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APRIL 20, 2009
MOBILITY
How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write
 Author Steven Johnson outlines a future with more books, more distractions -- and the end of reading alone
See a sample reprint in PDF format.Order a reprint of this article nowDow Jones Reprints: This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, use the Order Reprints tool at the bottom of any article or visitwww.djreprints.com
BySTEVEN JOHNSON
Every genuinely revolutionary technology implants some kind of "aha" moment in your memory -- the moment where you flip a switch and something magical happens, something that tells youin an instant that the rules have changed forever.I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia; using Google Earth to zoomin from space directly to the satellite image of my house; watching my 14-month-old master thepage-flipping gesture on the iPhone's touch interface.The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.comInc.'s e-book reader. A few  weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully  working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a suddendesire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I'd bought and downloaded Zadie Smith's novel "On Beauty." By the timethe check arrived, I'd finished the first chapter.
 Aha.
I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of tradingink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them.It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of readinginto something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will werecognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?
The Dark Matter 
In our always-connected, everything-linked world, we sometimes forget that books are the dark matter of the information universe. While we now possess terabytes of data at our fingertips, we
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matter of the information universe. While we now possess terabytes of data at our fingertips, wehave nonetheless drifted further and further away from mankind's most valuable archive of knowledge: the tens of millions of books that have been published since Gutenberg's day.That's because the modern infosphere is both organized and navigated through hyperlinkedpages of digital text, with the most-linked pages rising to the top of GoogleInc.'s all-powerfulsearch-results page. This has led us toward some traditional forms of information, such asnewspapers and magazines, as well as toward new forms, such as blogs and Wikipedia. But because books have largely been excluded from Google's index -- distant planets of unlinkedanalog text -- that vast trove of knowledge can't compete with its hyperlinked rivals.But there is good reason to believe that this strange imbalance will prove to be a momentary blip,and that the blip's moment may be just about over. Credit goes to two key developments: the breakthrough success of Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, and the maturation of the Google Book Search service, which now offers close to 10 million titles, including many obscure and out-of-print works that Google has scanned. As a result, 2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.If so, if the future is about to be rewritten, the big question becomes: How?
The World of Ideas
For starters, think about what happened because of the printing press: The ability to duplicate,and make permanent, ideas that were contained in books created a surge in innovation that the world had never seen before. Now, the ability to digitally search millions of books instantly willmake finding all that information easier yet again. Expect ideas to proliferate -- and innovationto bloom -- just as it did in the centuries after Gutenberg.Think about it. Before too long, you'll be able to create a kind of shadow version of your entirelibrary, including every book you've ever read -- as a child, as a teenager, as a college student, asan adult. Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that thiskind of shift will have on scholarship. Entirely new forms of discovery will be possible. Imagine asoftware tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you've read on a specifictopic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven'tencountered yet.
The Impulse Buy
The magic of that moment in Austin ("I'm in the mood for a novel -- oh, here's a novel right herein my hands!") also tells me that e-book readers are going to sell a lot of books, precisely becausethere's an impulse-buy quality to the devices that's quite unlike anything the publishing businesshas ever experienced before.On another occasion, I managed to buy and download a book on a New York City subway train,during a brief two-stop stretch on an elevated platform. Amazon's early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did beforeowning the device, and it's not hard to understand why: The bookstore is now following youaround wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down areminder to pick it up next time you're at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and --
voilà!
-- you own it.My impulsive purchase of "On Beauty" has another element to it, though -- one that may not beas welcomed by authors. Specifically: I was in the middle of the other book, and in a matter of seconds, I left it for one of its competitors. The jump was triggered, in this case, by a sudden urge 
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to read fiction, but it could have been triggered by something in the book I was originally reading: a direct quote or reference to another work, or some more indirect suggestion in thetext.In other words, an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may begreat news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books haveremained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading.Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article --sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you tofollow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.The Kindle in its current incarnation maintains some of that emphasis on linear focus; it has nodedicated client for email or texting, and its Web browser is buried in a subfolder for"experimental" projects. But Amazon has already released a version of the Kindle software forreading its e-books on an iPhone, which is much more conducive to all manner of distraction. Nodoubt future iterations of the Kindle and other e-book readers will make it just as easy to jumponline to check your 401(k) performance as it is now to buy a copy of "On Beauty." As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.
You're Never Alone
Putting books online will also change how we find books -- and talk about them.Now that books are finally entering the world of networked, digital text, they will undergo thesame transformation that Web pages have experienced over the past 15 years. Blogs, remember, were once called "Web logs," cultivated by early digital pioneers who kept a record of information they found online, quoting and annotating as they browsed. With books becoming part of this universe, "booklogs" will prosper, with readers taking inspiringor infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will beginindexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatterabout them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, "In the new world of books, every bitinforms another; every page reads all the other pages.") You'll read a puzzling passage from anovel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world,annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning.Think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any givenmoment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even
sentence
you are reading.Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally privateactivity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.This great flowering of annotating and indexing will alter the way we discover books, too. Webpublishers have long recognized that "front doors" matter much less in the Google age, as visitorscome directly to individual articles through search. Increasingly, readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote on page 157, instead of an interesting cover ondisplay at the bookstore, or a review in the local paper.
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