One of the essential characteristics of the printed book, as of the scribal codex that preceded it, is its edges. Those edges, as John Updike pointed out not long before he died, manifest themselves in the physical form of bound books – “some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained” – but they are also there aesthetically and even metaphysically, giving each book integrity as a work in itself. That doesn’t mean that a book exists in isolation – its words, as written and as read, form rich connections with other books as well as with the worlds of nature and of men – but rather that a book offers a self-contained experience. The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement. The book must feel complete between its edges.

The idea of edges, of separateness, is antithetical to the web, which as a hypermedium dissolves all boundaries, renders implicit connections explicit. Indeed, much of the power and usefulness of the web as a technology derives from the way it destroys all forms of containment and turns everything it subsumes into a part of a greater, ever shifting, amorphous whole. The web is an assembly not of things but of shards, of snippets, of bits and pieces.

An electronic book is therefore a contradiction in terms. To move the words of a book onto the screen of a networked computer is to engineer a collision between two contradictory technological, and aesthetic, forces. Something’s got to give. Either the web gains edges, or the book loses them.

How this collision will play out over the course of this century is not exactly difficult to predict. Here is Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, introducing the new X-Ray function for the Kindle Touch two days ago:

The video is something of a Rorschach test. A person of the web may see X-Ray as a glorious advance. A person of the book may see the technology as a catastrophe.

“When you reduce friction, make something easy,” says Bezos, correctly, “people do more of it.” The friction in this case is the self-containment of the printed book, the tenacity of its grip on the reader. The reduction of the friction is the replacement of text with highly responsive hypertext. What people do more of is shift their focus and attention away from the words of the book and toward the web of snippets wrapped around the book – dictionary definitions, Wikipedia entries, character descriptions from Shelfari, and so forth. It’s easy to see the usefulness of X-Ray, particularly for reference books, manuals, and other publications of a utilitarian nature. But Bezos is not X-Raying a cookbook. He’s X-Raying a novel: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. He is, in a very real sense, treating a work of art as though it were an auto repair manual. Which is, of course, what the web wants a work of art to be: not a place of repose, but a jumping-off point.

When Amazon delivers a copy of The Remains of the Day to your Kindle, Bezos goes on to explain, the company “has pre-calculated all of the interesting phrases” and turned them into links. My, what a convenience! As a reader, I no longer have to waste a lot of mental energy figuring out which phrases in a book are interesting. It’s all been pre-calculated for me! Here we have a preview of what happens when engineers begin to recreate books, and the experience of reading, in the image of the web. The algorithmical mind begins to run roughshod over the literary mind. Needless to say, there are also commercial angles here. Clicking on an “interesting phrase” will no doubt eventually trigger not just Wikipedia and Shelfari articles but also contextual advertisements as well as product recommendations from Amazon’s store. Removing the edges from a book also serves to reduce friction in the purchasing process.

Up until now, it’s been commonly assumed that a divide would emerge in the presentation of different kinds of electronic books. Reference works would get the full web treatment, tricked out with multimedia and hypermedia, while fiction and literary nonfiction would be shielded from the web’s manifest destiny. They’d go digital without losing their print nature; they’d retain their edges. That assumption always struck me as naive, and Bezos’s choice of a novel for his demo of X-Ray makes me even more dubious of the idea that literary works will remain exempt from webification. People aren’t going to purchase different sorts of e-readers for different sorts of books, and the reading medium will, as always, influence the act of reading. Updike observed that “the book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets.” I don’t know whether or not Amazon’s algorithm would calculate that Updike’s words qualify as an interesting phrase, but they do seem prescient.

The future arrives wearing the clothes of the past. The first book that came off a printing press – Gutenberg’s Bible – used a typeface that had been meticulously designed to look like a scribe’s handwriting:

The first TV shows were filmed radio broadcasts. The designers of personal computers used the metaphor of a desk for organizing information. The world wide web had “pages.” The home pages of online newspapers mimicked the front pages of their print editions. As Richard Goldstein succinctly put it, “every novel technology draws from familiar forms until it establishes its own aesthetic.” It’s tempting to look at the early form of a new media technology and assume that it will be the ultimate form, but that’s a big mistake. The transitional state is never the final state. Eventually, the clothes of the past are shed, and the true nature, the true aesthetic, of the new technology is revealed.

