For well over a decade, publishers have been waiting for a miracle gadget—an iPod for text—to usher in a new age of electronic reading. But that age is already here. People today are reading vast amounts online, more and more each year, and they are reading in new ways, interested more in the linkages among texts and the discussions surrounding them than in the possession of individual copies. Yet while newspapers have felt this change acutely, books have largely been spared any growing pains.
Until now, that is. Led by Google and Amazon, big tech companies have started to close the gulf that has long separated books from the Internet by scanning thousands of volumes into searchable databases and throwing publishers into panic mode. Increasingly, they're looking for new ways to monetize these search services, and the result is the beginning of a new electronic publishing industry. Judging by the initial signs, however, it doesn't look promising.
Last November, Amazon announced Upgrade, a new option in its Search Inside program that allows customers to "upgrade" the purchase of a physical book to include access to a full, searchable online copy. A few months later, Google announced a similar element to its Partner Program that will eventually enable publishers to sell Web access to titles in the Google Book Search database.
Both services provide searchability, but little more. Presented as digital supplements to paper books, Google's e-books (not yet available) will be visible only inside a browser, with a user account. Amazon's Online Reader does offer basic functionality like highlighting, printing and copying, but, like Google's, fails to explore more dynamic online reading practices such as tagging, annotation and social bookmarking. These books are islands in a vast network, reading their readers—tracking their routes through the pages, mining useful data from their searches.
It's understandable that publishers want to protect the security of their works, but not only is this sort of security invasive, it's short-sighted, since it cuts books off from the nourishing connectivity of the network.
Imagine an online Harry Potter in which readers can keep personal blogs, engage in live chats in the margins, annotate the text collectively, compose alternate endings and contribute to communal glossaries and repositories of lore. Or an electronic Moby-Dick that allows teachers to create a virtual seminar around the text while connecting students to a vast library of scholarly resources. Or a new kind of book, native to the network, that we have not yet conceived—one that employs multiple media forms, and grows and changes over time.
In each of these cases, what is significant is not how many copies of the book are sold, but how many and what sorts of people are present and active in that online space. The book in the network is not a static object but a little network of its own. Many of the most significant cultural stirrings on the Web—Flickr, MySpace, Wikipedia, the blogosphere—operate on this very principle. Even the New York Times—about the furthest from the blogosphere that one can get—recently unveiled a new design for its Web site that incorporates many of the interactive features of blogs, including links to other sites that are discussing its articles.
Amid fears of piracy, publishers' instinct is to lock down e-books in proprietary formats and protective enclosures, cutting them off from the complex links and social interactions that make the Net so rich. But this approach, predicated on the old one-copy-per-customer business model, will never succeed in creating a vibrant electronic publishing culture. Why should readers pay for these compromised creations when physical books are still, by comparison, much more versatile?
Jorge Luis Borges, a great spinner of metaphors for the information age, once said, "A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships." Publishers have an opportunity to reinvent their industry by plugging books fully into the new environment. They can let Google and Amazon do it for them, or they can take matters into their own hands.