Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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The future of books

March 2002

Most of us have bookshelves at home, which take up quite a bit of space. I made our smallest bedroom into a library, since it isn’t big enough to be useful for much else. The walls are lined with books, but even so, I have to occasionally clear out ones I no longer want to make room for new ones. The library has a comfortable chair where I can go and escape the noise, to be alone. There is something about books that conveys an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity. I love buying interesting reference books, which I skim-read as soon as they arrive. After that they go on a shelf and are quickly forgotten. If I want to look something up, I would always use the net, never a book. In my view, printed encyclopedias are almost worthless as an information source, and much the same could be said of CD versions – they will never be as up-to-date or as comprehensive as the information that can be found on the net. A reference book provides a quick dose of stimulation when it arrives, and that’s all. Apart from the novel in my briefcase that I read on the train, the rest of my books rarely get looked at, but I would hate to lose them. In spite of all the books in there, my library is mostly a place where I write. Most of the time I spend in there, I am using a laptop, in input mode, not even connected to the net.

In spite of all the recent advances in electronic books, and the promise of electronic inks that will give us lightweight, flexible, high contrast displays that are easy to read, paper books are here to stay. It is already easy to buy books electronically and read them on a screen. Several can be stored on the same machine. The electronic book can be scanned, searched, processed and hyperlinked to the rest of the universe. It can display video and be fully interactive. But it all misses the point for me, quite apart from the usual sentiment of wanting to hold a nicely bound ‘real book’. If I want volume of material, or interactivity, I use my laptop or the net. These are far better platforms for such functions than anything that can be considered a book. These are different platforms that occupy different niches in my life. For me, a book is a retreat from the mass of interactive information into a single linear stream. Instead of me being firmly in control, deciding what I want and quickly finding it, someone else is – the author. Someone else takes control of my mind for a while and leads me where they want to take me. They guide me into areas I otherwise would not have thought of. I suppose in that sense, a book is the written equivalent of a TV mini-series or a film. It is escapism. But whereas a film makes the visual experience explicit and shared, my imagination interacts with the book author’s to create a completely unique experience. The media live comfortably side by side, and each needs to recognise its own limitations, and hence its future boundaries.

This special author-reader relationship of course is only really special in novels or documentary style books. These are the rightful owners of the printed medium. I can’t see any advantage of reference books over the interactive medium other than the richness of the photography, or the style of presentation. In due course, the electronic domain will capture the upper ground here. I am sure that demand for printed reference books will continue to decline, especially encyclopedias, which really belong on the net. Recipe books should be interactive and talk directly to kitchen equipment and the packaging chips built into everything we bring home from the supermarket, with alarms and real-time audio guidance.

There is some scope for a new domain, where neither book or film reign today. Like millions of others, I am a Terry Pratchett fan. My imagination is OK but not brilliant, and I am sure that when the films of his books are made, the superior professional imaginations of the directors will make them well worth watching for me. But the films won’t live completely up to my expectations, because some of the characters just won’t be done right. The Pratchett cover illustrations of the characters just don’t work for me. Computer game spin-offs are a step in the right direction. But if the point of the book is to have the author lead me down a particular path of thought, then I won’t be entirely satisfied by a game that requires me to do the work. What I really want is a visual companion to a book where I can choose to some extent what the characters look like and how they behave, but where the dominant role is still played by the author. I want to read the text and have the author interact with my mind to show what it should look like, and then get the computer to synthesise the video to show me it, make it real, but just when I need it. This might look a little like a computer game on ‘demo mode’, switched on and off at will, all the way through the book. Being able to choose or tweak the appearance of the characters would make it much better than a film. The author keeps control, as he should, but I can apply some of my interpretation too to make it a more rewarding experience for me. The interactive visual novel companion. Once I have that, I’ll take everything else down to the charity shop and fill my shelves with these. Only then will I even contemplate reading a novel on a screen.