So it is with what we call “electronic books.” Amazon’s original Kindle was explicitly designed to replicate as closely as possible the look and feel of a printed book:

When Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, introduced the Kindle in late 2007, he went out of his way to emphasize its mimicry of the familiar, bound book. Here’s an illuminating excerpt from a Newsweek cover story about the first Kindle:

“If you’re going to do something like this, you have to be as good as the book in a lot of respects,” says Bezos … Bounding to a whiteboard in the conference room, he ticks off a number of attributes that a book-reading device … must have. First, it must project an aura of bookishness; it should be less of a whizzy gizmo than an austere vessel of culture. Therefore the Kindle (named to evoke the crackling ignition of knowledge) has the dimensions of a paperback, with a tapering of its width that emulates the bulge toward a book’s binding. It weighs but 10.3 ounces, and unlike a laptop computer it does not run hot or make intrusive beeps.

To put it another way: the e-book, in its early form, used the metaphor of a printed book as the design concept for its user interface. But it was only a metaphor. The Kindle’s aura of bookishness was the modern equivalent of the Gutenberg Bible’s aura of scribalness. It was essentially a marketing tactic, a way to make traditional book readers comfortable with e-books. But it was never anything more than a temporary tactic.

Jeff Bezos is a businessman. He never really wanted to save the traditional book. He wanted to destroy it. And, in introducing the multimedia, multitouch, multitasking, app-tastic Kindle Fire today, Bezos has taken the “austere vessel of culture” out to the woodshed and whacked it with the business end of a mattock.

With the Fire, as with its its whizzy-gizmo predecessors, the iPad and the Nook Color, we are seeing the e-book begin to assume its true aesthetic, which would seem to be far closer to the aesthetic of the web than to that of the printed page: text embedded in a welter of functions and features, a symphony of intrusive beeps. Even the more restrained Kindle Touch, also introduced today, comes with a feature called X-Ray that seems designed to ensure that a book’s words never gain too tight a grip over a reader’s consciousness: “With a single tap, readers can see all the passages across a book that mention ideas, fictional characters, historical figures, places or topics that interest them, as well as more detailed descriptions from Wikipedia and Shelfari, Amazon’s community-powered encyclopedia for book lovers.” The original Kindle, now discounted to $79, is beginning to look like a dusty relic – something for the rocking-chair set.

The press coverage of the Fire has largely concerned its immediate commercial prospects: Will it challenge the Almighty iPad? But the real importance of the Fire is what it presages: the ultimate form of the e-book. Historians may look back on September 28, 2011, as the day the book lost its bookishness.

The desire for privacy is strong; vanity is stronger.

This is the third in a series of occasional pieces on the transformation of the newspaper business. The first two pieces, both published in 2009, were The Writing Is on the Paywall and Google in the Middle.

Information doesn’t want to be free. Nor does it want to be expensive. Information wants to be reasonably priced. And when it’s reasonably priced, it gets purchased.

The internet has changed patterns of supply and demand in media businesses in profound ways. We’re not going back to the way things used to be. But it’s a mistake to assume that the contours of the landscape in the immediate aftermath of the disruption are the permanent contours of the landscape. New patterns of supply and demand – and, in turn, new ways of doing business – emerge to replace old ones, though it can take a long time for those patterns to mature and become stable. And in the meantime, there can be a whole lot of wreckage to clean up.

