The Future of the Book
What is an electronic book, anyway? How did it come about? Consider the difference between a printed and an electronic book. Is an e-book still a book? In what ways? Has the book died?
The history of the electronic book reaches as far back as Vennevar Bush’s landmark proposal for the Memex, a device built upon the notion that technology could provide a digital home for countless books that could be cross-referenced, annotated, and read all through this single device. While this device remained a mere theoretical proposal, it nonetheless began the steady rethinking of the book that progressed alongside the growth of the digital medium.
As soon as text processing became feasible, digital books began to form, advancing from the early Apple HyperCard platform to CDs, born digital works hosted online, to the modern day e-book built for consumption in a centralized e-reader.
One of the earliest examples of such a work was Thomas and Mohr’s If Monks Had Macs. This work characterized the experimental early days of digital works, attempting to explore the idea of what a book could be when released from the bindings of an inherently linear format. The technology was limited, but the result was a book that was itself a monastic library of texts to explore, hinting at the promise of what could be accomplished.
In time, video, audio, pictures, decorations, interactive elements, games, branching narratives; all of this would be experimented with in what would come to be labeled digital storytelling. This is where the difficulty comes into play, as it raises the question: where does the “book” begin and end in this new digital realm? If a book with an embedded video still counts as a book, then does an interactive video with embedded books also count? Both can be read by the same device and both convey information. Is a book only that which is read? Then is a video composed only of text just a book with self-turning pages?
These seem like silly questions, but much of the confusion and ambiguity comes down to the fact that we’ve become rather attached to the book-as-codex. A book is some variation of rectangle, maybe a square or other shapes if you’re getting fancy, but it must have pages that are turned with text arrayed in certain expected ways. This is not the only form of a “book” though. Perhaps it’s what matches the literal definition of “book,” but not the notion of it, the purpose, or the history. The codex, for all of its legacy, is still recent compared to the likes of scrolls and tablets. A scroll, in essence, is radically different from a book—yet there are similar conventions and plenty of familiarities. The form is different, the way one interacts with it is different, but the essence—an external means of recording and conveying information—remains the same. This is a transition which is repeating itself in some ways.
The e-book maintains many of the conventions established by the book. The general layout is much the same, as are the fonts, the spacing, the text colors, and most notably the use of pages. This is notable precisely because it is completely unnecessary in a digital environment—an e-book, like a webpage, can simply scroll infinitely, and indeed many html books do precisely this for the sake of simplicity. Despite this, pages are employed precisely because it is something expected of a book, as is its linear nature. One does not expect to be able to jump around a book as one might a webpage. Hyperlinks are employed for convenience, but not often as a means of actual storytelling. The story itself is expected to unravel linearly and in a predictable manner. Despite the experimentation of earlier eras, the e-book has arisen largely as a digital facsimile of the physical thing, a true “electronic book.” How long precisely this will remain the case is unknown, that it can be assumed a certain degree of inertia and desire for the familiar will keep books much the same for some time now.
Ultimately, a medium is defined by its limits and the testing thereof. A photographer may take a picture of but a small rectangle of life yet desire to take simultaneously a picture of the world all around himself, to capture not just an image but the totality of a moment that could be relived as if time had truly frozen around them. Yet technology produces limits and the photographer must work within these limits. Such an experience cannot yet be captured let alone relived. A camera can only capture one bit of light in one direction, and working within this limitation photographers have created an art that uses the limited perspective to highlight moments and details and create new aesthetics. The question is, what does the photograph become when the limits of the frame are gone? Surely the value of the narrow focus won’t be lost, but a whole new world will be opened in parallel, one that may be seen as something altogether different. This may sound silly, but it has already happened once. It came in the form of the video camera, and it produced a series of pictures which, when strung together, simulated movement, simulated life and fuller moments, and this became a new medium, a new art, a new field.
Books as yet have been produced in a linear fashion because this, effectively, was the limitation of the medium. What happens when these limits are removed though? Is the book the limitation, the frame as it were, or is the book the essence or the purpose? Once these limits are fully removed, once writers and creators fully embrace this unchained state, will it diverge into something altogether different? Will digital stories, as with movies were to pictures, be seen as a new art related yet divorced from the old? Right now we are arguable at the point where, with e-books, we have a new medium yet an old terminology, just as the movies of old once were bound up in old terminology, known as “motion pictures.” Eventually this will change, and, understandably, the book will change with it, or rather something altogether new will be born from the book.
