Are you ready for the future?

Everyone is talking about the future of the book, although no one knows for sure what it will be. Clearly the digital format is growing exponentially, while print production thrives at a lower pace. Sometimes it's helpful to step back and look at the overall picture of what this means rather than just pour on more information about the percentage of books being purchased or borrowed from libraries in digital formats. A good place to go for thoughtful, long form ruminations on the underlying changes in the concept of books is the @craigmod blog. For an indepth look at what the change in formats may mean to writers and readers, take a look at his post about the stages of book production from pre-artifact to post-artifact. Writing a book has always been a slow and usually solitary pursuit. Someone gets an idea and struggles to find the words to explain it to others. After writing, revising, re-revising, showing it to a few friends, the writer sends it to an agent or an editor at a publishing house. Then if the powers of publishing agree to take it on, the writer sits back (or more likely writes another book updating that one) for two years or so until the final product--a book--is eventually produced. Not until then do readers get a chance to look at the book, share the writers ideas, and possibly comment and argue about them. Much of that long, slow process is being swept away in the digital age. New publishing processes make it possible for the writer to share ideas with an audience during the writing process. Arguments and questions can be raised even before the "publishing" process begins. More and more books are growing out of blogs on which readers and potential readers have already commented and showed interest. Once the book is finalized and published in a digital format, the interactivity continues. In fact "finalized" is becoming an obsolete term. The librarian's beloved format of the "stable text" is disappearing. Corrections can be made in mid-flight from typos to major revisions and the book that existed last week has given way to a new text. Craig Mod uses the example of Wikipedia as a post-artifact encyclopedia compared with Encarta, trapped in a shining, rigid CD format.

What do these changes mean to those of us who have dedicated our careers to having the perfect package for a book--an artifact carefully written, illustrated, and printed in exactly the format envisioned by its creator? Children are perhaps the greatest fans of the stable text. Try changing a word of "Peter Rabbit" to a storyhour group of literate children and you will be shouted down. Already we have Peter Rabbit apps that make the pictures move, shrink, and expand. Do we want to ask children to change the words too? Don't answer "No" too quickly. It's a reasonable question. Certainly interactivity and flexibility are important in today's world. Librarians along with everyone else have to consider the advantages gained by having a community of writers and readers. We shouldn't blindly worship the artifacts of our childhood or of our children's childhood. The world seems to spin faster every year and the only way to keep up is to welcome new ideas, to adopt the strengths and always to question the received wisdom of our collective past.