“Facts are collected indiscriminately by the naive empiricist, who lives in fear of missing the one fact that will give meaning to the rest. His fear is justified; that fact will never be found.” -Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel

I realize that Larry Page is on a crusade to dumb down Google in order to compete more effectively with Facebook (exhibit 1: Google Search Plus Your World), but was it really necessary to remove Google Scholar, one of the company’s most useful services, from the search-options drop-down menu on search results pages? A couple of months ago, Google actually expanded the choices appearing on that menu, in a ham-fisted attempt to promote more of its services, but it deleted the Scholar option:

The menu is now a confusing mishmash of options to refine searches (e.g., Books, Photos) and links that whisk you over to landing pages for Google services (e.g., Wallet, Offers). But to get to Scholar, you have to click on the Even More link, then scroll down through a dog’s breakfast of obscure Google products, click on the Google Scholar link, and then (since Google doesn’t bother to remember what you were searching for in the first place), retype your keywords into the Google Scholar search box. What a kludge.

In addition to the drop-down menu, Google also lards its search results pages with two other search-options menus – the one that runs across the top, in that funereal black band, and the one that runs down the left margin – but you won’t find a Scholar option in those places, either. (I’ll also point out, just to emphasize the dumbing-down point, that the Images option now appears in all three places, though in the drop-down menu it’s called Photos and instead of bringing you to the real Image results it brings you to some lame-ass Picasa Image results. This is exactly the kind of of self-serving bloat that Google used to make fun of Microsoft for. We become what we hate.)

Promote Google Offers, and demote Google Scholar: if you’re looking for a symbol of the way Google has changed, you couldn’t do better than that. And, for the record, I’m not the only one whining about this. It’s a doggone donnybrook.

Larry, I beg you, put Google Scholar in one of those freaking menus. I don’t care which one. If you’d like, you can even add a fourth options menu down at the bottom of the page and stick Scholar there – alongside, perhaps, “Picasa Cat Photos” and “Google+ Celebrity Posts” and “Google Offers Daily Deals.”

I had the pleasure recently of being interviewed, by Alec Ash, for The Browser’s excellent “Five Books” series, in which one writer talks about five books written by other writers. The theme of my interview was the Information Age, which I think had its origins back in the fifteenth century, with the arrival of the mechanical clock and the invention of the printing press, and the five books I chose to talk about were Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet, James Gleick’s The Information, Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. You can read the interview here.

Following up on my earlier post suggesting that publishers include a free copy of an ebook with a sale of a print book, here’s a piece from Publishers Weekly reviewing some of the pros and cons of book bundling as well as a response from a publisher. Both pieces quote Bloomsbury USA sales exec Evan Schnittman, who argues that an e/print bundle could be sold for a higher price than a print book alone. I don’t see that approach making much of a dent in the marketplace (who wants to pay more for a book at this point?); in fact, it might well backfire (by making readers even more sensitive to the price premium of printed books, particularly hard covers, in comparison to ebooks). For bundling to make a strategic difference to publishers, the ebook would need to be a freebie, for the reasons I outlined earlier.

In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke published a collection of prophetic writings called Profiles of the Future. His intent, he wrote in an introduction, was not “to describe the future, but to define the boundaries within which possible futures must lie.” In one chapter he predicted the creation of a high-speed worldwide communications network (he thought it would be satellite-based) and discussed some of its probable consequences. The physical mail system, he wrote, would be replaced by “an orbital post office,” which “will probably make airmail obsolete in the quite near future.” The new system will “of course” raise “problems of privacy,” though these “might be solved by robot handling at all stages of the operation.”

The revolution in communication won’t be limited to correspondence, though: “Perhaps a decade beyond the orbital post office lies something even more startling – the orbital newspaper.” News reports would come to be transmitted to video screens in homes. To get “your daily paper,” you’d need only “press the right button.” Moreover, each reader would be able to create a personalized bundle of stories: “We will select what we need, and ignore the rest, thus saving whole forests for posterity. The orbital newspaper will have little more than the name in common with the newspaper of today.”

“Nor will the matter end here,” Clarke continued. “Over the same circuits we will be able to conjure up, from central libraries and information banks, copies of any document we desire … Even books may one day be ‘distributed’ in this manner, though their format will have to be changed drastically to make this possible.”

The technology would transform the publishing industry, Clarke warned. “All publishers would do well to contemplate these really staggering prospects. Most affected will be newspapers and pocket-books; practically untouched by the coming revolution will be art volumes and quality magazines, which involve not only fine printing but elaborate manufacturing processes. The dailies may well tremble; the glossy monthlies have little to fear.”

