and uploaded all of Fearless Leaders books to a website hosted in a breakaway former soviet republic with no legal ties to the US. Here is one link:http://www.freenicholasgcarr.com/shallows.pdf. Last time I checked, there had been over 50K downloads of The Shallows. Its very convenient: you don’t have to waste time going out to a library or bookstore or spend any money to buy the book. It saves consumers money and keeps Nick from going into a higher tax bracket. It’s a win-win situation all around!
I’d like your thoughts about the difference between nonfiction and fiction on the Ipad.
I can understand the use of graphics and sound for nonfiction, which is not that much different than the use of photographs and tables and cartoons and the like in nonfiction.
But fiction? One of the attractions of fiction, from a reader’s perspective, is how it invokes your imagination. I don’t want to see Keira Knightley stomping about in some little box on the right hand side of the tablet. I want to imagine her myself.
The other head-scratcher for me involves finding the authors who would put together such ‘Ipad novels’. Where are these people, and what skills must they have? I think it is difficult enough to develop the wordsmithing skills to produce a novel, at least, one others want to buy and read,. But now I must learn Gimp and video cameras and CGI and sound editing? Wouldn’t these ‘books’ be something more like a film than a novel? Perhaps closer to graphic novels, but with more moving parts. Seems to me it would require more creators than a lone fiction writer. If so, wouldn’t the funding be closer to the Hollywood or game models? And finally, if the ‘Ipad novel’ form had traction, wouldn’t it already exist somewhere on the Internet? Is there a leading-edge writer out there I haven’t stumbled across who is doing this sort of new fiction, using HTML and Flash and CSS and soundclips from Freesound?
Great blog, i am really curious how the businessmodels around writing books and publishing will change, will “The Shallows” be your primary source of income or will you have to do 200 lectures to make a living ;-)
>> If the delivery system mattered so much in the past, are we really to believe that it won’t matter in the future?
Well, yeah. In the past transitions, the Book became simpler to make, simpler to distribute, simpler to share, and cheaper to own. The masses got Books. One can see how this transition could be quite the opposite.
I would tend to agree with this, except that isn’t the idea of the book as a delivery system for text not quite historically accurate? Look at the literature of the nineteenth century and before, and the text is often constantly interrupted/enriched by engravings…without knowing the history of the book very deeply, this word/illustration seems integral to the experience of many books from Gutenberg onward.
Great article!
This is a great point, but I wonder–the changes in the system, as far as I can see, have been for the better. Not entirely so, true, but literacy and books are now much more accessible than they have ever been. Education is on the rise, and information is stored more reliably now than it has been in the past. None of this means that the iPad and it’s app-books are perfect, or that they won’t change the way we read. But I think there’s a certain negativity associated with books on the iPad that may be unfair.
Will the iPad allow for reading deeply? I don’t know, because I haven’t tried one yet. I’m not likely to try one for a while, because it’s not actually that useful to me (and I have a Kindle). But I do think that how deeply we read is, in large part, up to us.
Devices and formats will keep changing, leaving us to try to keep up and update our e-libraries at great expense.
Or, we could stick with real books, which will not become outdated and as an added advantage can be read by candlelight during a blackout.