58. Full Circle – Karin Spaink
I used to read whenever and wherever I could. You were only allowed to borrow four books a week from the library – for me, a measly ration. Once I had finished the children’s section, I cheated a bit with the age groups; the lady behind the desk sometimes turned a blind eye to that.
When my parents were out for the evening, I would sit for hours on end on the wc with a book. At least that light wouldn’t betray me when they came home. As soon as they started fiddling with the front door, I hid my book under my pyjamas, sanctimoniously flushed the wc, and pretended to be intoxicated by sleep. In the weekend, when they had a lie-in, I would take book after book from the shelves in the living room. At breakfast, I read the labels on the jam jars.
Later, I would read at least two or three books a week and the greatest attraction about holidays was that you could read even more. When around my thirtieth birthday I was suddenly struck half blind – fortunately only temporarily – my first concern was how I could carry on reading. I considered Braille. When my sight cleared up, I triumphantly read the screaming advertisements and billboards that disfigured public roads.
All around me, in my five by five living room, there are now more than fifty metres of books: almost three walls full. It looks impressive, but I hardly ever read them. Nowadays, I read at most a couple of pages before going to sleep, in order to ease the transition from waking to snoozing. I also seem more and more unable to keep up with the newspapers and magazines to which I subscribe. (I do obsessively read the T-shirts of people I meet.)
It’s the computer. I sit at it day and night, I read myself silly on mails, news groups, forums, blogs, websites, newspapers, wikis, Facebook updates, summaries, and tweets, and naturally all the reactions to that. Internet has turned me into a short-track reader. I would conscientiously keep the longer pieces that I came across on my way for that same later in which I would read all those unread books that had, in the meantime, piled themselves up everywhere.
That continued for years.
Until I saw a Kindle and immediately fell in love. Four days later, Amazon delivered mine, which I immediately stuffed full of books. Longer pieces that I encounter on the Internet are sent, with just a few clicks, to my Kindle, and would you believe it, now I do get round to them. Hours on end on the sofa, in bed, or in the train; during stolen minutes in the smoking breaks, or waiting in the café at the cinema for the film to start – I’m again reading books wherever and whenever I can.
And again – plus ça change – I often read illegally. I exchange as I have always done books with my friends, but that isn’t allowed now that they are digital. I have to break the copy protection on the books I purchased in the Netherlands in order to read them. (Dutch books shops only serve the market for Sony e-readers.)
My Kindle is in a red leather case; as soon as I open it, I have two hundred books at my disposal. There is a reading lamp built into that same case. In bed, in the dark, I read books – and my cats suspect nothing when they come home at night.
Karin Spaink is a writer, columnist, and feminist. She is a free speech advocate and social critic.
59. Books Erik – Spiekermann
Lots of important people have pronounced the book dead. And lots of less important people – the average consumer – believe them because they want to be seen as progressive and on top of the latest trends. Tablets, smartphones, and other gadgets are sexy; printed books are tired.
I disagree. Nothing is sexier for the promotion of knowledge than printed books. The decisive factor is the typographic arrangement in all its depth and detail and adequate production. Books are objects, not surfaces. Badly designed and produced books will quickly be superceded by letters on screen.
A book, however, that has been properly designed in all its parameters, from the format, the paper, the binding, and the other materials to all its complex typographic parameters, offers a physical experience far beyond the mere transfer of facts. 500 years of typographic experience cannot be emulated by a reader’s swipe of a finger. There are only so many ways to set a beautiful, legible and readable page in a given size and format and most readers wouldn’t be able to improve on it.
As long as our brains and eyes have to compensate for technical and typographic defects instead of dedicating all our brainpower to the comprehension of content, we’ll need books. If their design and production have been carefully considered, they can be perfect objects.
Erik Spiekermann is typographer and graphic designer. He is co-founder of MetaDesign design consultancy.
60. The New Orality and the Empty House – Matthew Stadler
There is anxiety about the book, but little about writing. Text flourishes. We read and write everywhere. Recall sitting in a room with a half-dozen friends on laptops, passing messages in chat boxes; or texting a loved one in another room of the house. No more phone calls; in Japan and South Korea per-capita minutes talking on the phone are down almost 300 percent. Never has literacy been so ascendant over orality. Or so it would seem.
