“Now … in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.”
—Harper Lee, writing in O, The Oprah Magazine
THE FOLLOWING IS FROM THE BLOG OF DR. MATT HAYLER:
With websites putting server drones in the sky, computers poised to be in everything, Netflix and Spotify and Tumblr, mobile computing, and the internet being what it is, the future seems, in some small ways, to be here. No flying cars or world peace, and Mars seems further away than ever, but we’re starting to get this whole distributing media thing sorted. Kinda.
Living through dramatic changes is disorienting; times of extreme flux throw up a diversity of paths and no one knows what will stick. During a revolution you can bet it doesn’t seem as cleanly teleological as a history book account. You can bet start and end dates and turning points are rarely clear. Technology and media often work in a similar enough fashion to act as a corollary, as a microcosm of more sweeping social upheaval. We can see how excitement and banality get mixed up and crossover, and are unevenly distributed, and realise how much more this must be true when you want to kill the king, reclaim a voice or break up a country.
A banal example: An old friend, chatting about what I’ve been researching, asked, “So what’s next for e-reading?”
I haven’t really thought about it, I said, e-reading’s just kind of here. After nearly two decades of media fervour, support and vehement detraction, it suddenly feels like all the promises are on the table: The e-ink Kindles might get a little better, but their screens are the standard when it comes to comparisons with the printed page. The iPad might get a little sharper, or change size, but its forms so far have told us what a tablet can be and what minimum it has to do in terms of touch-response and UI.
We’re seeing the beginnings of social reading and multimedia books and they’re pretty much what we thought they’d be; no one knows if they’ll find a mass audience. So what’s next for portable digital reading?
Perhaps it’s just subtle refinement and bedding into the medial landscape, and that may be its most significant sign of strength: E-reading is here, this is what it is; it works; how can we tweak it to be its best? (This is largely how the story of print is told: Gutenberg > tweaking > 600 years of history. After the first few generations, how often did people say, “So what’s next for books?”) Depending on the technology, some books will probably start to have more pictures, video and audio, but how many and how much? Enough to notice the world has changed again?
The hardware is going to iterate fairly blandly from now too, I think, until current desktop speeds (and beyond) can be achieved on tablets which are able to switch between low consumption e-ink (or similar) and retina-level displays. At that stage, when it comes to reproducing hypertextual, searchable and internet-linked text, image, video and audio, what more do we need?
The computer in your pocket or backpack can just get faster and thinner (or pass some rubicon into a wearable/foldable/implantable form that’s as different to the book as cinema is to painting; at it’s most exciting, the Google Glass project feels like this). And with the devices set for a few more generations, the written word seems in no danger of going anywhere. (That fear actually seems pretty quaint by now).
But no doubt the publishing industry is changing. The democratisation of content creation, distribution and price-setting certainly hasn’t played out fully, and I wouldn’t be too surprised by a Netflix/Netflixes-of-everything setup in around 20 years (with boutique offline distribution still going strong in certain print and music circles). For most people’s user experience, this apparently dramatic change to the ecosystem wouldn’t even make much difference—just a twist of process here or there, a wider access, a better thing, but still a very familiar thing.
Am I sad that the big changes in an arena I’ve cared about seem done? Should I be?
I wrote this post on my mobile phone, and that seemed another little memento mori: I feel like I’m living in one future and waiting for another to be invented—or at least made possible or desirable. My everyday technology is the death of all the unpredictable paths that might have been; the nice clean dates are starting to be written down.
Some things, however, gain in strength in direct proportion to their mundanity. Perhaps what’s next for e-reading is its just becoming plain ol’ reading, and that’s important, too. In fact, that’s the only place where it does whatever it will do: Books, mobile phones and internet access all changed the world in their own ways when their forms became boring. Now reading’s next again.
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Dr. Matt Hayler is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Exeter, researching the philosophy and psychology of reading on screen. He blogs at http://4oh4-wordsnotfound.blogspot.com and tweets at @cryurchin.
I never cease to me amazed at people who repeatedly over time, think that it’s all been done now. We’ve seen it all. It’s all about design and refinement now …. One wonders at the limitations of their minds.
I can so easily imagine these same people 6 months before the arrival of the iPhone, the iPad, the cell phone ! and of course the internet.
When mobile reading trends settle down we may have a moment to reflect on the revolutionary recent advances in paper making, printing and on-line print book commerce. Such sectors of print book production literally mapped the terrain for electrophoric screens, screen imaging and ebook commerce. As for mobile reading behaviors, guess where they came from? And screen books have yet to venture across the divide to standardized, persistent, refined device display. Even advances well associated with screen book reading including touch navigation, word searching, remote access and bibliographic utilities are augmenting print as well.
@Howard – I can certainly respect the opinion that something I can’t predict will emerge, I hope it does (always exciting for anyone that enjoys new tech to be completely blown away). But it still feels to me like something’s changed recently. When the iPhone came out at a price point that a large number of people could afford then that seemed ground-breaking (ditto cheap small mobile phones in the 90s). But the Kindle and the iPad everyone could see coming (though maybe not the companies who’d lead these sorts of devices), it was just a matter of time (blogs such as Teleread, for instance, had been speculating for ages. During my MA I cited their rumours of “a future Apple slate device” and had a crack of my own at predicting what such a device might look like/do). They’ve been around a number of years now with little change, and what’s stranger is that no-ones rumour-milling about anything significantly new in the field anymore (strange only in the context of the last few years where e-reading has been really hot on tech blogs).
It’s a similar situation, to my mind, to videogame consoles. The Wii did so well because it seemed like something new in what has, for a long time, been an arms race of graphics, speed, memory, and (recently) multimedia application. Consoles are another great example of something becoming powerful BECAUSE it’s boring, because there’s little more that is truly new that can be brought to the field without its changing entirely (e.g. Virtual Reality). Again, just my $0.02, but as I say in the post, I think it’s a positive for e-reading that maybe it has settled into being what it is.
@Gary – I think you’re right, digitisation’s effect on print is a fascinating area. I’m particularly interested in how some contemporary authors are remediating digital ideas back into printed works (I’ve argued that Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (http://www.visual-editions.com/our-books/tree-of-codes) are in some ways responses to digitisation: http://4oh4-wordsnotfound.blogspot.co.uk/2010_07_01_archive.html and http://www.ntu.ac.uk/writing_technologies/current_journal/124935.pdf).
This is very interesting Matt. Moving content to a responsive environment is something to consider for the future of portable reading. As tablet and mobile readers’ resolutions are much smaller, digital editions in their current form can sometimes be ineffective in delivering the content because not only do the users have to zoom in but they also have to scrool across to read a sentence.