Peering at the Bookish Future

Spent an interesting few hours at a half-day conference on the Future of the Book at Boston University this afternoon.

James Tracy, the Headmaster at Cushing Academy (the school that made news recently because the library traded in most of the print collection for electronic books) spoke about that decision, explaining that the school hopes to explore options for the best ways to educate students for the world of the future.

The argument that keeping access to a relatively few, not especially rare print titles in a small school library is not inherently better than offering access to many thousands of electronic versions of texts is definitely interesting. If you're offering books, is there a special value to print that makes it worthwhile to have a library dedicated to that?


The next speaker was Richard Sarnoff, President of Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, who gave a publisher's perspective on electronic books, stressing that while they have a lot of potential, especially for academic texts that are frequently updated and that users may not feel a strong need to own permanently, they are and will continue to be a small part of total books sold for many years.

He believes that the audience for print books is so broad that it will be a long while before e-books get the kind of widespread use that digital music enjoys. I liked the point that books for small children, at least, are unlikely to go electronic in the near future, certainly until e-book readers are designed to handle being thoroughly drooled on.

I also liked the mention here of the way that e-books are designed to replicate the experience of reading print, rather than to take advantage of the chance to put in audio or video enhancements: while these may be useful in some contexts, there are many times, especially when reading imaginative works, where we don't want to be distracted from our engagement with the text. Despite the shorter attention spans that the internet might encourage, there's still value to long-form reading, and e-books can support that.


Finally, Ann Blair of Harvard spoke about note-taking in history and today. New means of taking, sorting and storing notes promise to add interesting elements to reading in the book's future, as access to scraps of parchment, and, later, paper, allowed for notes in earlier ages. She had some great images of notes from history, and a fascinating overview of how notes have been perceived over time.

I loved the idea that reference books are essentially a way of getting access to ready-made notes: summaries of the important information about various subjects. Rather than read all the background material and take notes on it, I can consult a reference book that breaks it down for me!


Overall, this was a very enjoyable short conference with some thought-provoking speakers. I am left fairly confident of at least one thing about the Future of the Book: one way or another, I'm going to be reading them.

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