(3) Reading the Future – prospects for the book

“Today it is widely assumed that digitized books and other texts will be read mainly on computer screens or on hand-held reading devices such as Palm Pilots or Gemstar readers. But a significant market for books read on screens has not yet emerged, and in my opinion this may never become the major mode of distribution for books on line. The more likely prospect, I believe, is that most digital files will be printed and bound on demand at point of sale by machines–now in prototype–which within minutes will inexpensively make single copies that are indistinguishable from books made in factories.” Jason Epstein

Booke vs. eBook

Clifford Lynch is worried that the transmission of knowledge is migrating from paper books to e-books.(see bibliography) The migration of the role of transmission of knowledge from paper books would mean the lazy, first time ever abandonment of a proven reading mode. Will e-books win? Perhaps the technological mediation of the composite reading mode vs. the more manual interface of the print reading mode should figure into the scenario.

What about the degree of technical mediation of reading modes? The suggestion that print is a mode of low technical mediation is a point of definition. What if books are so defined? “A book is a format conveyed with a low degree of technical mediation.” Perhaps use of the reader as the interface is a futuristic attribute not a disattribute. If so, it may follow, that e-books with their need of support technology and mediation are at a disadvantage. Here are some factors in play.

(1) The emerging e-book market appears to be genres readily abandoned by paper books such as travel reference, instructional manuals, conference proceedings, textbooks and encyclopedias. In their paper format, these genres have never been well associated with the print reading mode. Ebooks may also have a role as the medium for the working manuscripts that will engender printed books. This scenario would utilize web publishing as processing platform for a print book; so synthesizing and resolving thoughts in peer review that they can, eventually, be conveyed bare, without any technological mediation, as a passive paper book.

(2) The various reading media of the reading modes can be distinguished in terms of a degree of technological mediation required. Add to this matrix the use of technological mediation to deliver formats across thresholds from one reading mode to another. Then overlay mediations of the reader’s preferred interface. The book vs. e-book is not an easily posed comparison in this diorama. In this situation every permutation deserves notice.

(3) What is the threshold between reading modes and how is it influenced by differing degrees of mediation? One of the influences of technologies mediating a combined reading mode may be an equal adaptation to the dissolution of the thresholds that once existed between the parent reading modes.

If so, future visualizations, may look to seamless mediation of all reading modes regardless of the degrees of technological mediation associated with each phase from idea to published thesis and regardless of the parent mode of origin of the work. Then, just as conceivably, the degrees of technological mediation may be managed in detail and applied to enhance, and not distract from, the efficiency of the transmission. For example the thresholds could be accentuated at the same time that the productivity and efficacy of the separate reading modes are more intensively supported by digital technologies. This is the scenario described by Jason Epstein which visualizes digital writing and digital distribution mediated by human editorial oversight and paper print at the point of the inter mode threshold.

(4) Another possibility is that the “booke vs. ebook” competition is an illusion. These separate futures may have nothing to do with each other. In this scenario both will progress in a context of digital mediation but move toward very different realizations within that single context. This is an exciting possibility.

(5) Back to the degree of technological mediation. Lets assume that technological mediation, from a historical perspective, is intended to diminish drudgery and inefficiency. That would include both the drudgery and inefficiency of physical work as well as the drudgery and inefficiency of conceptual work.

Now there is an interesting thing to notice here. As technological mediation extends our inherent capacities it also, progressively, exceeds them. But advances to expedite conceptual work are not free of other effects.The process of extension of technological mediation is secessionist and continuously subjected to obsolescence and displacement of the mediating forms and formats. Conversely, as we undertake activities with low degrees of technological mediation, we note an increasing robustness and stability based in human capacities which have remained unchanged for thousands of years. This explains how anthropologists can literally rediscover flint knapping techniques and stone tool uses otherwise lost for tens of thousands of years. This must say something about the degree of technological mediation as applied to the transmission of knowledge.

