NPR is featuring, at its site, an excerpt from a chapter of The Shallows titled “The Very Image of a Book,” which looks at the rise of e-books and the consequences for reading and writing. The excerpt, which is taken from the end of the chapter, describes how pundits have, for about two centuries now, been eagerly proclaiming the imminent death of the book. And, over and over again, they’ve been proven wrong. Today’s book lovers may take comfort from that fact, but they probably shouldn’t.

Here’s a bit of the excerpt:

The book survived the phonograph as it had the newspaper. Listening didn’t replace reading. Edison’s invention came to be used mainly for playing music rather than declaiming poetry and prose. During the twentieth century, book reading would withstand a fresh onslaught of seemingly mortal threats: moviegoing, radio listening, TV viewing. Today, books remain as commonplace as ever, and there’s every reason to believe that printed works will continue to be produced and read, in some sizable quantity, for years to come. While physical books may be on the road to obsolescence, the road will almost certainly be a long and winding one. Yet the continued existence of the codex, though it may provide some cheer to bibliophiles, doesn’t change the fact that books and book reading, at least as we’ve defined those things in the past, are in their cultural twilight.

More.

I’ll be talking about The Shallows with Robert Siegel this afternoon on NPR’s All Things Considered. Tune in live, or listen later.

The airing of the idea of delinkification did not, you’ll be relieved to know, set off a catastrophic implosion of the World Wide Web. It did, however, set a few minds to pondering. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum considered the distracting qualities of the link and their influence on our ability to pay attention:

Think about reading a newspaper pre-Web that decided it wanted to turn a few words blue here and there. Isn’t that in itself distracting? Now think about how many times you jump in and out of a story to follow some link. It can’t not be distracting.

It’s not a trivial question to ask what the Internet is doing to our attention spans. I know mine, for one, is shot to hell. And my suspicion (totally unproven and based only on personal observation!) is that you scan more than you read on the Internet. With a printed publication, you read more than you do on the Web. Why is that? Well, you’re not distracted by hypertext for one … Dismissing the question of what links do to attention and readability as some anti-link nonsense does nobody any good.

At the Economist, Tom Standage – yes, the chortling twitterer – looked beyond the question of distraction and pointed out that making a piece of writing sufficient onto itself is a worthy pursuit, and a self-contained article or essay can be subtly undermined, rather than enhanced, by inserting lots of links:

I don’t mind piles of links in sidebars, but I find links in text can be irritating if there are too many of them. Of course, it makes sense to link to sources, but links also invite the reader to go away and read something else, and they can imply that the item you are reading can only be understood by reading all the references. At The Economist we do our best to write articles that are self-contained and make sense without the need to refer to other sources, which leads to some characteristic Economist style quirks, such as saying “Ford, a carmaker”. (See? We saved you the trouble of having to ask Google what the company does.) When those articles are published online, there are very rarely hyperlinks in the body of the text.

Writer Russell Davies, on his blog, wondered how the fact that, increasingly, writers don’t know the form in which they’re work will ultimately be read will come to influence how they write. Once you wrote for a book or a magazine or a blog, but now the fate of a piece of writing is often unclear. An article written for a magazine “could end up read on a phone, a tablet, or a kindle. It could be read via RSS or instapaper or something else”:

I know this is terribly obvious and not terribly new. But it’s never fully struck me before. I’m used to thinking the design of things has been atomised, fragmented – that poor old designers for the web could never be sure how something was eventually going to look. But I hadn’t thought about it as something for writers to worry about. It’s just text, how different could it be? But it is different, if you wrote a book you used to have a reasonable idea what the reading experience would look like – no longer. That seems like a thing. That might change writing. A bit. Not a lot. But some.

On the other end of the spectrum, tech blogger and twitterer Mathew Ingram railed against the idea of self-contained pieces of writing. To him, people who don’t pepper their prose with links are lily-livered varmints hiding behind their own words:

not including links … is in many cases a sign of intellectual cowardice. What it says is that the writer is unprepared to have his or her ideas tested by comparing them to anyone else’s, and is hoping that no one will notice. In other cases, it’s a sign of intellectual arrogance — a sign that the writer believes these ideas sprang fully formed from his or her brain, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead, and have no link to anything that another person might have thought or written.

I guess this means that before the link was invented, all writers were arrogant cowards. Which, come to think of it, is probably true.

(Warning: the first idiot who writes a comment on this post pointing out the “irony” of its links will be tracked down, tortured, and shot.)

UPDATE: In a new comment on my earlier delinkification post, Salon’s Laura Miller reports on the reactions to her experiment in arranging links at the end of her articles:

My readers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the change, but Web punditry seem to regard it as a kind of blasphemy. There’s been hysterical exaggeration (pretending that the proposal is to eliminate external links entirely) and other misrepresentations, intentional or not, which surprise me in a community that’s always presented itself as embracing change and flexibility. I wonder if the prospect of overturning a single longstanding tenet of the digital punditry is threatening because it undermines the prophetic powers of Web pundits as a whole (i.e., if they were wrong about this back in 1995, maybe they’re wrong about other things today)? The whole discussion takes on the quality of a doctrinal war.

Gizmodo has a brief excerpt from The Shallows in which I describe the instrumental, but now largely forgotten, role that the inventor Lee de Forest played in the launching of our electronic age:

Our modern media spring from a common source, an invention that is rarely mentioned today but that had as decisive a role in shaping society as the internal combustion engine or the incandescent lightbulb. The invention was called the Audion. It was the first electronic audio amplifier, and the man who created it was Lee de Forest.

