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How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com - The Diigo Meta page

online.wsj.com/...SB123980920727621353.html - Cached - Annotated View

Will Richardson's personal annotations on this page

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Willrich bookmarked on 2009-04-21 connective_reading connective_writing mustread09 books kindle literacy ebooks

I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.

  • The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.'s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business
  • I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways.
  • I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.
  • It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      Some potetntially profound changes right here. But just as I am using Diigo to mark this up for myself and others, I am most interested in the social aspects of reading. I hadn't thought much about the Diigo connection to that until I read this article.
  • Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?
  • In our always-connected, everything-linked world, we sometimes forget that books are the dark matter of the information universe.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      Echoes of Dov Siedman's "How"
  • That's because the modern infosphere is both organized and navigated through hyperlinked pages of digital text, with the most-linked pages rising to the top of Google Inc.'s all-powerful search-results page.
  • But because books have largely been excluded from Google's index -- distant planets of unlinked analog text -- that vast trove of knowledge can't compete with its hyperlinked rivals.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      Really interesting way of putting this, that analog can't compete with hypertext. I wonder how many traditional teachers would argue with that?
  • As a result, 2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      And perhaps another tipping point in the public's understanding and perception of the "tectonic shift" that's occuring.
  • Now, the ability to digitally search millions of books instantly will make finding all that information easier yet again. Expect ideas to proliferate -- and innovation to bloom -- just as it did in the centuries after Gutenberg.
  • Before too long, you'll be able to create a kind of shadow version of your entire library, including every book you've ever read -- as a child, as a teenager, as a college student, as an adult. Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. Entirely new forms of discovery will be possible. Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you've read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven't encountered yet.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      The question I keep coming back to is how do we make this simply a part of our practice and not some "Wow!" process? These concepts and others (when you add the work of the social group around information collection, selection and dissemination) are going to be profound shifts in the process.
  • The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      Some are really going to hate reading that line...
  • In other words, an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      Knew that was coming. I'm wondering if this shift in attention is better or worse or simply different. Can the brain (or will the brain) process information differently, in spurts and snippets, in ways that can be similar in "value" to they ways we now consider continuous attention?
  • Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article -- sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      And here I wonder what the pedagogical and curricular implications are of these shifts to linked reading environments. When I think of the process (ineffective as it may be) that I use to capture and store and link information (as in taking these notes right now) and how different it is or, really how absent that is from classroom teaching, it's scary on some level.
  • As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      And, so? Again, I'm not convinced this is a bad thing, just different. Look at how reading has evolved over the ages. Is this just another step, albeit huge one, in that evolution.
  • Putting books online will also change how we find books -- and talk about them
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      Yes. Imagine doing this to books.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      I'm just struck at this moment how badly I want to be able to engage in a conversation with others about these ideas. The idea that I'm using Diigo to add these meta thoughts creates an expectation of response that is pretty strong. I want a disucssion to happen here, on the page. I'm thinking that I'd almost like to be able to save these threads and the contextual highlights as a blog post, but it would be too disjointed. Guessing I will have to Tweet out this undertaking to see if others might join in.
  • With books becoming part of this universe, "booklogs" will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, "In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.") You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      I find this to be a compelling vision. Others, not so much I'm sure.
  • Think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      Again, this can certainly be cool or chaotic. But I love the way Diigo allows you to do this in small groups. Wouldn't it be cool if we had a diverse "must read article" group where once a week we just came in a picked apart an article from many sides?
  • Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      And then connect those ideas to every blog post, Tweet, etc. Navigating all that meta data will be a hugely different reading skill. Is THAT a new literacy?
  • permanent annuity for the author
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      Love that thought, and the implications that it holds for public writing.
  • Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      This idea kind of tweaks me, I'll admit. That shift in the motivation for writing, for the audience of Google, draws some interesting parallels to writing for the teacher and not oneself or one's audience. As I write these notes, for instance, I am primarily writing for myself, but I am also concious of the potential audience that might read them when I blog about it and tweet it out. This is not for Google, at least not yet.
  • Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers;
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      Tagging on the sentence level. Now that is cool, I think, and I've asked Diigo to allow tagging on the comment or the highlight level in that way.
  • Perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      Yuk. And I don't think it would work, necessarily, as readers would be less apt to promote that prose, right?
  • It's not hard to imagine, for instance, how introductions will be transformed in this new world. Right now, introductions are written with the assumption that people have already bought the book. That won't be the case in the future, when the introduction is given away. It will, no doubt, be written more to entice readers to buy the whole book.
  • The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.
    • willrich
      Willrich on 2009-04-22
      Isn't O'Reilly already doing this?

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