The sliding scale between stable bionic capacity and unstable, though always increasing, technological capacity can be observed in the context of transmission of knowledge. But note how technological mediation in physical activity differs from technological mediation in conceptual activity. The anthropologist is using an unadulterated dexterity however technologically mediated so is an instrumental musician. The researcher, on the other hand, is using a capacity for native, bionic thought that may already be artificiated, that is sustained, by technological mediation regardless of the amount of mediation applied to the given conceptual activity; a subtle difference that can be overlaid on the future of the book.

Ideally, we want robust, reliable performance for the means of transmission of knowledge. We also want high efficiency of comprehension from native bionic capacity. There is reason to exploit every current technological mediation that will realize such prerequisites. But if excessive technological mediation impairs both transmission reliability and native bionic comprehension there may be a problem.

It is a paradox that the paper book conveys conceptual thought via a physical object. But, that may be the same sort of paradox now needed to utilize the digital mediating technology of the ebook to transmit knowledge. It could be that the knowledge realized only via digital mediation is a knowledge of which we can take possession. In the meantime we should not be disturbed to use the paper book for transmission of knowledge.

A Thought Experiment

Lets consider the booke vs. ebook in a thought experiment. Suppose that the last 500 years of reading history did not transpire in a context of printed books and their organization into physical libraries. Suppose, instead, that the last 500 years of reading history occurred in the context of the Internet and the composite reading mode that it has engendered.

All of the scenarios of readership that J.Yellowlees Douglas describes in her (print) book on reading interactive narratives would have long since come to pass and have been eclipsed.(see bibliography) The charmed persistence of Eastgate’s StorySpace and the Bolter and Lanham classics would extend to the centuries (see bibliography). Reader and author would be synonyms and the technological assistance of relational links and conceptual threading would be such seamless pop-ups to the process of thought that any thinking person will assume that they embody the best approach to any problem solving. Any thinking person will assume that these ìtools of thoughtî (see Howard Rheingold in bibliography) offer the best hope of posing the right questions.

In this thought experiment, even the digital laser printer would not necessarily suggest the print book. Barbara Brannon in her paper on ìThe Laser Printer as an Agent of Changeî (SHARP conference 2001) offers this immense and subtle premise; ìIt is the fluid, unfixed nature of the assembly of tiny dots forming the shape of laser-printed letters that endows this invention with such transformative power.î This ìunfixing of typographyî , in her words, sends the transmission of ideas, both text and illustration, into a state of mutability and momentary appearance. The various print-outs only confirm the proliferation of implications of a star field of dots. At the same time, the momentary transition between latency and print fuser fixing confirms each writer as a publisher, each manuscript as print and each copy as an original.

Now lets say, out of all probabilities, that the the paper book and a distinctive print reading mode is invented within the context of this long venerated tradition of an effervescent, screen based reading mode.

I suggest that the paper book would supply a suddenly perceived deficiency. Then, with the advent of the concrete prototype of the paper book in print reading mode which invites interaction between fixed works, something else happens; a different economy of thought is introduced in which an individual reading action is attributed to each individual, standing, isolated in time and cultural locale across time. Like the haptic attributes, another array of attributes of the physical book would emerge which is associated with deep features of consciousness itself.

Codex Companion of Consciousness

According to Antonio Damasio human consciousness is a by-product of our own insular corporality.(see bibliography) The evolutionary story begins with basic bionic response to environment, followed by the emergence of emotion which prompted the emergence of feeling. Two different things, emotion and feeling: emotion is what a third party can observe while feeling is our own private negotiation of emotion.

Anyway, experiencing and dealing with emotion lead to core consciousness, a state our species shares with many others. Core consciousness leads to extended consciousness in which projections of past and future are overlaid. Using and mapping all the layers of perception, including the reflexivity that enables us to observe ourselves doing all this, is particularly human, although not necessarily exclusively human.

Other animals, especially those domesticated, may also be well along in development of extended consciousness. On the other hand, it is also possible that we are introducing this little invention, or as Demasio said, ìevolutionary accidentî into non bionic species. One of the inventions of non bionic consciousness may be the book.

