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

¶

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

¶

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.

Our grim e-book future

Kottke hits the nail on the head when it comes to issues with our current and future ereader regime. I might add that we underestimate the cognitive and learning benefits of a tactile reading interface (i.e. books). The olfactory and tactile benefits of a book are also not just a case of sentimentality or emotion but are of considerable pragmatic value.¹

Smell works extraordinary well at improving recall and memory of emotional details and can even improve recall of declarative memory in some contexts.²

The hype around the iPhone has in no small way been around the enormous benefits of its rudimentary touch interface; crude by the standards of the history of objects and tools, revolutionary by computing standards.

The book offers an integrated, multisensory, easy to use learning experience. Ebooks of some kind might be the future of publishing, but they will need to up their game considerably if they are offer benefits that match that of the interface they are ostensibly replacing.

I think that ebooks will take over the publishing industry due to their economic benefits That said, there will be demand for certain books in print format because the benefits to the reading experience are unmatched. The book’s value as a memento comes at a distant, but still important, second place.

For example, I just read Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” on my Sony PRS-505 and went out yesterday, as soon as I finished it, and bought it in printed form.

Once ebooks have taken over as the primary format for publishing, the single most consistent and reliable predictor of the quality of a book that a book consumer can rely on, will be whether there is evidence of a demand for it in print from readers of its ebook version.³

First up, I saw a display that supports animations. You probably know your Kindle can’t show anything other than static text/photos. A prototype I saw allowed for simple animations. I say “simple” because I’m talking about animated line-art, not video like you see on YouTube. Nevertheless, it was implemented in a manner that lends itself nicely to simple, motion-filled ad blocks on a portion of the display. Although the Kindle’s content is currently ad-free, I’d like to see Amazon enable ad support so that publishers/authors will have a new way to monetize their content.

Joe Wikert’s Kindleville Blog: All Kindle, All the Time: My Visit to E Ink

That, right there, is the core problem with the publishing and media industry today. Any sensible person who has used one of these devices (mine is a Sony PRS-505) would see improved animation capabilities as something that could, dramatically, improve the user interface of these devices.

The effect of proper use of, even limited, animation on the user experience is stunning and it bodes well for the future of ereaders that this is being worked on.

But equally stunning are the thoughts and attitudes that the otherwise excellent and intelligent Joe Wikert expressed above. Animated ads in the context of static text are a cancer on reading.

The way our eyes and brain are built means that any motion on the periphery of our vision has an irresistible pull on the readers’ attention; animated ads degrade the reading experience more than anything else that’s within the power of the publisher to destroy, leach, screw up or sabotage.

Raw literature used to resemble speech, in its messiness, idiosyncrasy, (& charm). Spelling was only made uniform very late, by printers, not by authors –which explains the idiosyncrasies of medieval authors.

Opacity – Nassim Taleb

This reminds me of some of the controversy surrounding the work of Iceland’s Nobel Laureate, Halldór Laxnes. The spelling of Icelandic had been standardised just the year before he published his first book¹. The standard of spelling settled on by the government was based on the origin of each word; in effect they changed the accepted written language of the time to more closely match that of the Sagas.

The competing view at the time was that spelling should follow pronunciation; the written language should follow the spoken, not vice versa.

Which is the approach Halldór Laxnes used throughout his career and it has a distinct effect on the feel and tone and emotional quality of his novels. It renders his books even less translatable than most.

Finally.

Icelandic media has been hunting with live ammo over the past few days.¹ They have exposed two secret payments from Landsbanki (responsible for the Icesave debacle) and FL Group (the group of investors behind the collapsed Glitnir bank) to the Independence Party in 2006.²

The Independence Party has been in power in Iceland for the most of the last 18 years and are responsible for the policies and decisions that led to the collapse of the Icelandic economy. They were responsible for the deregulation that made those donors billionaires, the privatisations that made those donors billionaires and a host of regulatory decisions that continued to make those donors billions.

