Book Worm + Tech Nerd = The Future (?)

July 14, 2009

By Liz Suman

I spent the last two and a half hours in the Columbia School of Journalism (on the sixth floor in a really uncomfortable chair). Had I thought to tweet, the message I would have shot into cyberspace would have read something like: “Listening to the Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book Bob Stein tell a room of 100 aspiring book editors, writers, publicists and agents that the print publishing industry as we know it is dead or at least will be soon.” After over two hours of lecture and discussion, half the audience wanted to run and the other half wanted to stay and fight. * Traditional print book publishing should move away from the printed page and onto the screen in an online, subscriber-based community of readers. * “A book is a place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate” (Stein). * Authors should be paid not for selling physical copies of books, but for turning on their monitors and engaging with readers about their work via online comment boards and paragraph-by-paragraph annotations.

These are some of the new roles Stein envisions for readers, writers and books within Comment Press, a user-based reading concept he has developed at the Institute for the Future of the Book, “a small think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens.”

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, one of the Institute’s reading projects, in which seven readers discussed a digital text with one another online. Photo Courtesy of Apt.

Stein’s ideas are timely and provocative as well as jarring and controversial. We all know that the Kindle, Sony Reader, eBooks, and other eReaders are quickly catching on with consumers (Stephen King’s latest novel was originally released straight-to-Kindle), but no one who loves books wants to be told that their tattered copies of James and the Giant Peach and Where the Wild Things Are aren’t sacred let alone obsolete. Stein’s argument that his online, interactive book publishing model will replace the book as a physical object is fundamentally at odds with the traditional, definitive reading experience of sitting down (alone) to read a book (that we can hold in our hands), an experience tonight’s audience was quick to defend with a sea of hands right around the time Stein prophesized that, “Our great grandchildren will think of reading as a social experience.”

Comment Press isn’t the only project Bob has pioneered. Click here for a sample of Comment Press and visit the Institute’s website to learn more about what is probably the most complex, nerdy, and sophisticated set of alternatives to traditional printed matter out there ("Sophie", for example, includes multiple versions of the same text (i.e. The user can view original and revised drafts of the Gettysburg Address just by clicking different links).

I don’t believe physical books will ever become obsolete, whether digital books come to dominate the marketplace or not - The experiences are simply too different. But while online books may not have won the populist reader vote, they definitely give book nerds a lot to think about.

Bob Stein, Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. Photo Courtesy of New York Magazine.

Comments

[Megan Baker]

I was on the beach this weekend and someone with me was reading a novel on a Kindle. I thought about the paperback in my hand. The next time he picked up the reader it would look and feel the same but with new text. Next time I picked up the paperback it would have sand stuck in the binding and soggy rippled pages. It would remind me of the time and place and re-connect me with the story. Long live the printed book.

[Lizard of Awes]

thanks Jo, looks great.

[Lizard of Awes]

Thanks john!

[Joanna]

sorry--fixed!

[john]

thanks, liz. very cool piece.

[reader]

thanks so much!

[reader]

help! i think you forgot the first paragraph of this article. it's weirdly unreadable.