He ended on a jauntily apocalyptic note: “How mankind will cope with the avalanche of information and entertainment about to descend upon it from the skies, only the future can show. Once again science, with its usual cheerful irresponsibility, has left another squalling infant on civilization’s doorstep. It may grow up to be as big a problem child as the one born amid the clicking of Geiger counters beneath the Chicago University squash court, back in 1942.”

After I wrote, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, about the malleability of text in electronic books, a reader asked me to flesh out my thoughts about the different ways that “typographical fixity” – to again borrow Elizabeth Eisenstein’s term – can manifest itself in a book. I’ve been thinking about that and have come up with four categories of fixity or stability – not all of which are typographical in nature – that influence the permanence of a book (or other written work) and that change, sometimes radically, as we shift from print publishing to electronic publishing. I’m sure this isn’t a complete list, but I hope it’s a useful start:

Integrity of the page. At the simplest and most fundamental level, typographical fixity means that when you have a page printed in ink, you’re able to trust that the page will maintain its integrity; when you pick it up tomorrow, or twenty years from now, its contents will be the same as what you see today. The printing press didn’t create this type of fixity – it was there with the scribal book, the scroll, and certainly the stone tablet – but it did extend it into the modern age. (It’s true that a person armed with an X-acto knife, an eraser, a jar of Wite-Out, and a Sharpie can undermine a page’s fixity, but I’d argue that that’s an exception that proves the rule – and, importantly, the fact that a printed page has been messed with tends to be pretty obvious to the reader.) The integrity of the page has been so intrinsic to the technology of the book (and the book’s predecessors) that most of us assume it to be intrinsic to the very idea of a book. But, as we’re now discovering, it’s not. Page integrity is not an inherent quality in ebooks, particularly when they’re stored on a networked device or in the cloud (as almost all of them are). Because an ebook’s words are composed of software and a page needs to be refreshed each time it’s viewed, the contents of a page can change from one viewing to the next. We can see this loss of integrity already, and on a broad scale, with Amazon’s Popular Highlights and Public Notes features for its Kindle books. If a reader turns on these functions, highlights and notes will be added to a book’s pages automatically, and remotely. The contents of a page can change from one refresh to the next. Technologically, it’s just as easy to change the words on a page as to add notes or highlights.

The introduction of page malleability to the book will have good consequences and bad ones (and in some cases, one person will see a particular consequence as good while another will see it as bad), but however the consequences play out, the loss of page fixity looks like a revolutionary change to our conception of and assumptions about a book.

Integrity of the edition. A second level of fixity – one introduced with the printing press – was the fixity of content across a large edition of a book. This kind of fixity was impossible with the scribal book, when copies were produced one at a time. There has been a great deal of debate, in book history circles, about how quickly books became consistent across editions – printing remained a manual, artisanal craft, with considerable variability, until it was industrialized early in the 19th century – but there’s no doubt that ultimately the printing press introduced far greater standardization across large press runs than had been possible with handwritten books. (The emergence of copyright laws in the 18th century also increased the fixity of a book’s contents by imposing more constraints on who was able to print a book.) This fixity never extended to different editions of the same work, which could include large and small variations – either deliberate revisions or errors. Nevertheless, fixity within editions, often very large editions of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of copies, became a basic characteristic of publishing. If I go out to my local bookstore and buy a copy of John Grisham’s new novel today, and somebody a thousand miles away goes out to their bookstore and buys the same book tomorrow, and somebody else orders a physical copy of the book from Amazon, we can all be reasonably certain that we’ll be reading the same book. (There is the occasional weird exception, but again it only serves to prove the general rule.)

The integrity of an edition, an inherent quality of modern printing technology, is not an inherent quality of the technology of the ebook. Ebooks have no print runs, and the very idea of an “edition” gets fuzzy with an ebook. A publisher, or a self-published writer, is free to change the source file of a ebook at pretty much any time, and there’s no requirement that readers be alerted to the change. Indeed, the self-publishing software offered by Amazon and other companies make such changes a snap. There’s no assurance that the copy of a book I download (or read online) today will match the copy of the same book that someone else downloads tomorrow. Again, this flexibility may have a mix of good and bad consequences, but it substantially changes our assumptions about a book’s stability.

Permanence of the object. Printed books don’t last forever, but, with a modicum of care, they can last a very long time. And as long as a book lasts, it remains readable (assuming the reader knows the language). Because an ebook is not susceptible to the kind of physical decay that can afflict a paper book, it theoretically can last longer. But in this case there is a vast gulf between theory and reality. What we know about computer documents is that, due to rapid changes in computer operating systems, computer media, software applications, and file formats, they don’t tend to have much longevity. I have a box of floppy disks from fifteen or twenty years ago sitting in a closet, and even if I still had a floppy drive (which I don’t) my current computers would be unable to read most of the files on the disks. As software, ebooks will likely suffer from this same impermanence, a problem magnified by the wide range of proprietary and open formats in which ebooks are sold today. A printed book is a printed book is a printed book. An ebook is not an ebook is not an ebook. The good news is that, if we make smart technological choices, we can alleviate this problem in the future. The bad news is that, if history is a guide, we probably won’t make smart choices.

