State of the Web Report

My “State of the Web” Report is on the future of reading and how e-books are going to change the way we view literature. The first article I read was titled “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write,” by Stephen Johnson. This article was not only informative, but quite fun to read. Johnson speaks of the “aha” moment he had when he realized that the concept of books as we know it is changing. He describes sitting in a restaurant reading a novel about business and technology on his new Kindle when he had the sudden urge to read Zadie Smith's novel "On Beauty." With a few clicks, he was able to change books, authors, and genres and all before his meal had arrived.

However, Johnson does not hesitate to point out that as convenient as e-books are going to make our world, there are countless problems that come with them. He sites his own experience in the restaurant where just as easily as he was able to buy a new book, he was able to stop reading the previous one. “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.”

Johnson compares how the advancement of e-books and the Kindle are similar in the way that they are going to change books as the Gutenberg did all those years ago. Whereas with the Gutenberg people were able to print many copies of the same text which lead to a “surge in innovation” which changed the world, with the Kindle and Google Books, people are able to search through millions of books for any variety of searches, ranging from words to genre to subject. According to Johnson, 2009 is the year of innovation and the beginning of a new age of technology which is going to lead to the same type of knowledge boom that was originally witnessed with the printing press.

The first example that Johnson sites of e-readers changing how we deal with books comes in the form of the impulse buy. Because we are going to have millions of books at our fingertips, we are going to be able to buy any book on whim simply because it is right there. There will no longer be the need to have someone recommend a book, write it down, drive to the bookstore, and purchase it. Instead, all that rests between us and a book are a few simple clicks, whether it be on our Smart Phones, our Kindles, or our Microsoft Readers. However, as beneficial as these impulse buys are going to be for authors, Johnson also believes that they are going to be just as detrimental. If one is reading a novel which does not capture his attention, he can very easily drop that novel and pick up another one without a second thought. As Johnson puts it, “the bookstore is now following you around wherever you go” and because of this convenience, readers will no longer feel the same sense of loyalty about the particular book which they are reading since it can so easily be replaced. Also, people will no longer be as captivated by what they are reading if they have the Internet at their fingertips and can switch at will from their novels to their emails.

With technology changing the way we read, it is only a matter of time before people's “blogs” on books become just as relevant to reading as the books themselves. With the annotation- friendly version of e-books that are soon to come, people will be able to comment on any page, paragraph, or even sentence of a book. It will essentially become the world's biggest book club. As Johnson points out, the activity of reading will go from being a “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.

With this type of breakthrough, it is possible that authors are going to be writing in terms that are more convenient and enticing for the e-book. Authors are going to write keeping in mind how certain pages and passages are going to be viewed by bloggers, and how popular these blogs are going to be ranked on Google. “Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.”

The Kindle is without a doubt going to change the way we view books, but only time can tell what kind of change is going to come about because of them. As Johnson states, “We all know the story of how the information-wants-to-be-free ethos of the Web threatened the newspapers with extinction. Wouldn't it be ironic if books turned out to be their savior?”





The second article which I read for my report was titled “Book End” by Jacob Weisberg. This article was very interesting to read because Weisberg made a conscious decision to not go overboard with the joys and wonders that come with the Kindle and Sony Reader, yet still managed to convey his point. Although Weisberg admits that there are many technological problems that come with the e-book readers, such as its black-and-white display, its lack of built-in lighting, and the robotic intonation of the text-to-voice feature, it is still a marvel of a tool that is going to revolutionize the way we read. According to this article, the 550 year marriage between book and print is coming to an end, and therefore “printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.”

As much as Weisberg brags about being a Kindle owner, he does admit that reading something on a Kindle is not always better than an actual print book, such as the case with art books, children's story books, or when one wishes to read in the bathtub. However, even with their inherent drawbacks, Kindles appear to be the better option for Weisberg, even though he is a publisher believes that due to the Kindle, physical books are ending their life cycle. He does not believe that the end of the print book means the end of literature; it is merely going to be a change from what we are used to. E-books should in no way take away from our love of print books. Instead, they are merely going to provide another more convenient option which people may or may not chose to utilize. As Weisberg points out, since we do so much on computers nowadays, it is only a matter of time before “books may again thrive as expressions of craft and design. Their decline as useful objects may allow them to flourish as design objects.”

However, as far as publishers go, their future looks far less optimistic. With Amazon selling books at a loss just to promote the Kindle, it is only a matter of time before Amazon decides to capitalize on their invention. Perhaps in the future, writers will no longer need publishers and will instead work directly with Amazon. “If the answer is primarily cultural arbitration and editing, the publishing behemoths might dwindle while a much lighter weight model of publishing—clever kids working from coffee shops in Brooklyn—emerges.”

As is true with any invention, the Internet and Kindle have their advantages and drawbacks. Although these advancements will probably hurt publishers and newspapers and journalists alike, they have at the same time given free range to writers to experiment in a new realm with a much wider audience.