The arrival of Napster and its various progeny gave rise to the assumption that the recorded music business was doomed, that no one would ever pay for music again. That assumption, which at the time seemed entirely reasonable, has proved wrong. Plenty of people now purchase music through online stores like iTunes and Amazon.com, and a growing number are purchasing subscriptions to music services like Spotify. (I recently signed up for a five-bucks-a-month Spotify plan and, despite the mediocre sound quality and the annoying gaps in the tunebase, I’m pretty happy so far.) Music is being paid for even though (a) attempts to restrict music trading through digital-rights-management schemes have failed, and (b) most of the songs being purchased can, without too much trouble, be found and downloaded for free. People, it turns out, are generally happy to pay for convenience, for the assurance of quality, and for legitimacy. (The music industry’s distasteful program of suing kids for downloading craploads of free tunes actually worked; it put a little bit of fear into the minds of downloaders – and their parents.)

Similar trends have been unfolding in the motion-picture business. In addition to going out to theaters, people continue to buy and rent recorded movies and other shows, in both physical and virtual forms. What we’ve witnessed in the recording industries in general is that the internet has actually expanded, not constricted, the ways people consume media. In particular, we’ve seen the establishment of five modes of consumption,* four of which produce revenue for the supplier:

1. Unit purchase. Buy an item (song, album, movie, TV show, etc.) for a fixed price in order to own it in (theoretical) perpetuity.

2. Subscription. Pay a recurring fee to access a collection of items. The fee may be variable, tied to limits on access and use.

3. Rental. Pay a nonrecurring fee to access a particular item or a collection of items for a set period of time.

4. Ad-subsidized. Watch or listen for free, but with some form of advertising included.

5. Freeloading. Unauthorized copying or trading.

The consumption of online recordings, via all these modes, has both cannibalized and supplemented the consumption of physical media. Though physical media sales, rentals, and subscriptions have fallen, often drastically, they have not been entirely supplanted. The reason is that, even when it comes to information, a virtual good is not always a perfect substitute for a physical good. Anyone who has had their viewing of a movie interrupted as Netflix recalibrates its streaming quality in response to a fluctuation in bandwidth knows that physical media still have advantages. Those advantages will almost certainly continue to erode as online offerings improve, but they may never be erased entirely.

The expansion in modes of consumption, which is now being extended still further as a result of the proliferation of networked gadgets like smartphones and tablets, each of which offers a somewhat different experience, doesn’t necessarily mean an expansion in the profits of suppliers. It seems pretty clear that the music business will never enjoy the same profitability it did back in the CD days. (As someone who bought a whole lot of recordings at exorbitant prices, I can’t say this breaks my heart.) But it does show that there are still plenty of people willing to pay plenty of money for informational products, even when those products have no physical form and are freely traded online.

The newspaper business – or, more generally, the written-word business – is different from the music and the movie business. Generally speaking, a news story is a lot more fungible than a song or a film. When I want to hear a particular song, no other song is going to be a satisfying substitute, but when I want to read about the outcome of a Congressional vote, I’m a whole lot less fussy about which story supplies the details. And whereas people may listen to a song a lot of times and watch a movie quite a few times, it’s rare for a person to read a news story more than once. Such differences have led some observers to argue that, even if other media products find a price online, news stories never will. People will just never pay for what newspapers produce.

Recent evidence suggests, however, that that’s another mistaken assumption, again born of a belief that current circumstances will persist. Newspaper paywalls, long scoffed at, are beginning to pay off, both by producing a new stream of subscription fees and by protecting traditional print subscriptions. It was once thought that paywalls would work only for business-oriented papers like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, but smartly constructed paywalls, which strike the right balance in supporting both ad-subsidized consumption and subscription consumption, are now showing signs of success for mainstream papers as well. See, for instance, Felix Salmon’s piece on the New York Times’s “porous paywall,” Ellie Behling’s review of the paywalls at the Concord Monitor, Augusta Chronicle, and Tulsa World, and John Lafayette’s article on the Arkansas Democrat Gazette’s well-established paywall. And a growing number of papers and other publications, from the Dallas Morning News to the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era, are testing paywall variations, which will help the industry gain a better sense of what works and what doesn’t. In fact, a recent study reveals that about half of all small newspapers now charge for online content in some way, and most of the rest are planning to institute paywalls.