At the end of the day though, books are containers—they contain information in the form of text and images and even textures. E-books and the digital medium as a whole present a new way to house the essence and purpose of the book. If the book is defined as this essence—as a device which transmits knowledge—then it will persist even across this leap. But this definition of book seems far too broad. Strange as it may seem, we may one day speak of “digitals” in the same way we speak of “movies,” abandoning the artifact of “electronic book” to the antiquated past just as we did “motion picture.” All it will take is for e-books to reach their equivalent of sound and music. Just as it was realized that a movie could be more than just moving pictures, so too will it be realized that these digital texts can be more than mere books.
This does not mean the death of the book though; far from it. Just as the movie did not kill the photograph, neither will this new medium kill the old. It will change it, it will transform it into more of an art and less of a practicality—after all, its form will be a choice rather than a necessity. It will be a move away from the standardized, industrialized book of the 1800s and a move back to the artistic labor of the medieval manuscript. A book will become something to behold, something to savor, to interact with, enjoying each turn of the page and intricate detail. Books will never die, but we must be prepared for their role to change.
The Bible is an excellent example of this. While a digital Bible may enhance access, it takes away from the aura of power that a Bible often has, with it's delicate, gold-trimmed pages. The Bible itself is, in a sense, partially a book of art, intended to convey not just the contents but to itself be something of a representative of the whole. Of course, this does vary in some ways between denominations--Protestants favor simplicity and would likely have the fewest qualms with the digital Bible, their Bibles already often being bare-bones affairs (at least compared to the Bibles of old). On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, it can be hard to imagine the Orthodox ever accepting a digital Bible, as the Bible itself is for the Orthodox community something which ought to reflect the glory behind their faith. You see the same philosophy in the design of churches, with Protestant churches favoring the simple and humble while Orthodox churches still favor the highly elaborate and mystical, the goal being in part for the Orthodox to create the experience that this is a sacred place separate from the outside world while the Protestant simply want to create a place that is welcoming and if anything an active part of the world. But, now that's wandering off into religion a tad too much.
The aura of the book will keep it prominent within our society even as its role changes. The cheap, mass-produced industrialized book may be slain by the rise of e-books (though not for some time--e-readers remain rather expensive and most booksellers have collaborated to keep e-books at the same price as physical books, greatly reducing the impetus to change), but those books with an aura and a power to them, those will remain as that sense is inseparable from the object itself.
The book achieved its prominence in society due to our need to relay and transmit information. Books bore the weight of this need for millennia, bound as we were to a strictly physical reality, but now, more and more, this burden is being carried by the digital realm. With this weight and pressure removed, the book will change. If anything, the rise of the e-book represents a liberation of the traditional book rather than its destruction. It will be decades more, as matters of cost, inertia, and technological proliferation provide yet more limits, but this change will be inevitable.
The history of the electronic book reaches as far back as Vennevar Bush’s landmark proposal for the Memex, a device built upon the notion that technology could provide a digital home for countless books that could be cross-referenced, annotated, and read all through this single device. While this device remained a mere theoretical proposal, it nonetheless began the steady rethinking of the book that progressed alongside the growth of the digital medium.
As soon as text processing became feasible, digital books began to form, advancing from the early Apple HyperCard platform to CDs, born digital works hosted online, to the modern day e-book built for consumption in a centralized e-reader.
One of the earliest examples of such a work was Thomas and Mohr’s If Monks Had Macs. This work characterized the experimental early days of digital works, attempting to explore the idea of what a book could be when released from the bindings of an inherently linear format. The technology was limited, but the result was a book that was itself a monastic library of texts to explore, hinting at the promise of what could be accomplished.
In time, video, audio, pictures, decorations, interactive elements, games, branching narratives; all of this would be experimented with in what would come to be labeled digital storytelling. This is where the difficulty comes into play, as it raises the question: where does the “book” begin and end in this new digital realm? If a book with an embedded video still counts as a book, then does an interactive video with embedded books also count? Both can be read by the same device and both convey information. Is a book only that which is read? Then is a video composed only of text just a book with self-turning pages?
These seem like silly questions, but much of the confusion and ambiguity comes down to the fact that we’ve become rather attached to the book-as-codex. A book is some variation of rectangle, maybe a square or other shapes if you’re getting fancy, but it must have pages that are turned with text arrayed in certain expected ways. This is not the only form of a “book” though. Perhaps it’s what matches the literal definition of “book,” but not the notion of it, the purpose, or the history. The codex, for all of its legacy, is still recent compared to the likes of scrolls and tablets. A scroll, in essence, is radically different from a book—yet there are similar conventions and plenty of familiarities. The form is different, the way one interacts with it is different, but the essence—an external means of recording and conveying information—remains the same. This is a transition which is repeating itself in some ways.
