PAPERLESS BOOKS

Ebook cynics, those who scoff, “Oh, it will never really take off,” are making several vital mistakes. One comes from lack of imagination and one comes from inattention.

Consider that when buggies became “horseless,” most people were unable to see said vehicle as anything but a “minus,” the way e-readers are called “paperless.” Of course, one of the big advantages of horselessness at the time was the lack of “cowboy biscuits,” the horse manure that layered the streets. It wasn’t until later that the waste products of engines began to be a problem, rather like the disposal problems of electronic equipment, to say nothing of the continuing problem of obsolescence. Horse design has stayed fairly constant.

So far ebooks have been promoted as allowing a person to carry many otherwise too heavy books with them in such environments as airplanes and buses, where readers are passively sitting. IPods, of course, allow the same books to be carried in a auditory mode, as is music, so one can listen while driving, ironing (talk about obsolete!) or walking. But generations of “reading” in the future may be much more inventive.

Suppose while reading you realize the light is a little dim or you’ve forgotten your reading glasses: simply make the font bigger. If you come to a word you don’t know, tap it and it will pronounce itself; tap it twice and it will define itself. (It’s already being used in a sentence.) Or suppose a person is named: tap it once to see a photo of their face, tap it twice to see a thumbnail resumé. If there’s something you’d like to highlight, simply change the color of the print, and the ebook, at the end of the article or story, will have a list of what you marked. Tap any of those entries and the book will open where the text was marked.

But more than that. Suppose you’re reading fiction and you come to “she danced with delight.” Up comes a little square in which a video shows a woman dancing. Or maybe you’re reading about a thunderstorm and the sound of the storm comes crashing out between your hands. Possibly the text would say, “On a hot June morning she was walking in Philadelphia, looking for the Rodin museum, when a familiar fragrance washed over her -- it was mimosa. She used to wear a perfume called Mimosa, so she recognized it, though she’d never seen a mimosa tree in bloom.” The little square shows those mimosa trees and the ereader emits the very fragrance. Tap "Rodin" and you get an image of a sculpture.

Suppose you’re reading Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and the ereader begins to throb in your hands, at first subtly and then more and more intensely, until the person in the next seat looks over with raised eyebrows. Like everything else, the ereader should probably have an off-button. The point is that an ereader is not confined to one sense: vision.

Book lovers will argue that making imagined senses too concrete is a mistake and robs the reader of the pleasure of trying to think what a mimosa smells like or a heroine’s face looks like. That’s true, but it only displaces the imagination to a different level of synthesis -- it supplies additional experience to be woven into new imaginings. Book illustrations have done that. Movies do that. It’s the skill of the writer and the synthesizer of text that either open or close doors to the reader.

The lack of attention that I spoke of in the first paragraph refers to the failure to notice that these technologies are not meant to replace books or all other forms of writing. Certainly it’s a lot more comfortable for an affluent commuter to carry a small instrument like an ipod or ereader in a cell phone because of lack of elbow room and a need for as-it-happens information. A paper newspaper can’t supply those in the same way. But there will always be people who stay home and, like me, enjoy the ceremony of fetching the paper from the front porch (they call it “pajama service”) and reading it with my first cup of coffee, scissors handy to cut out interesting articles. (This suggests a change in content.)

Technologies are additive: consider the car with a bicycle on its rack. In my lifetime my father’s 78’s, replaced by my generation’s 33 1/3’s, then by reel-to-reel tape, then 8-track, then cassettes, then by CD’s, then by mp3’s, have circled around and come back to machines that will translate 78’s into mp3’s in a computer, while kindly removing all the hiss and scratch. Some publishers are presenting e-versions of books; if the book takes hold, maybe a paperback edition; and if the book begins to feel like a classic, a hardback edition, maybe with new illustrations; and for the people who like the prestige of books, custom-bound leather versions. The same person might have both a presentation copy and an mp3 version so as to listen to favorite parts now and then. Maybe even several different sound versions with different readers, the way people buy recordings of operas from different performances.

In terms of writers, the necessary skills will vary widely, from old-timers telling stories to the careful and intricate written sentences of a highbrow novel. There will be a new category of something like “wordsmith techie,” supplying things like the throb of a heart or a ship engine. Authors might have their keyboard setup on one wall and a sound-mixing board on another. Some, of course, will make the leap into pure video and not use words at all -- just concepts expressed in images and sound.

Infrastructure, both in the sense of inventing and manufacturing such means and in terms of delivery systems to the goal, the consumer, will have to grow and adapt. Again, it’s like automobiles: you can’t have electric cars without plug-ins.

But the ultimate technology is always the person. The success of the other stuff depends on how cleverly and appropriately the electronic devices interface with the human brain, a device we are only just beginning to understand. The evidence is that it evolves and mutates just as quickly and perhaps more radically than anything on the market.