number of fixed values and needs are still around. And that is the importance we attach to fine stories, useful information, and valuable knowledge.
The question many publishers pose today is how those stories are going to reach us, how we shall gather information, and how we can best learn. Reading in the old meaning of the world – namely, with a ‘paper book in a quiet place’ – is still one of the methods for doing that. But it is not always the most effective, up-to-date, or appealing way.
Text, image, and sound now exist in all sorts of combinations. From hardcover print books via printing app with sound effects to on-demand animation films. The choice depends on what you want to achieve: stimulating the fantasy, discovering things yourself, or escaping for a moment from reality.
The activities around this content are also influenced by technique and will increasingly be absorbed into the content: reading can become a continuous process of scanning, assessing, sharing, learning, noting, talking, adding, watching, writing, reacting, et cetera.
Content is and remains the basis, but context is going to offer real added value. And whether you obtain that content from paper or from a screen is not the most interesting question… The question is how you, as user in the information wilderness, can find your way to the right content. So it can be rather nice if there is a publisher who builds up such a good contact with you – personally or via an online profile – that they know better even than yourself what you want to read or learn. And then to offer you the appropriate content via the proper medium and at the right moment.
Lian van de Wiel is business consultant with the Dutch educative publisher ThiemeMeulenhoff, and focuses on the influence of digital developments on learning tools.
67. Reading Becomes Looking – Bregtje van der Haak
Recently, a friend (26) told me that when reading a book, her eyes will intuitively drift to the top right- hand corner of the page, as she expects to find a window there with the Google search function. Rather than having to work her way through the whole book, she wants to zoom in on the essentials and she fully expects to be directed there instantly, effortlessly, and free of charge. When standing in front of a bookcase, again she casts a look upwards to the right, eagerly in search of an entry point for the liberating key word to create order in the chaos of book covers and to find the needle in the haystack.
How do we create order in the chaos? How do we find what we need? These questions are crucial in how we will relate to reading in the future. Linear methods of organization, based on text, reading, and alphabet, will lose ground to visual methods based on looking and image recognition. After all, when confronted with ‘massive information’, looking is a faster and more efficient strategy than reading. In addition, looking overcomes the awkward problem of all those different languages.
In the West, reading is by definition linear: if you change the sequence of the letters, the words mean nothing anymore, or something very different. It is a harness and an arrangement along an established pattern one can hardly escape from. If you mix the ingredients of this recipe in the wrong order, the recipe will simply be wrong too.
Looking is more free and therefore faster, more flexible, and more contemporary. When you read an image you can also start at the right-hand side or at the bottom as the ingredients of an image can be mixed in many different ways to get meaning. My son (7) approaches letters and numbers as pictures. While looking at them he combines them into something that makes sense to him.
In China , every word is a picture. With enormous effort, Chinese boys and girls learn by heart thousands of ‘word pictures’ (characters) and the meanings attached to them. There is no alphabet and no fixed link between signs and sounds. You can start reading a Chinese book at the front or back or on the left or right pages. This is changeable and the reader construes structure and meaning from the context.
The Chinese engineer Yunhe Pan is leader of The Million Book Project (CADAL), which aims to digitize a million books and ultimately all books in the world. He uses the term ‘ Data Ocean ’ for the rapidly expanding total amount of information in the world and works on the concept of the ‘Smart Library’: ‘a needs-centered, rather than a books-centered information service’.
Pan thinks that reading will ultimately be too slow to satisfy our informational needs. He calculates that human beings – providing they live to be a hundred and read one book every single day – are able to read 36,500 books during their lifetime. This is simply not enough, says Pan. He predicts that books will become increasingly ‘multi-modal’ and ‘multi-medial’ (integrated with videos, photos, drawings, music, and animations) to accelerate the transfer of knowledge ‘because visuals can sometimes more quickly explain an issue than text’. With the shift towards e-reading, books and digital archives will increasingly include open, dynamic, and informal sources such as construction drawings, web pages, video news, and statistics.