The e-book maintains many of the conventions established by the book. The general layout is much the same, as are the fonts, the spacing, the text colors, and most notably the use of pages. This is notable precisely because it is completely unnecessary in a digital environment—an e-book, like a webpage, can simply scroll infinitely, and indeed many html books do precisely this for the sake of simplicity. Despite this, pages are employed precisely because it is something expected of a book, as is its linear nature. One does not expect to be able to jump around a book as one might a webpage. Hyperlinks are employed for convenience, but not often as a means of actual storytelling. The story itself is expected to unravel linearly and in a predictable manner. Despite the experimentation of earlier eras, the e-book has arisen largely as a digital facsimile of the physical thing, a true “electronic book.” How long precisely this will remain the case is unknown, that it can be assumed a certain degree of inertia and desire for the familiar will keep books much the same for some time now.
Ultimately, a medium is defined by its limits and the testing thereof. A photographer may take a picture of but a small rectangle of life yet desire to take simultaneously a picture of the world all around himself, to capture not just an image but the totality of a moment that could be relived as if time had truly frozen around them. Yet technology produces limits and the photographer must work within these limits. Such an experience cannot yet be captured let alone relived. A camera can only capture one bit of light in one direction, and working within this limitation photographers have created an art that uses the limited perspective to highlight moments and details and create new aesthetics. The question is, what does the photograph become when the limits of the frame are gone? Surely the value of the narrow focus won’t be lost, but a whole new world will be opened in parallel, one that may be seen as something altogether different. This may sound silly, but it has already happened once. It came in the form of the video camera, and it produced a series of pictures which, when strung together, simulated movement, simulated life and fuller moments, and this became a new medium, a new art, a new field.
Books as yet have been produced in a linear fashion because this, effectively, was the limitation of the medium. What happens when these limits are removed though? Is the book the limitation, the frame as it were, or is the book the essence or the purpose? Once these limits are fully removed, once writers and creators fully embrace this unchained state, will it diverge into something altogether different? Will digital stories, as with movies were to pictures, be seen as a new art related yet divorced from the old? Right now we are arguable at the point where, with e-books, we have a new medium yet an old terminology, just as the movies of old once were bound up in old terminology, known as “motion pictures.” Eventually this will change, and, understandably, the book will change with it, or rather something altogether new will be born from the book.
At the end of the day though, books are containers—they contain information in the form of text and images and even textures. E-books and the digital medium as a whole present a new way to house the essence and purpose of the book. If the book is defined as this essence—as a device which transmits knowledge—then it will persist even across this leap. But this definition of book seems far too broad. Strange as it may seem, we may one day speak of “digitals” in the same way we speak of “movies,” abandoning the artifact of “electronic book” to the antiquated past just as we did “motion picture.” All it will take is for e-books to reach their equivalent of sound and music. Just as it was realized that a movie could be more than just moving pictures, so too will it be realized that these digital texts can be more than mere books.
This does not mean the death of the book though; far from it. Just as the movie did not kill the photograph, neither will this new medium kill the old. It will change it, it will transform it into more of an art and less of a practicality—after all, its form will be a choice rather than a necessity. It will be a move away from the standardized, industrialized book of the 1800s and a move back to the artistic labor of the medieval manuscript. A book will become something to behold, something to savor, to interact with, enjoying each turn of the page and intricate detail. Books will never die, but we must be prepared for their role to change.
The Bible is an excellent example of this. While a digital Bible may enhance access, it takes away from the aura of power that a Bible often has, with it's delicate, gold-trimmed pages. The Bible itself is, in a sense, partially a book of art, intended to convey not just the contents but to itself be something of a representative of the whole. Of course, this does vary in some ways between denominations--Protestants favor simplicity and would likely have the fewest qualms with the digital Bible, their Bibles already often being bare-bones affairs (at least compared to the Bibles of old). On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, it can be hard to imagine the Orthodox ever accepting a digital Bible, as the Bible itself is for the Orthodox community something which ought to reflect the glory behind their faith. You see the same philosophy in the design of churches, with Protestant churches favoring the simple and humble while Orthodox churches still favor the highly elaborate and mystical, the goal being in part for the Orthodox to create the experience that this is a sacred place separate from the outside world while the Protestant simply want to create a place that is welcoming and if anything an active part of the world. But, now that's wandering off into religion a tad too much.
