There is a kind of bookish dualism at work. The text is the soul, and the book – or scroll, or vellum, or clay tablet or knotted rope in the case ofquipu– is the perishable body. In this way of thinking, the ebook is the book, only unshackled from paper, ink and stitching. If the debate about the ebook is to move on from nostalgic raptures over smell and rampant gadget-fetishism, it’s time to think about the real fundamentals.
There are two aspects to the ebook that seem to me profoundly to alter the relationship between the reader and the text. With the book, the reader’s relationship to the text is private, and the book is continuous over space, time and reader. Neither of these propositions is necessarily the case with the ebook.
The ebook gathers a great deal of information about our reading habits: when we start to read, when we stop, how quickly or slowly we read, when we skip pages, when we re-read, what we choose to highlight, what we choose to read next.
[Stuart Kelly’s second contention:] China Miéville, at last year’s Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, raised the idea of “guerrilla editors”– readers remaking the text, much in the manner of the fan reaction to The Phantom Menace, The Phantom Edit. As Jaron Lanier argues in his new book Who Owns The Future? the largest digital companies compile huge amounts of information on our likes, dislikes, economic activity, preferences, attention spans and such like. What happens when this information is recycled into the “reader-specific” book? […] What this means is that when I say to a friend “Have you read such-and-such a book?”, even if they answer “yes”, the real answer may be “not exactly”.
Once these features of privacy and continuity are acknowledged, the ebook might well come into its own. Could the e-reader support texts that could be read only if more than one person were reading it – and what issues of trust might that raise? Or that could only be read at specific times and in specific places? Could there be texts that no one reader has access to in their entirety, and if so, what communities of interpretation might grow up around them? (In this case, TV and film are far ahead of publishers; with things like the ARG The Lost Experience – a video game based on the programme Lost – and the Batman-centred “Why So Serious?” campaign.)
Realising the specific nature of the book ought to make us more considerate of what the form does achieve, and could well unsettle the ebook into being more daring. It wouldn’t be a book, but it might be something as yet unthought.