The future of sustained narrative

If:book and the folks at the Institute for the Future of the Book have done a lot of hard thinking about what books will look like in future. Dozens of litblogs offer book reviews, forums for discussing books, and pithy little witticisms about books. One of the most successful Web sites ever is a book store.

Yet the book is in danger, we are told. Kids today have no patience for books; they’re obsessed with video games, with movies, with pornography.

There is no doubt in my mind that physical, bound books will disappear, probably within the next 20 years. As soon as it is cheaper to produce books electronically, paper books will go away. And that moment is fast approaching. Listen, if we can have a $100 laptop within 5 years, we’ll certainly have a $20 e-book reader in 20. When the electronics cost less than the paper, you can say goodbye to paper.

The real question is, with this change in book technology, how will the nature of books change? Because, again, there is no doubt that they will change.

As I have said before, some books have already disappeared. Encyclopedias are gone, and dictionaries aren’t going to be far behind. Textbooks will be next. My kids haul 15 pounds of books to and from school every day. When my son enters the ninth grade in a year and a half, he will be given a 7-pound laptop computer containing all his texts, and he will have no more textbooks. His school has a “special” laptop program, but I suspect by the time he enters college, this type of thing won’t be so special, and many, if not all of his college courses will be taught using e-texts.

Some changes will be positive. You need only take a look at Cognitive Daily to see that many of the topics we cover there would be difficult to present in a typical book. An e-book would have none of those difficulties. I was surprised to learn (via Brad DeLong) of the popularity of an outfit called The Teaching Company. Why would anyone pay $500 for a DVD of a lecture series when they could buy a $20 book covering the same material (it turns out, most people wait for the “sales” when the DVDs cost more like $100, but the question still applies)? The answer is that the DVDs contain demos: audio demos for music classes, interactive demos for physics classes, etcetera. They are multimedia, just like an e-book.

In this sense, what we may start to find is that a technology like TiVo is going to be part of what ends up replacing books. I just finished watching the History Channel’s excellent program on FDR. A 4-hour TV show covers almost as much information as a short book, but I doubt I would ever have purchased a book about FDR. I also doubt I would have watched the live broadcast. TiVo allowed me to treat the program like a book, watching it over a period of several days, pausing whenever I needed to answer the phone or refill my glass of wine. Eventually TiVo (or its descendents) won’t just record shows that happen to be broadcast: it will allow me to search an online catalog and download the shows I want to see, anytime. Someone who then learned about the FDR show could find it online and download it for a buck or two, instead of spending $20 on the equivalent book. It will be difficult for print books to compete.

It’s a mistake to think of an e-book as simply an electronic version of a printed book. “E-books” are going to appear — and have already appeared — in a variety of forms, for a variety of audiences. The real question is what is going to happen to the sustained narrative form. A 300-page book takes me about 10 hours to read (if I’m reading carefully). Will we want our information in 10-hour chunks, or some other size? Maybe 4 hours (like the FDR program) will be more like what we want, or maybe that’s how the economics will work out: maybe people will only be willing to pay $2 or $3 for an e-book, and so from a publishing perspective that only works out to a 4-hour book.

I have a lot more to say about this topic, so for now I’ll have to wrap this post up. Look for several more posts on this topic in the next few days.