Pan ascertains that considerable progress has been made in recent years concerning computer-driven recognition, translation, and visual comparison of Chinese calligraphy and that this knowledge could presently be applied to navigate more efficiently in the ‘data ocean’. Searching on the basis of pictures rather than words will undoubtedly become more important. Today, my friend still has a search word in mind when she stands in front of a bookcase, but for my son this will probably be a ‘search picture’ flashing through his mind. The time is right for intellectuals and scholars to set aside their fear, dislike, and disdain for pictures and to learn to picture-read and picture-write.
Bregtje van der Haak is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, and writer on contemporary culture.
68. The Library Is As Large As One Half of the Brain – Els van der Plas
‘If an old man dies in Africa , a library disappears’. This is a well-known African proverb, where oral tradition ensures that history and stories survive.
Libraries are rare in many African countries. Illiteracy is high, 39 percent of the population to the south of the Sahara cannot read or write. Stories are told orally. So if an old man dies, a library really does disappear.
In Africa, they have been looking for a solution to this problem for decades; libraries exist (in, for example, Egypt , Senegal , and South Africa ) but are scarce, just like the old wise men. They work hard at combating illiteracy, organize bus libraries that reach people who would otherwise never read or borrow a book, and have started rescue operations for libraries such as those in Sudan and Yemen , where mainly Islamic clerics have ensured that the ancient papyrus rolls have survived and been passed down through the centuries. But the old man is still the best option. You ask him about the history of your family, the stories of other people, and he begins his narration. There are men and women who have made this storytelling their official occupation, generally by passing it on from father to son or from mother to daughter. These are the so-called griots. They have the knowledge because their parents had the knowledge, and they in turn received it from their parents. Repetition is essential here, through the centuries. The knowledge that is managed and imparted by the griots is called jeliya, which means imparting through blood. You are therefore born a griot, with passed down knowledge and stories; it is in your blood, as it were, and therefore in your head.
In Africa , stories are also told through clothing. The Vlisco Dutch Wax fabrics, highly popular in many African countries, tell historical stories through pictures printed on the fabrics about, for example, the release of Nelson Mandela (11 February 1990), the celebration of Independence Day in Ghana (6 March 1967), the relationship between George Bush and Osama Bin laden (two men embracing each other, 2003), or the woman who wants to show with her shawl with lips that her husband is a good lover: ‘Mon mari est capable’ (‘my husband knows what he’s doing’, 1953). Negative stories about husbands are also told: the dissatisfaction of the women about her adulterous husband, or the shawl with birds flying out of cages with the title ‘Si tu sors, je sors’ – ‘If you leave, then I’ll leave as well’. But there is also good advice: a cloth with a crown and hearts tells of a faithful husband (1973). All these stories, historical events, and wise advice are told in pictures like a moving comic strip. The street with the women in colourful fabrics moving gracefully is a visual library, accessible for everybody, including illiterates.
In the West, knowledge has long been strongly linked with the image of the book. Transfer of knowledge has, both literally and figuratively, an enormous volume with clear contours; libraries represent both in content and in image (rows of books) the enlightenment idea about how knowledge can take us further. That image is now drastically changing; the library can be downloaded and can therefore be accessed and read with a little machine. Do you want to know when Boniface was murdered, where your great-great grandfather lived, or what Eline Vere, the book by Couperus who lived in The Hague, is all about, simply google it. Internet has become a true world library, containing everything, and accessible in every language within a fraction of a second.
In Africa , the library is as small as one half of the old man’s brain, enormous because of the interpretation and wisdom of that man, and limited in its reach which goes no farther than the immediate surroundings. In the West, the library is now as small as the iPad or iPhone, with an enormous accessibility. In Africa , the griot, within his collaborating surroundings, live on for a while; the jeliya is directly accessible. They will soon get used to i-information, the mobile telephone is now common property throughout Africa and the best form of communication. That is what you call the law of the handicap of a head start. They will only then truly miss the interpretation and wisdom of the old man.
Els van der Plas is the director of Premsela, Dutch Platform for Design and Fashion.
69. Classic Canon – Rick van der Ploeg
By reading, you find peace, you come into a different world, experience and feel things you would otherwise never dream of. Reading is astonishing and enriching. Nowadays, you can download onto your iPod, iPad, or any other