Demasio notes that consciousness is a weird artifact or by-product of isolation within a body, within a corporality. The traditional book does fit that precondition. It is a conceptual work conveyed by a physical object. But books are not conscious; they are something even weirder. Books are constructs of our own consciousness migrated out of our body. This explains a lot of stuff including why we use anatomical terms to describe book structure and intellectual precepts to consider content or why books aggregate so well into societies of their own that we call libraries.

That books are constructs of our own consciousness migrated out of our body is a fit for some other things. What about the seclusion of book reading? “In parallel with representing the printed words and displaying the conceptual knowledge required to understand what I wrote, your mind also displays something else, that you rather than anyone else are doing the reading and the understanding of the text.”p.10 A premise of the neurological perspective on consciousness is that we own our own minds and that an audience listening to the same lecture will, nevertheless, be engendering individual owned and insular constructs of what is being conveyed.

In this context, book reading contrasts with the lack of privacy sensed while reading a web page. Further, the web page moves tangentially via optional links, escaping any sense of ownership of the conveyed content. The web content is not an insular consciousness migrated out of the body. Instead it is a virulence of meanings migrated into the body.

So what new kind of consciousness reflexively maps itself in cyberspace? Can a network of computers ignite its own consciousness even though it has no body? A distributed consciousness possibly, it just couldn’t evolve our accidental, insular kind. Granting evolutionary process to any relation between human consciousness and synthetic ìconsciousnessî, we are both going our separate ways, however post human we may become (see Katherine Hayles in bibliography). For now and far into the future the physical book is our only companion of consciousness.

(4) Real Reading – confirming the fourth mode

The implications of a fourth, screen based reading mode are consequential. At issue is the integrity and continuity of reading. Students of the book and of the history of reading may be ready to ride this wave, but is all this stuff real? What is needed is verification that the parent modes define each other, but that they are now changing as a result of their merge into a composite reading mode. What is needed is confirmation that a composite reading mode has emerged.

It follows from the present discussion that the composite reading mode should (1) be rich in thresholding between the parent modes, (2) should merge reader behaviors, and (3) should display ever increasing technological dependencies and mediations between readers and content.

Dissolved Thresholds – an intuitive indicator

Sometimes two people in the same room will converse via email. It does not occur to either to turn to speak to the other because they are writing as if speaking. Likewise the threshold between print reading and visual viewing is encountered and crossed, unconsciously and repeatedly, with each website visit. Watch your self and others during a PowerPoint presentation. Or note yourself browsing, automatically writing to yourself as your browser strings your visits and the visited sites report their referers. Note the Google search providing both the live URL and the cached URL, both what you read now and what you could have read before, providing a whole text of rewritings.

Merged Behaviors – a convincing indicator

With screen based, on-line reading, the behaviors associated with the parent modes are churned and blended together. These are the behaviors of seclusionary print reading, the behaviors of the public forum associated with the oral reading mode and the behaviors of specific exchange between writer and recipient. The reading of a Website simultaneously provides the seclusion and ownership of the scrolled reading, an awareness that the content is, at the same time, globally and publicly shared and an acting on provocation to respond and advance repartee with the site master.

Changed Change – a disturbing indicator

The arrow of time is at work here and there is no return. Just as evolutionary sequences cannot be reversed, so increasing dependence of reading on technological support seems irreversible. Greater separation and alienation of the reader from the message seems inevitable.(see Bill Joy in the bibiolography) Believability, authentication and a trust in search engines is not the whole issue. There is the jeopardy that the plug can be pulled. There is nothing darker than a dark screen. But even turned on, deep down we know that the screen presentation is not what it seems to be. The act of reading can then begin to offend our inherent kinetics of understanding. If the paradigm shift of the fourth reading mode is the advent of access methods commensurate with knowledge, we will also need a paradigm shift of some kind to enable readers to do more than view the change itself.

It is difficult to add anything to the literature ascribing revolutionary change to the advent of digital communication. However, the advent of a fourth, composite reading mode comes close to adding to the hyperbole. Such a new reading mode does not supersede the future of the parent modes. The various reading modes will continue to develop in parallel, but the composite fourth mode may bring a focus and further definition to the interactions of its parent modes.

please continue to part three