E-books: Not just about reading

Welcome to our newest contributor, Michael Harrington, who holds  a visiting scholar fellowship to the Bridwell Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. More bio info at the end. – D.R.

At the recent BookExpo in Los Angeles most of the buzz was about digital media and what technology portends for the book industry. It’s unsurprising that the role of the digital book has been folded into a much wider discussion about modern culture. Topics range from “The Future of Reading” to “Print is Dead” to the dumbing down of the Internet and articles asking, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?”

One BEA panel member from a prominent publishing house couched the digital issue in terms of two main hypotheses. First, the "doomsday" hypothesis: digital media will kill off print. This idea has gained some support in recent weeks from people like Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft; Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, and Paul Krugman, op-ed writer for the New York Times. Do these folks know something we don’t?

The second hypothesis is slightly more hopeful: digital media will be a great way to promote print books. This idea gets regurgitated with a smorgasbord of business strategies for publishers, publicists, and authors to employ the Internet. It’s all about using YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and the social networking culture to create value and promote physical product. The buzzwords here are the power of click, crowdsourcing, networked communities, and wikis.

The risks of past business models

However, as a consumer and creator of digital media, a reader, a writer, and an educator, I find neither of these hypotheses particularly convincing or satisfying. The dilemma is the natural one—we must look to the past to try to predict the future. More dangerous for the economics of the industry, we’re using past business models to try to shape or constrain future business models.

This preoccupation with business models often disregards the all-important role of the author as content creator. This is most unfortunate because ultimately it will be the creative capabilities and innovations of authors and readers who will determine the fate of digital and print books. This is another extension of the McLuhanesque logic of media: It’s the authors who will make use of digital technologies to make new connections to the audience.

The technology companies have the distinct advantage of avoiding path dependence when it comes to books. They don’t depend on book royalties or retail distribution models. This is why Apple was able to dominate the music industry’s transition to digital. Amazon, Sony, and Google, among others, have taken the first expensive forays into digital print. Yet, these companies seem particularly tone-deaf to the nature of content and the creative process of authoring ideas for the commercial market.

Why books aren’t just about reading

The point they do get is that the book is not just about reading. Book lovers will wax on about how there’s nothing that can supplant the book and the reading experience. They cite the timelessness of storytelling and how this drives so many of our cultural experiences. But the problem is that while books need storytelling, storytelling doesn’t really need books. Humans were enjoying storytelling for thousands of years before anyone ever knew how to read or write.

What we’re really about is imagination, creativity, curiosity, wonder and community – those things that we might say define our humanity. Books and language are mere technologies—the book is the hardware and the words are the software. The invention of the book and its mass production with printing allowed us to experience our humanity in new ways. But video, recorded audio, and mass communications have done the same.

Humanity dominates adoption of tech

A quick review of the history of progress shows that our humanity always dominates the adoption of new technology. This will determine the future of books and other digital media as well. What we desire are ways to experience our world—through our imaginations, our creativity, our wonder, our curiosity and our sociability—in any way or form, whether through books, videos, social networking, virtual online worlds or cell phones. Print books will continue to exist as one form of technology and reader experience, but digital media is something that will revolutionize the book because it allows us a fuller experience to actually dwell within our stories and explore and share our wonder.

This suggests a third hypothesis that is not as narrow and constricting as the first two: eBooks will be a blessing as they afford us another medium that will satisfy our natural desires in ways that competing media cannot.

How might this work? Think how curiosity and wonder are satisfied by digital information technology: Have a question or need some information? Google it. Need some interpretation in summary form or citations for further investigation? Surf over to Wikipedia or search Google books and cross-reference. Tunnel down through links to the primary sources of knowledge. And the digital world can serve up this experience with multimedia formats using audio, images and video.

The desire to connect

Notice also how technology has helped fulfill our desire to connect to a larger community: Want to share your thoughts and ideas? Log into MySpace, Facebook or some social network devoted to your specific interests. Or go to a blog and converse with an author or other readers. The possibilities seem endless. In the fictional world our stories can be ours, in collaboration with the author. One of the fastest growing sectors of the publishing world feeds the desire to write—it seems everybody wants to be an author and why not? Aren’t we all becoming filmmakers on YouTube?

The immediate problem we have with digital print is that any long form text we read has been separate from this electronic culture, i.e. in a book on the shelf, or reduced to eye-straining pixels on a backlit LCD screen. The development of E-Ink is the first step toward making this problem tractable. There is also the eBabel problem that begs for a consistent, easily convertible, standard format. The next step will require some killer apps and software programming. E-books can either incorporate these features of the digital world or connect to them through our computers and other online devices.

Unfolding as all market-driven exchanges do

Yes, I know, the accountants and business strategists are asking about IP, DRM and how we’ll all get paid for creating these products. That is a topic for another day, but in most general terms it will unfold the same way as all market-driven exchanges do: through added value and efficient pricing. Welcome to the new world – not so different from the old world.

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Bio

Michael Harrington has a wide-ranging background in the social sciences and the arts. He has earned advanced degrees in economics, finance and political science and has worked in the securities and venture capital industries as an investment portfolio manager and financial analyst. In more recent years he has taught political science as a lecturer at the University of California and worked as a research fellow and public policy analyst, conducting studies for several policy think tanks. His research interests focus on the effect of uncertainty on human behavior in determining economic and political choices and wider social outcomes.

Harrington’s writings and research on political and economic issues have won several national awards and his opinion essays and letters have been published in a wide variety of national media journals, including The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, BusinessWeek, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He maintains the Red State-Blue StateWeb movie site, writes a political blog and has been involved in digital media for more than twenty-five years.

Recently, Harrington received a visiting scholar fellowship to the Bridwell Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he conducted research with primary Savonarolan materials. This library houses the largest collection of Savonarolan literature outside of Florentine state archives. This fellowship was partly to supported research for his historical fiction drama on Savonarola and Machiavelli, a 200,000 word manuscript titled The City of Man.

Harrington’s artistic interests encompass music composition and performance, photography, and writing. He has composed music, written a play, taught music, and designed Web sites for his photography and writing. He has harbored a life-long fascination with the Italian Renaissance, its art, culture, and politics, and has lived and studied in Italy near Florence. He speaks Italian and some French and German. His enduring interests in social movements and artistic creativity directed him toward the fascinating story of Savonarola and Machiavelli, a story that strongly resonates with the modern world.