Newspapers are also getting smarter about distinguishing between the more fungible and the less fungible elements of their products – and focusing their talents and investments on the latter. Less fungible means more distinctive, and distinctiveness in written news can manifest itself in many forms, from news analyses, to human-interest narratives, to smartly written editorial columns, to editorial skill in creating a bundle of stories, to compelling packages of local news and event coverage. Finally, and crucially important, the huge overabundance of supply in the news market, a consequence of the collapse of geographical boundaries that traditionally separated newspapers, is slowly ebbing as journalists are laid off and newspapers go under. The pruning of supply is ugly, but, from a business standpoint, it’s both inevitable and necessary.

What we’re coming to understand is that, in the newspaper business as in the music and motion-picture businesses, convenience, assurance of quality, and legitimacy are valued by consumers. Mainstream news consumers are not news geeks. They do not want to spend an inordinate amount of time flitting among sites, aggregation services, RSS readers, and tweet streams to cobble together a sense of what’s happening in the world. Many of them will choose to pay for convenience, assurance of quality, and legitimacy, and, as with music and movies, they will likely pay in a variety of ways – unit purchases, subscriptions, even rentals – depending on their needs. Many others will refuse to pay, limiting themselves to what’s available in purely ad-subsidized models. (And, of course, there will be plenty of freeloaders who take pride and pleasure in figuring out ways to defeat paywalls.) The newspapers that will survive, and perhaps even thrive, in the years to come will be those that are able to offer the most distinctive products and to tailor those products to a variety of consumption modes, spanning payment methods and devices, in a way that maximizes revenues and optimizes readership. And because an online news site is not a perfect substitute for a printed paper for either readers or advertisers – I cancelled my paper subscription a couple of years ago but ended up resubscribing after realizing that I was missing something – print editions will likely remain a crucial element in the mix indefinitely.

There is a group of new-media pundits – let’s call them the Self-Appointed Guardians of Web Orthodoxy (SAGWOs) – who encourage newspapers to launch all sorts of online distribution and editorial experiments. That’s good advice. But the SAGWOs have heaped scorn on experiments with paywalls and subscriptions and pricing. That’s terrible advice. Newspapers and magazines need to test all sorts of ways to get people to pay for news. That’s the only way to secure a vibrant future for quality journalism. Many of the experiments will fail. But some will succeed. And, eventually, we’ll see the emergence of sustainable, robust new business models, probably characterized by a broader set of revenue sources than existed before. If the last decade was the decade of digital destruction for newspapers, the current decade may turn out to be the decade of rebuilding.

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*I realize that there are some who will take offense at my use of the c-word – “consumption” – as it conflicts with their belief that the web has made media consumption obsolete. But that’s silly. The people formerly known as the audience still spend a lot of time behaving like an audience. I doubt that’s going to change.

Put Mike Arrington, Tim Armstrong, and Arianna Huffington in a beach house together for six months and film the proceedings. The hijinks would be primo. And if the action ever flagged, you could always helicopter Paul Carr in for a sleepover.

Can I patent this idea?

Skills are gained through effort.

Automation relieves effort.

There’s always a tradeoff, but because the relief comes immediately whereas the loss of skills manifests itself slowly, we rarely question the pursuit of ever greater degrees of automation.

Recent case in point:

Pilots’ “automation addiction” has eroded their flying skills to the point that they sometimes don’t know how to recover from stalls and other mid-flight problems, say pilots and safety officials. The weakened skills have contributed to hundreds of deaths in airline crashes in the last five years … “We’re seeing a new breed of accident with these state-of-the art planes,” said Rory Kay, an airline captain and co-chair of a Federal Aviation Administration advisory committee on pilot training. “We’re forgetting how to fly.”

Something to think about on Labor Day.

I’m thrilled to report that The Shallows was today named a finalist for the PEN Center USA 2011 Literary Award in the category of Research Nonfiction. The other finalists in the category are Colossus by Michael Hiltzik and Charlie Chan by Yunte Huang. The winner in the category is Why the West Rules – For Now by Ian Morris.