Sense of completeness. Fixity and permanence matter not only as real qualities of technologies and objects, but also as perceived qualities. As the printing and publishing trades matured over the last half millennium, the publication of a book went from being a vague, ongoing process to an event – a date on a publishing calendar – and, in turn, the sense of a book as a final, finished creation strengthened, particularly in the mind of an author but also in the minds of editors, proofreaders, and book designers. This sense of finality, of completeness, was, I believe, essential to the emergence of literary culture in its current form. That doesn’t mean that a particular author might not revise a book for subsequent editions – if you write a “Song of Myself,” you will probably want it to change as you change – but it does mean that each edition was a thing in itself – at best, a work of art aimed at posterity as well as the present day.

Because it lacks the necessity and the fixity of a print run, e-publishing once again can become an ongoing process rather than an event, which is likely to change the perceptions of writers and their collaborators. And when you change your perception of what you’re creating, you will also change how you create it. I think it’s fair to say that these kinds of shifts are subtle and play out over a long time, but in some ways the erosion of the sense of a written work’s completeness and self-containment may ultimately change literature as much as the underlying technological changes.

So there you have four facets of a book’s fixity or stability that are shaped by the prevailing technologies of creation, production, distribution, and reading. The permanence of a book is not just a function of technology, of course. Many other factors – laws, commercial interests, reader preferences and habits – also exert an important influence. But technology matters, and it seems likely that we’ll be celebrating, and rueing, the consequences of today’s epochal shift from printing to electronic publishing for centuries to come.

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” writes Mark Zuckerberg at the start of his letter to would-be shareholders in the company’s IPO filing. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”

Hosanna!

One of the great things about our newly transparent world is that we can peer into people’s pasts – I mean, their timelines – and see what they were doing and thinking way back when. And when you scroll Zuckerberg’s timeline back to Facebook’s formative days, you do indeed see a young man filled with philanthropic fervor, a man without worldly desires who is putting his heart and his soul into a grand social mission.

Just look at what Zuckerberg was doing, as a sophomore at Harvard, in the days just before he created Facebook. Working selflessly at his computer in his dorm, he created a site called Facemash. It pulled photos of Harvard undergrads from other campus sites, put two of the photos side by side on a web page, and allowed people to vote for which of the two was the “hottest.” It then tallied the votes to create lists ranking students by their looks. It’s hard to imagine a more altruistic project. What Zuckerberg had already realized is that, in order to create seamless online connections between people, you have to first turn them into objects.

And then the fledgling humanitarian really spread his wings. He agreed to write the code for a dating site being planned by some classmates even as he was clandestinely pursuing his own plan for a similar social-networking site, then called The Facebook. He struggled mightily with the ethical dilemma raised by this apparent conflict of interest, at one point pouring his heart out in an instant-message exchange with a high school friend named Adam D’Angelo:

Zuckerberg: So you know how I’m making that dating site

Zuckerberg: I wonder how similar that is to the Facebook thing

Zuckerberg: Because they’re probably going to be released around the same time

Zuckerberg: Unless I fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I’d have it done.

D’Angelo: haha …

Zuckerberg: Like I don’t think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating

Zuckerberg: and I think people are skeptical about joining dating things too.

Zuckerberg: But the guy doing the dating thing is going to promote it pretty well.

Zuckerberg: I wonder what the ideal solution is.

Zuckerberg: I think the Facebook thing by itself would draw many people, unless it were released at the same time as the dating thing.

Zuckerberg: In which case both things would cancel each other out and nothing would win …

Zuckerberg: I also hate the fact that I’m doing it for other people haha. Like I hate working under other people. I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait until the last day before I’m supposed to have their thing ready and then be like “look yours isn’t as good as this so if you want to join mine you can…otherwise I can help you with yours later.” Or do you think that’s too dick?

D’Angelo: I think you should just ditch them

Zuckerberg: The thing is they have a programmer who could finish their thing and they have money to pour into advertising and stuff. Oh wait I have money too. My friend who wants to sponsor this is head of the investment society. Apparently insider trading isn’t illegal in Brazil so he’s rich lol.

D’Angelo: lol

When you’re deeply engaged in pursuing a social mission, and not at all concerned about any sort of crass business interests, you naturally obsess about ways to “fuck over” your competitors so you can get to market first, pour investors’ money into “advertising and stuff,” and “win.” It’s a simple fact: When you’re guided by high social ideals, you can never be “too dick.”

haha