The aura of the book will keep it prominent within our society even as its role changes. The cheap, mass-produced industrialized book may be slain by the rise of e-books (though not for some time--e-readers remain rather expensive and most booksellers have collaborated to keep e-books at the same price as physical books, greatly reducing the impetus to change), but those books with an aura and a power to them, those will remain as that sense is inseparable from the object itself.
The book achieved its prominence in society due to our need to relay and transmit information. Books bore the weight of this need for millennia, bound as we were to a strictly physical reality, but now, more and more, this burden is being carried by the digital realm. With this weight and pressure removed, the book will change. If anything, the rise of the e-book represents a liberation of the traditional book rather than its destruction. It will be decades more, as matters of cost, inertia, and technological proliferation provide yet more limits, but this change will be inevitable.
The Book as Art
What is an artist’s book? How did art in books change from Medieval manuscript to the “modern aesthetic”? Has the book become less a book than a work of art via focusing on artist’s work?
In a sense, the book has always been a work of art. The burden placed upon it and the technology utilized have changed and in some ways diminished this art, but the form of the book has remained one open to art in a multitude of forms. The mere construction of the book can be a matter of art after all, down to the quality of its pages and ink and the care and intricacy put into binding it all together, but this is only the start of what it can accomplish.
Going back to even the earliest days the book often carried an artistic dimension, employing images and illustrations that, in many ways, reached their peak in the west with the medieval manuscript. These manuscripts, bound up in the holy aura of religion, became labors of devotion and the wealthy were rather willing to pay a high price for such an elaborate work, often personalized just for them. Time could be poured into each individual book and every detail surrounding it, leading to works that, even to this day, are sights to behold.
The advance toward secularism did not halt this artistic trend though, with the book now becoming a means of housing the growing intellectual and aesthetic revolution. Books now carried intricate sketches, diagrams, and works of art, embodied perhaps most notably in the scion of humanism, Albrecht Durer. Knowledge of the natural world, of humanity and the growing sciences were vital to share and, lacking photography, the only choice was to draw by hand the world one wished to share.
The growth of printing steadily changed this. The limitations of the early printing press restricted choices in color, often rendering an item monotone. While color was not impossible, cleaning the plates and applying new ink for each variant color was time consuming, and the more the demand for books grew, the more the limitations increased. Attempts began to create a new sort of art within this, focusing on woodcut prints and fonts.
New restrictions arose as the production of books reached an industrial scale, with the quality of paper and text and the overall book declining to render it affordable to the mass market. This if anything seemed to represent the death of the book as art and the rise of the book as a purely functional device, little more than a means of conveying information at the cheapest rate possible.
The artistic side of the book survived though as artists and the avant-garde began to look at new ways in which a book could be construed and how art might intertwine with it. Illustrations began to better blend with and highlight the text, and the text itself became a focus through the manipulation of fonts and the application of new principles, from streamlining to Bauhaus. Each movement attempted to apply its own aesthetic to the book and in the process led to a resurgence in the book as art.
Nonetheless it remains the case even today that these more artistic books, like their medieval predecessors, are often unique and costly affairs, quite out of the grasp of the average reader. Nonetheless the project remains with many artists and writers today thinking of the book as something more than just a means of conveying text. Children’s books are, strangely enough, the most prevalent example of this, employing creative designs to enhance the presentation and purpose of the book, and in a way calls back to the medieval manuscripts full of creativity and artistry. If anything you could say that this is the true book and that it is in fact the industrial book, with its cheap factory-made pages and mass-produced features that are the true oddity. This too is inescapable though, as book are the primary means of spreading information, and one of the cornerstones of modern society is just that, being able to easily access and share information. Industrialization--and the associated decline in quality of books--was necessary for the book to spread so far and be so affordable. Illustrations had to be minimized to cut costs and book covers became less about art and more about marketing, which is why there's often enough a disconnect between the cover that's trying to sell you a thing and the book itself. They know at the end of the day that you're going to look at the cover, glance at the blurbs and summary, read the first few pages, maybe a chapter, and then buy or not buy. That's why so many books are weighted toward that first chapter, and especially that first paragraph, and most of all that first sentence.
There also exist such works as Kellner’s 71125: Fifty Years of Silence which seek to create a book that is not read so much as experienced. As the rise of digital books continues, this trend will no doubt grow, the book becoming less a mere vehicle for information and more a vehicle for experiences, expression, and art. Suffice it to say, it'll be interesting to see what happens as the book becomes less industrialized and returns more to its artistic and creative roots.