We’re currently moving away from paper printing, replacing physical books with e‑books and text readers. We need to look at what we’re giving up in the process.

Lev Grossman recently wrote an article for the New York Times‘s Sunday Book Review, “From Scroll to Screen”. In it, he points out how our current book format, the codex (multiple pages bound in a rectangular shape between two covers) took over from the scroll (a single long sheet of paper wrapped around a rod or roller). He cites easy random access as the codex’s chief benefit, and an absolutely critical one.

We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e‑books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e‑book.

Not to use too much of Grossman’s text, but another section near the end of his essay points out a critical aspect of the sacrifice we’re making as we move toward e‑books:

[I]f we stop reading on paper, we should keep in mind what we’re sacrificing: that nonlinear experience, which is unique to the codex. You don’t get it from any other medium — not movies, or TV, or music or video games. The codex won out over the scroll because it did what good technologies are supposed to do: It gave readers a power they never had before, power over the flow of their own reading experience.

Except that’s not the only sacrifice involved. That’s simply the technological, UX sacrifice — but we’re also making a societal sacrifice, and it’s one that may be even worse. We’re sacrificing a huge number of readers, many of whom become writers and boosters of text as a mode of communication.

Recently, Seanan McGuire wrote “Across the Digital Divide”, in which she talks about what it’s like to be poor, and about how the current (official, U.S. government) measures of poverty are based on what was available in 1955. Noting that computers and e‑book readers didn’t exist then, and so aren’t even noticed in modern-day poverty measurements, she then unleashes her main point:

[E]very time a discussion of ebooks turns, seemingly inevitably, to “Print is dead, traditional publishing is dead, all smart authors should be bailing to the brave new electronic frontier,” what I hear, however unintentionally, is “Poor people don’t deserve to read.”

She notes that this isn’t due to malice; it’s just hard for those of us with lots of money and bandwidth to see across the divide that (at least) 1 in 5 Americans are still on the downside of. But she also points out that seemingly-simple “remedies” like a low-cost e-reader program for poor kids, or even giving them away free, will not solve the problem. That doesn’t address concerns ranging from bandwidth to theft.

Even if we assume that print is about to die, that it is inevitable and the most we can do is make our peace with the oncoming new technology, there are still things we can and must do to ensure that it doesn’t impoverish our society by taking literate expression with it. As McGuire says:

We need paper books to endure. Every one of us, if we can log onto this site and look at this entry, is a “have” from the perspective of a kid living in an apartment with cockroaches in the walls and junkies in the unit beneath them. A lot of the time, the arguments about the coming ebook revolution forget that the “have nots” also exist, and that we need to take care of them. (emphasis in original)

Jennifer Brozek’s “Poverty and Books” covers a lot of the same territory, describing how she got her love of reading and words from library books and second- and third-hand books. Note that Ms. Brozek is now an award-winning author and editor, and like Ms. McGuire, is a rising talent in the genre fiction scene. If we ignore their advice, we risk throwing away 20% — or more — of the next generation of excellent writers.

That’s not a price I want to pay.

Finally, Dreamwidth user Elf points out that the social contract being promoted by e‑book publishers is essentially and profoundly selfish. In “The Selfishness of Ebooks”, she tells a tale that she tags as “potentially triggery for bibliophiles”, which turned out to be a good warning in my (bibliophilic) opinion. Her tale involves something you can mouse over to read, but don’t say you haven’t been warned – stripped of the gruesome details, it involves someone who would habitually destroy books while reading them, obliterating each page as soon as he’d read it. Elf sees a parallel with e‑book publishers’ attempts to ensure that we never, ever share our books with others — we might as well destroy them completely once we’re done with them.

Read it. Read it again if you want. Download & read it later, on a different device. But don’t pass it on. As soon as you’re done with it — forever-and-truly done, never going to read that book again (and really, how many times am I going to re-read Harlequin romances)… destroy it. Delete that file, blank that space on the memory card. (emphasis in original)

Elf’s basic point, and it’s one I can’t find any flaw in, is: “Books are social. Ebooks are selfish.”