The payments were made in secret, just days before the law was changed prohibiting payments of exactly this kind.

Just these two payments together are greater than the entirety of all donations received by the competing Coalition Party (our social democrats) that year and are at least a hundred times larger than the biggest donation received by the Left-Green party.

It’s hard to see how the Independence Party can spin their way out of this one, with only two weeks to the election.

I linked to the little joyous wonder that is the Readability bookmarklet a while back. Dorothea Salo’s blog post on this little gift to us all, highlighted something that has been bothering me as well.

With all this tsuris about the web removing our ability to read and comprehend long texts, I wonder: is it us, or is it abysmal web typography? No wonder print seems easier; we’ve had centuries to polish print design canons to a high sheen. The infrastructure of the web… started off clueless about design and has only gotten worse.

Caveat Lector  » Blog Archive  » Readability

In my experience as a person responsible for websites ranging from the atrocious¹ to the tolerable, support for typography in the web browser is fine.

It’s more than fine. On web browsers with good CSS support and decent use of native platform text rendering APIs, a web page is capable of a surprising level of typographic beauty. Even the sub-standard browsers are capable of reaching, at the very least, the level of a mass market paperback set by a competent, but not inspired, designer.

Which isn’t to contradict Dorothea’s point. If anything, it emphasises it. There’s no reason why typography should suck on the web, except for a rampant disregard for aesthetics that exists throughout the web value chain. The web infrastructure in terms of social capital, design culture and enterprise server software is almost completely devoid of anything that is beautiful.

The only thing we can hope for is a bit of simpering glossiness and a splash of garish colours², if we’re lucky.

Even the sites which are lauded for their “coolness” are just the online equivalent of a slob with halitosis who thinks he’s cool because he’s wearing a bright green faux Armani suit.³

But even if the culture wasn’t dominated by eighteen year olds who think anything looks good with shine and a twitch, it would still be largely unreadable. Design on the web is about services and sales.

Services on the institutional or enterprise level rarely hire a designer of any sort. Even if one is hired, and if the situations are anything like the ones I’ve been in, they are mute and powerless in affecting the final product. The cultural environments of the organisations in question always favour either MBAs or engineers.

Or both, in the case of Google, if Doug Bowman’s post is anything to go by.

Sales are the other driving force of the web, ultimately the motive power behind everything from product pages to advertising, and beauty, unfortunately, has precious little sales value.

Copy, placement, context and sleazy use of cognitive psychology are the modern tools for driving sales and they do so while providing the MBAs and the engineers with the numbers they so love. It’s a mechanical process, devoid of human emotion or sympathy with the victim.

The web is owned by people who aren’t artists. Those of us who are artists are silenced by virtue of the roles we play in the commercial web and our place in the social hierarchy.

Those who run the web have chosen the broad highway of toxic sales mechanics⁴ and, as the dominant culture, they offer those of us who care for something more, for something more human, few opportunities for wandering the narrow pathways of aesthetics and compassion.

The preceding blog post (Love is but a twitter away), for example, miss out on a lot of optimisations that have become par for course in our age of efficient punditry that’s unencumbered by facts.

To wit, some advice for myself for future blog posts:¹

• The opening is horribly inefficient. I should have started with a link to some social media punditry blog and called them out as idiots. The ruder and more off base, the better.²

• The title makes no sense. What does it mean? People who need to know exactly how things work—be in the “know”—don’t have time for phrases that just sound vaguely poetic.

• It should have been concrete and actionable: “15 reasons why social media is destroying our culture” and the post itself should have been broken up into nicely digestible bullet points with plenty of bolded and italicised pithy phrases.

• The ambiguous and conflicted nature of the post was counterproductive. Take a stand! Don’t just worry that things might be changing. Don’t just try and present the image of two struggling trends as food for thought. Pick a side and burn the heretics! Figuratively speaking, of course.

