Loud

How long till I do to the books what I’m now doing to the music? I have issues with the Kindle’s business model and control structure, but clearly it’s a signpost. As I wrote recently in On Paper, books, as we know them, are toast. Their future is as objets d’art and antiques, and this is a good thing.

ongoing · Empty Walls – Tim Bray

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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.

How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com – Steven Johnson

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But there’s a deep, perhaps tragic, flaw in Bray’s thinking, at least when it comes to those books. He’s assuming that a book remains a book when its words are transferred from printed pages to a screen. But it doesn’t. A change in form is always, as well, a change in content. That is unavoidable, as history tells us over and over again. One reads an electronic book differently than one reads a printed book - just as one reads a printed book differently than one reads a scribal book and one reads a scribal book differently than one reads a scroll and one reads a scroll differently than one reads a clay tablet.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Clutter – Nicholas Carr

The ongoing evolution of reading seems to have hit a spurt of some kind with the release of the second Kindle and Stanza on the iPhone and other developments. This has prompted a lot of commentary, including my own, and most of them fall along predictable lines.

My thoughts have focused on two issues:

• On the collapse of two modes of text, reading versus communicative text, and how that results in a inferior hybrid form of reading. (Love is but a twitter away)

• On the total disregard by the technological faction of the interface, design, experience and cognitive qualities of reading printed books. (An ode to Readability, The problem with publishing, Ebooks and the senses)

I own a Sony PRS-505 and I love it. I use it to bring back the joy into reading online articles. Long essays, posts or articles are shuffled off to a virtual printer which saves them all in PDF form, sized for the ereader, all in a folder which I then throw onto the PRS and read while drinking a good cup of coffee. This has injected a tiny little extra pleasure into reading these online articles and I love the device for it.

I also use it to sample books, and since I’m mostly interested in the classics these days¹, the lack of Amazon’s Kindle store here in the UK hasn’t been much of an issue for me.

My worries concern the attitudes of the technical caste. Writers, both optimists and pessimists, rarely fail to mention the specific issues that trouble the current and near future generations of devices. Steven Johnson mentions the changing modes of reading and Nicholas Carr mentions the same qualities I highlight in Ebooks and the senses, although he fails to mention that it’s a stance with more scientific weight behind it than the printed book’s detractors allow.

The technological caste seem intent on dooming us to walk down the path we’ve already suffered through with the web: A complete disregard for design, typography, aesthetics and general readability; and a wilful ignorance of the user experience qualities of the form’s ‘predecessors’.

I wonder if Joe Wikert really understands the damage that would be done by injected animated ads into longform books (mentioned in The problem with publishing)? I wonder if Tim Bray and Steven Johnson really believe that the user interface and experience design of ereaders will surpass that of books in the near future, when the modern desktop interface is little more than a glossed up version of a flawed thirty year old paradigm? The technological history of human-computer interface design is a history of devices just good enough not to get thrown out of the window in an uncontrollable, frothy rage of fury and frustration.

HTML5 poses to make web development less secure, more complicated and more expensive² and publishers are poised to ignore what little progress the web has made as they develop the epub format and compatible devices. That they should consider accepting even less typographic control and design capabilities than what you even get in IE 6 would blow my mind were it not so predictable and consistent.

I certainly think that ebooks and printed books are economically complementary. Ebooks are an excellent way to cheaply read the rubbish most publishers call books today³ if you have to because of your work or hobbies and are a usable way of doing a first, initial read of the few good books that are released.

Which you then buy in print, of course.