It Isn’t What You Read, It’s How You Read It
The history of world includes the history of ideas; and ideas require communication in order to flourish. How does that communication happen?
People talk, and people write. Talking hasn’t changed much over the years; but reading and writing certainly have.
I like this brief history, neatly summarized by David Usborne last year in The Independent:
The first “manuscripts” are thought to have been produced around the seventh to 13th centuries, with largely religious texts produced by hand. A well-known example is the Book of Kells, a Latin collection of the Gospels lavishly decorated with an eight-circle cross. From the 13th century, with the “secularisation” of book production, books changed from being objects of worship to descriptive works. This expansion – though limited, given the lack of printing presses – was driven by the Rennaisance (sic.), and with it the rise of European universities and the return in the 13th century of Crusaders, who brought texts from Byzantium – books from ancient Greek and Roman times about world affairs.
The first printed – religious – books emerged in the 15th century but books as we know them took off in the 17th century. In the 1600s Gutenberg printing presses were invented in Germany. By 1424, the Cambridge University library owned 122 books. Woodblock printing and paper arrived from the Far East and in 1800.
I’ve finally taken my own first steps into the future of the manuscript: last week I bought my first ebook reader in the form of Amazon’s Kindle. And it’s certainly an interesting experience.
I bought it mostly because, as a writer myself, I feel I need to experience what is clearly the future of books, at least for many people. I also am enormously attracted by the ability to carry a whole library with me when I travel, and (with the easy ability to order more books) no more panic when I’m on a trip and run out of things to read.
So while it’s early days, for what it’s worth, here are my impressions so far:
- The screen is terrific. It’s really easy to read and the font size can be changed quickly if necessary.
- I have not yet gotten used to the page forward and page back buttons, which are all aligned on either side of the screen — the places where I’m most likely to grasp the “book” and therefore inadvertantly flip around. I expect that ease will come with practice, but right now it’s damned annoying.
- Also annoying is the fact that the spiffy jacket fits loosely and falls off easily.
- I thought I’d be mostly reading books, but it’s absolutely marvelous for magazine reading. So you don’t get the pictures (and obviously Smithsonian and National Geographic aren’t therefore good candidates); but I get to read articles in one of my favorites, the Atlantic Monthly at a fraction of the offline subscription price, and don’t use dead trees to do it. That pretty much rocks my world right there.
- I haven’t yet got the process down, but a deal-breaker for me had always been that I was confined to buying books from Amazon to read via the Kindle. This is not the case: other ebooks and even pdfs can be sent to the Kindle from my very own MacBook. It’s trickier to do than to simply buy from Amazon, but it’s feasible, and some rainy Saturday afternoon soon I shall learn how to do it.
- The looks aren’t as bad as I’d feared, Yeah, it looks like a clunky version of some medical device that would be used in sick bay on the starship Enterprise, but it grows on you. I have dreams, still, of what Apple’s eventual ebook reader will look like, but for now I’m willing to settle for this one.
- The first three days I had the Kindle I was in Boston taking the subway all over the place and it’s absolutely terrific for reading in small crowded spaces. It remembers what page you were on and gets you admiring glances from people around you.
I don’t yet have any gradiose conclusions about the future of printed books or how we’ll communicate our ideas in the next century. But I’m having a lot of fun in this one dipping my toe into the waters of the future.
As long as there are words, I’ll survive … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Books, Process Matters, Reading, The Cutting Edge, Words on October 1st, 2008