In the online version of Little Brother, in the section called, “The Copyright Thing”, Cory Doctorow writes: “I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, “Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free — because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash.” Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they’d discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift.” Again, books are social: We don’t just read them, we also want to share them with others.

E‑books and readers have many wonderful features, from easily-enlargeable text for people with poor eyesight to a lightweight form factor that makes it so people with weak wrists or arthritis can absorb the latest Neal Stephenson tome without struggling with a door-stopping hardback edition. Oh, and of course it’s easier to Ctrl‑F the thing to find text you’re specifically looking for.

But what are we giving up? And, more importantly, is there any reason why we have to give it up? Or are we just getting herded along by circumstances, and forgetting to actually look at where we’re going, and exert some decision-making willpower of our own?

We have the power to decide what kind of future we want. But we have to stop and think long enough to use it. McGuire and Elf have been doing some thinking, and the points they make are important ones.

For some people, the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard is a deal-breaker. For me, the smaller-than-standard keyboard on the average netbook is a powerful disincentive: If I had to use one, it would slow down my interaction with the netbook — and if I learned to be fluent and productive with the small keyboard, it might mess up my muscle memory for dealing with full-size keyboards on my “real” computers. It’s not a trade-off I’m willing to make.

The Palm Prē’s physical keyboard is tiny. I can only key it with my thumbs, and there’s no risk of interference with my pre-existing keyboarding skills. Inputting data with it is achingly slow, but offset by the device’s wonderful portability (it fits into a pocket even easier than an iPhone does). But I can’t really edit text with it, because there’s no D-pad to do precise cursor positioning with. Even the Orange+finger-movement trick is balky and awkward, in my experience; if I want to correct a single-letter typo, getting the cursor after the incorrect character so I can backspace and correct it is such an ordeal, it’s often quicker and easier for me to use Shift+Backspace to delete the entire word and then retype the whole thing.

In effect, even though the phone has the ability to edit text, the interface makes it so difficult that I can’t use the capability. It might as well not be there. What would a better interface mechanism look like?

In Charles Stross’ Accelerando, the protagonist starts off with a set of glasses that provide him with a constant Net connection and heads-up displays of whatever he desires: maps, email, people’s vCards, and so on. But Stross (perhaps wisely) doesn’t give much detail about the glasses’ input mechanism. “He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived.” How? That part’s left to the reader’s imagination. (A very crafty trick on Stross’ part, and one that writers can pull off and user-interface engineers cannot.)

If I want to do with my phone what Stross’ character did, I have to yank it out of my pocket, press the power switch, then make a swiping gesture that tells the phone its attention has been requested by a real human (rather than simply being jostled in a pocket or handbag). But Stross’ protagonist’s glasses were already powered up and in use, so suppose I were already using my phone and decided I wanted to take a picture of something?

Tap a physical button to escape from whatever app I was already using, then press an on-screen button for the main “launcher” feature. Find the “camera” icon, tap it, wait for the camera to load. Then I can aim and press another on-screen button to capture the image.

Cropping is pretty much out of the question, although someone could write an app for it. And I actually can update my blog from my phone; it has a WebKit-based browser and enough screen real estate to make writing and posting an entry possible, albeit painful.

Stross’ interface has the luxury of not having to be real, of course. But something that already works as a real-life prototype is the Sixth Sense system, built by Pranav Mistry of MIT’s Media Lab. It senses the user’s hands, and you can take a picture simply by framing whatever-it-is you want to capture with your fingers and thumbs. (It does a whole lot of other things, too, and I highly recommend the entire video.)

Possibly most important — certainly more important than I would have expected just a few years ago — is the fact that now I have my SVN repository back. I’ve recently checked in two months’ worth of code changes. I wound up describing the extreme discontinuity as “the Spring 2009 Downtime”, because the first few ideas that drifted through my head just sounded a little too grandiose and overblown.

Still, I’m reminded of a scene in Joe Haldeman’s early novel Mindbridge. A team of interstellar explorers get sent off to an unknown planet via teleportation technology, wearing fully self-contained environment suits that keep them alive for two weeks. When they’re teleported back to Earth and a safe enviroment, Haldeman writes: “they scrambled out [of their suits] to an orgy of backscratching”.

I know the feeling.