The #%¤&%! of the Book

If the book isn’t dying, then what is it doing?

With the prophesied coming of the ebook, pundits have been talking about the death of the book for the last 30 years. That’s depressing — let us talk about the evolution of the book instead. This seems to be more appropriate given past experience — the death of the book was probably prophesied back when papyri was invented.

Talk about the future of the book is often about digitization, either in the form of the changing structures outside and around the book — the distribution, the price and the availability. Or in relation to the packaging — the ebook versus the printed book. What I want to talk about is how the essential bookness of the book might evolve in the years to come.

I think the real evolutionary pressure on books is created by something that is changing human culture even as these words are written. Some people call this the Internet, some years ago it was called Web 2.0. Here I will coin it the Hyper Networked Usage Phenomenon, or HyNUP for short. Sometimes it takes a freaky name to clearly bring forth the freakish effects of something we interact with everyday.

The HyNUP has changed human phenomena in explosive and unforeseen ways. But often it is not the phenomena themselves that are special, but just that they are getting Hyper Networked on a global scale. In fact, the most revolutionary internet-phenomena are often super fundamental. Take Facebook — what is more fundamental to human nature than having social ties, family and friends, and sharing things with these people? Or Twitter — real-time tweeting things that are happening. There is a reason it is called Twitter, birds are doing it all time (Watch out #sabretooth). It is basic animal behaviour. Hyper networked — these basic phenomena becomes something new, something wild.

So what about more complex human phenomena, how does this evolve in a hyper networked context? Take blogs. These are more complex things, closer to our book. Blogs have democratized publishing unlike anything before, giving everyone who wants it a voice and means of using it. Generally blogs concern themselves with shorter concoctions of information.

What if we increase the complexity even more. Moving beyond blog-length, into the lands of complex literature, structured written knowledge, iterative expositions of science, stories, drama, fiction, poetry — have these phenomena evolved into unknown forms never imagined before? On an explosive culture-changing scale, only Wikipedia comes to mind.

Ebooks as we know them are variations of known forms, expositions existing in little digital cages. They are as their print counterparts, their packaging different, but dead instances of written text. How are they created? Like afterthoughts to the printed book, involving complex exports and advanced coding. Not to talk about written forms of scientific knowledge, victims of early digitization, lying in their pdf-tombs, locked behind paywalls and institutional bureaucracy.

My point is that we are not even beginning to see what is possible with this complex human behaviour in a hyper networked context. The ebook scene, or e-publishing, are just mirrors and rehashes of known forms, now in digital.

But we can try to imagine: What will happen if everyone can write books and publish them worldwide with the blink of an eye? What will happen if a thousand people are reading the end of an amazing story at the same time, commenting and chatting real time in the margins of the book? What will happen if fifty scientists can interact with each other as they are reading a new report on cancer-treatment as it is published? What if ten great screenwriters are going episodical like Dickens, reacting to readers like insane improvisational theater — live literature? I want to know!

So the idea of Scripler is to see what happens, if we take this human phenomenon, lets call it literature, and grants it power to evolve in a hyper networked context. What will it then become? It’s an evolutionary experiment, with the internet as the laboratory, and the collective literate output of the world as the subject. That is the ambition at least.