Even when judged by the high standards set by America’s mad-genius inventors, de Forest was an oddball. Nasty, ill-favored, and generally despised – in high school he was voted “homeliest boy” in his class – he was propelled by an enormous ego and an equally outsized inferiority complex …

Continue.

Christopher Caldwell reviews The Shallows in the Financial Times:

The subtitle of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains leads one to expect a polemic in the tradition of those published in the 1950s about how rock ’n’ roll was corrupting the nation’s youth; or in the 1970s about how television was turning kids into idiots; or in the 1990s about the sociopathology of rap music. But this is no such book. It is a patient and rewarding popularisation of some of the research being done at the frontiers of brain science. Carr has lately found it harder to concentrate on the serious reading he used to love. He is taken aback by the number of smart people who no longer read books. He puts the blame on the mental habits we have all learnt on the internet …

Continue.

A few years back, my friend Steve Gillmor, the long-time technology writer and blogger, went on a crusade against the hyperlink. He stopped putting links into his posts and other online writings. I could never quite understand his motivation, and the whole effort struck me as quixotic and silly. I mean, wasn’t the hyperlink the formative technology of the entire World Wide Web? Wasn’t the Web a hypermedia system, for crying out loud?

My view has changed. I’m still not sure what Gillmor was up to, but I now have a great deal of sympathy for his crusade. In fact, I’m beginning to think I should have joined up instead of mocking it.

Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It’s also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What’s good about a link – its propulsive force – is also what’s bad about it.

I don’t want to overstate the cognitive penalty produced by the hyperlink (or understate the link’s allure and usefulness), but the penalty seems to be real, and we should be aware of it. In The Shallows, I examine the hyperlink as just one element among many – including multimedia, interruptions, multitasking, jerky eye movements, divided attention, extraneous decision making, even social anxiety – that tend to promote hurried, distracted, and superficial thinking online. To understand the effects of the Web on our minds, you have to consider the cumulative effects of all these features rather than just the effects of any one individually.

The book, I’m pleased to say, has already prompted a couple of experiments in what I’ll call delinkification. Laura Miller, in her Salon review of The Shallows, put all her links at the end of the piece rather than sprinkling them through the text. She asked readers to comment on what they thought of the format. As with Gillmor’s early experiments, Miller’s seemed a little silly on first take. The Economist writer Tom Standage tweeted a chortle: “Ho Ho.” But if you read through the (many) comments her review provoked, you will hear a chorus of approval for removing links from text. Here’s a typical response:

Collecting all the URLs into a single block of text at the end of the article works very well. It illustrates Carr’s point, and it improves the experience of reading the article. It also shows more respect for the reader – it assumes that we’ve actually thought about what we’ve read. (Which is not to say that all readers merit that level of respect.)

Now, Neuroethics at the Core, the fine blog published by the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia, is carrying out a similar, informal experiment. As Peter Reiner explains, at the end of a lengthy, linkless post:

So here at the Core we are embarking upon a small experiment. For the next little while, we will try not to distract you from reading our blog posts in their entirety by writing them without hyperlinks in the main body of the text. We will still refer you to relevant posts, papers, etc., of course, but we will do so at the end of the post. Oh, the horrors, you might say, but really it is not so bad. One of my favourite science writers, Olivia Judson, regularly writes lovely articles for the New York Times in which she cites the relevant literature at the end of her article, and rarely includes links. If you have not read her posts, I highly recommend them. It would be great if you could share your experience of reading sans hyperlinks. Do you find it irritating? Does it allow you to read an entire blog post without skipping off to some other corner of the internet? Do you jump to the bottom of the post to get at the links anyway? Feel free to let us know.

My own feeling, in reading these works, is that I much prefer the links at the bottom. I do find that the absence of links encourages more concentrated, calmer, and more enjoyable reading. Of course, I’m biased. Try it yourself. You may be surprised.

And here, patient reader, are the links:

Salon review

Neuorethics at the Core post

Standage’s tweeted chortle

The Shallows site

UPDATE: Wow. This post really seems to have ticked off the Self-Appointed Defenders of Web Orthodoxy. Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor and ubiquitous web presence, even accused me of wanting to “unbuild the web.” Don’t worry, guys, no one’s going to take your links away. If you’d taken the time to read the post, you’d see that it is about some simple experiments (note headline) aimed at improving our understanding of the Net’s effects on attention, comprehension, and reading.

I don’t want to unbuild the web, but I do want to question it. Is that allowed, Jay?

UPDATE2: And now the king of the linkbaiters, Jeff Jarvis, accuses me of writing “that piece about links to get links.” Yes, Jeff, whenever I write a post with the craven intent of harvesting a lot of links I always make a point of publishing it on the morning of Memorial Day.

The new issue of Wired features an excerpt from my new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The excerpt draws on material from the chapter of the book entitled “The Juggler’s Brain,” in which I examine an array of research on how the Internet and networked computers are influencing our mental habits and altering the way we think. (For those of a scientific bent, I should note that the chapter itself, which is considerably longer than the excerpt, surveys many more studies than could be accommodated in the Wired piece.)

I previously listed blurbs for the book provided by early readers. Some other early reviews have also appeared. You can find excerpts on the reviews page of the book site.