• Link to both the cheerleaders and naysayers of social media and accompany each link with an outrageous exaggeration or misrepresentation of their views. Do that for both the side you agree with and those you disagree with.³

• Send all of them passive-aggressive e-mails letting them know that you admire them all but that they’re cunts if they don’t link to your post.

• Link to a few of the posts that are on the front page of Techmeme. Insert flagrant, off-topic statements just to carry links to the headliners that are completely irrelevant, just on the off chance that they might bring traffic.⁴

• Work a pitch for consultation services somewhere.⁵

• End the post with a facile statement masquerading as a question in an attempt to sound more diplomatic and spur comments.

• Twitter about writing the post.

• Twitter about publishing the post.

• Twitter about the idiots that disagree with the post.

• Twitter about the idiots that agree with the post.⁶

• Digg/Reddit it and start an argument in the comment threads on each service, use sock puppets to fake consensus.⁷

• Twitter about some fake controversy I’ve started on Digg or Reddit.

• Sit back and watch the money roll in. What? No ads? Bad, bad blogger! No linkie linkie munchies⁸ for you!

As you see, the blogging “industry” has developed a state of the art, standard practice for how these things are done. Ignore it at your own peril. Mainstream media beware!

The communicative nature of social media is presented as an evolution, development—progress, even—over the structured mode of writing that presents a single writer’s state of mind as a linguistic image. These two different aspects of the human animal have been set in a conflict by economic and cultural developments and I know no easy way to resolve the feud.

Conversation dooms writing. It’s not that texting breaks our brains or that a wall-to-wall post on facebook somehow cauterises all that is good and true and right from our moral souls. The idiot doom-mongers condemn new interactive communicative media because it provides us with new interactive communities and chant the paradoxical claim that new ways of connecting people somehow isolate them.

It’s not that.

It is a matter of the impossible simultaneous operation of text as writing and text as conversation.

Where people of a previous generation had a clear separation of roles for speech and text, conversation and writing, most people today are conversant in text and illiterate at writing.

They didn’t plan to be that way, they’re not lazy, nor do they suffer of some defect in character. What used to be a characteristic of the civilised person has been lost due to a simple change in priorities and understandable—inevitable—social changes.

Text as conversation interrupts text as writing. It doesn’t work in the same way, doesn’t draw its order, its rationales or structures, from the same centres in the brain and its creativity flows from different, darker, recesses of the soul.

The business of art consists precisely in making understandable and accessible that which might be incomprehensible and inaccessible in the form of reasoning.

Leo Tolstoy – What is Art?

To write as an act of writing is a different state of mind from texting to communicate. Comments, forums, discussions, twitters, facebook and blogs all function as conversation with the standards, protocols and even responses of a social situation.

They carry with them the expectations and obligations borne from their social context; they offer a different world of messages, symbols and metamessages. The frameworks for understanding social media come from a separate mindscape. The social medium of communication you could call texting does not work like writing.

When I sit down to write, even just a short note in my journal¹, I’m not conversing. I’m crafting my thoughts and emotions into text. I try my best to infect you with my feelings and lure your mental state along the path my mind has already travelled. This is not communication or information, this is an attempt to pass on a state of mind as an airborne pathogen. It is a black death as a blight on the soul, passed on from person to person through compassion. It is a form of art unique to the human condition.²

When I sit down to converse, even when it is in writing, I’m thinking about the conversation and the social situation I’m in. I am thinking about relationships, bonds; sometimes about status and career. I’m thinking of history and life. I’m thinking of the care and the vulnerabilities and the obligations of friendship and family.

I’m not sure you can be good at both, texting and writing. Competent, yes. Fluent, even. But, good? I worry that we’ve lost a generation of writers whose priority for the act of writing is to see text as a social function.

Text as conversation and text as writing are lives apart; our lives apart. One is an attempt at obliterating solitude. The other is an exultation of solitude, of its serenity and thoughtfulness, no matter how many people surround you with their chatter.