Contrarily, bookstores close and sales numbers drop, throwing shadows of doom over the evolving enterprise of the book. People worry and assemble conferences.
In fact, the book is robust and ascendant while literacy threatens to collapse under the weight of a new orality. The New Orality. Digitized and freed from the inertia of the printed page, the written word has become fluid. Just as solid ground liquifies in an earthquake, the written word turns oral within the rhythmic convulsions of digital transmission. Text corrects itself. It is withdrawn, resent, and then doubled. Links burst open; feedback loops chatter; spelling dissolves and is reassembled. Digital transmission is, thus, performative, contextual, social, additive (rather than subordinative), aggregative (rather than analytic), copious, and homeostatic – in Walter Ong’s analysis, oral.
The printed page is static. Like an empty house, the book does not change while you are away. It waits, making meaning only in the strangely private relationship called reading. Digitized text lives and changes constantly, vibrant in its hive mind. Ong, writing thirty years ago, predicted that electronic techonology would hasten a 'secondary orality'. Though he had in mind books-on-tape, rather than digitization, his analysis remarkably predicts the condition we find ourselves in: 'This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment.'
Paradoxically, the new orality recovers the book as an enduring and meaningful technology by freeing it from a host of awkwardly performed duties. During the age of mechanical reproduction books became home to image culture; their flat pages hosted the illusion of three-dimensional space and were sometimes manipulated to convey action or motion, as in flip-books or the sequential illustrations of comic strips. Their covers became movie stills and their interiors art galleries in which were hung that ultimate expression of the contemporary artist, his photo documentation.
No longer. Now the unfolding capacities of digital transmission will free the printed page from these awkwardly performed duties. As image culture – whatever that is – moves into its spacious new home (digital transmission), it will bed down with its true lover, orality. And literacy will be left to reside comfortably in the flat static pages of the book – home alone, at last. The book lies closed, recumbent and still, waiting for its reader. Who wouldn’t want that?
Matthew Stadler is a writer and editor living in Portland , Oregon . Together with Patricia No he founded Publication Studio.
61. Letter and Spirit – F. Starik
There are two types of people: readers and lookers. And all
just push against doors on which scribbles are scrawled,
everyone does it. The reader will only go into the toilet
after carefully studying which scribble is the man
Which the woman: pictograms are meant for illiterates
and not intended for you, who just wants to know where
to piss. The reader can’t know what the train door is saying
if the picture explains that the door is half open
And the arrows point downwards or do they point upwards,
it’s all over the place. The reader just loves giving
meaning, but never attaches an action, a consequence to what
he has just finished reading. When the reader leaves his flat
he reads all the names on the doors of the other tenants
and also the words on the doormat with the bleeding heart
of the girl on the first floor: ‘You look nice today’.
The looker rings that bell.
F. Starik is a writer, poet, singer, and artist. He is the current city poet laureate of Amsterdam .
62. Social Reading – Bob Stein
Beginning in 2005 The Institute for the Future of the Book began a series of experiments under the rubric of 'networked books.' This was the moment of the blog and we were exploring what would happen if we applied the concept of 'reader comments' to essays and books. Our first attempt, McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory turned out to be a remarkably lucky choice. The book's structure -numbered paragraphs rather than numbered pages – required my colleagues to come up with an innovative design allowing readers to make comments at the level of the paragraph rather than the page. Their solution to what at the time seemed like a simple graphical UI problem, was to put the comments to the right of each of Wark's paragraphs rather than follow the standard practice of placing them underneath the author's text.
Within a few hours of putting Gamer Theory online, a vibrant discussion emerged in the margins. We realized that moving comments from the bottom to the side, a change that at the time seemed minor, in fact had profound implications. Largely because Wark took a very active role in the unfolding discussion, our understanding at first focused on the ways in which this new format upends the traditional hierarchies of print which place the author on a pedestal and the reader at her
