Digital books will change the way we read

The web is transforming how we connect with books. These new relationships will be the basis of new forms of writing and new business models for digital publishing.

By Adam Solove, 5 February 2011

Before we worry about the design or technology behind digital books, we should understand how readers will relate to them. Some of the relationships translate directly from print. Other inspirations come from the time when books were more expensive, from when manuscripts were painstakingly copied by hand, and even from the story-telling and song traditions of preliterate societies.

Stronger relationships with books

Our favorite books are connected to our lives. But digital books can do better.

Our favorite books tell us something about ourselves. Poems that remind us of vacations to Europe. Novels that bring back all the terror of sixth grade. This is the level that most of us live with our books: one complete book, one complete chunk of our lives. Once we’re “finished” with a book, we remember the vague emotional connection but none of the specifics.

Reading wasn’t always this way. When literacy was rare, or books more expensive, we learned stories and songs piece by piece, keeping individual lines and paragraphs in memory for ready use.

In a split-second decision, the short proverb “let him without sin cast the first stone” might turn our consciences to humility.
On a tough day, bits of a sonnet might remind us to hope for the future.

These proverbs and quotations, recycled for our own purposes, put our daily actions within the larger story of our lives.

This mode of reading, appropriating bits of a text into our own new contexts, spans cultures and times. It includes the faerie tales and folk songs of preliterate societies along with the poetry recitation and allusiveness of highly-literate ones. It also includes the future of digital books, a future where we can easily find our favorite passages and notes, taking them out of the original book and into our lives.

Three modes of reading

There are three different and complimentary modes of reading. Print works better in some, digital in others.

One of the complaints about digital books is the fear they will all turn into Wikipedia. That we’ll constantly be skimming through links and media, never curling up to just read a book and escape to another world.

Let's think about the ways that we read and how they fit in print and digital:

We browse to get a cursory overview of a subject, to learn how much there is to learn, and to gather references for further study. Print books never caught up with oral teaching for this purpose. Wikipedia and Google both do a better job than any print book of answering questions like “what should I know about this?” or “what other topic is this related to?”
We close-read to struggle to understand another person’s ideas or stories. Manuscripts and print books allow this to happen across time, space, and psychology by preserving an author’s thoughts for each new generation of readers.

Too frequently, our reading stops with this second phase. We struggle to understand an author in order to pass a test, write an essay, or perhaps from more noble motives. Then we move on to other books and other experiences. Our understanding slowly fades, our notes are trapped inside a closed, physical book, and we rarely recall our hard-won knowledge. If we want to retain it, we must move on until:

We absorb what we read and it becomes part of who we are. We retell stories, slightly modified so that they fit a given situation. We recite from memory in order to recall an important principle. We reuse texts as allusions and metaphors to suit our own needs. In each of these ways, we take what we have learned out of its original context and place it into our own lives.

Very few people still practice this ruminative mode of reading outside of university or elite vocational training. Perhaps this explains why so few people seriously browse or close-read: why struggle to understand something we will never remember or put to use?

Digital books can become part of our lives

The promise of digital books is that we can interact with them at any moment.

Especially in the spaces between the other moments of our lives. Small aphorisms, quotations, and poems can nuzzle themselves into our every moment, reminding us of who we have been and who we want to be. Instead of using books to escape into another world, we can use them to navigate and look carefully at this world.

This transition, the recovery of the third mode of reading, is already beginning to change our relationships with books:

Social media. We already bring our book learning into the real world through Twitter, Facebook, and online reading groups. Open discussion leads to new syntheses of existing ideas, and repetition drills them into us until they become part of who we are.
Pick a card, any card. In any profession, there are too many aphorisms and theoretical guides to remember at any time. Collect your favorites into a deck of cards, and select one at random when facing a difficult problem. Try to incorporate whatever it says into what you’re working on. The random idea can jolt you away from preconceived notions and connect the slog of everyday work with the high ideals and theory of your vocation. Pre-made decks are available for designers, programmers, and architects.

Many more business models will grow from the desire to connect more permanently with what we’ve read. Imagine:

A Flipboard time machine that shows your annotations and favorite quotations from the articles you were reading on any day in the past.
A Twitter client that every year, on your child’s birthday, reminds you of the congratulations you received after the birth announcement.
Any reasonable way to share annotations socially. Amazon? Apple? Anyone?

Where is this leading?

The new relationships we build with digital texts will also be the basis for new ways of writing and the new business of digital publishing.

How could fiction writing change to fit in short snatches during a reader’s day?
How can we help readers take their favorite quotations and notes out of the context of a book or blog and put them into the context of their daily lives?
How do we bring together the mass of status updates, tweets, book annotations, and offline activities into a coherent story of our lives or the lives of our families?

I am thankful for the help of my wife, Alison Solove, and friend Simon Fung for help talking through and editing this essay. I am deeply indebted to Craig Mod, whose lecture at SVA refocused my thinking on the emotional aspect of digital books.