The Future of Reading

This is already happening on the Web. Instead of retreating to a cork-lined room to do their work, authors like Chris Anderson, John Battelle ("The Search") and NYU professor Mitchell Stephens (a book about religious belief, in progress) have written their books with the benefit of feedback and contributions from a community centered on their blogs.

"The possibility of interaction will redefine authorship," says Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, an association of libraries and institutions. Unlike some writing-in-public advocates, he doesn't spare the novelists. "Michael Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium," he says. Brantley envisions wiki-style collaborations where the author, instead of being the sole authority, is a "superuser," the lead wolf of a creative pack. (Though it's hard to believe that lone storytellers won't always be toiling away in some Starbucks with the Wi-Fi turned off, emerging afterward with a narrative masterpiece.)

All this becomes even headier when you consider that as the e-book reader is coming of age, there are huge initiatives underway to digitize entire libraries. Amazon, of course, is part of that movement (its Search Inside the Book project broke ground by providing the first opportunity for people to get search results from a corpus of hundreds of thousands of tomes). But as an unabashed bookseller, its goals are different from those of other players, such as Google—whose mission is collecting and organizing all the world's information—and that of the Open Content Alliance, a consortium that wants the world's books digitized in a totally nonproprietary manner. (The driving force behind the alliance, Brewster Kahle, made his fortune by selling his company to Amazon, but is unhappy with the digital-rights management on the Kindle: his choice of an e-book reader would be the dirt-cheap XO device designed by the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.) There are tricky, and potentially showstopping, legal hurdles to all this: notably a major copyright suit filed by a consortium of publishers, along with the Authors Guild, charging that Google is infringing by copying the contents of books it scans for its database. Nonetheless, the trend is definitely to create a back end of a massively connected library to supply future e-book devices with more content than a city full of libraries. As journalist Kevin Kelly wrote in a controversial New York Times Magazine article, the goal is to make "the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time."

Google has already scanned a million books from its partner libraries like the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library, and they are available in its database. (Last week my wife searched for information about the first English edition of the journals of Pehr Kalm, a Swedish naturalist traveling in Colonial America. In less than two seconds, Google delivered the full text of the book, as published in 1771.)

Paul LeClerc, CEO of the New York Public Library, says that he's involved in something called the Electronic Enlightenment, a scholarly project (born at the University of Oxford) to compile all the writings of and information about virtually every major figure of the Enlightenment. It includes all the annotated writings, correspondence and commentary about 3,800 18th-century writers like Jefferson, Voltaire and Rousseau, completely cross-linked and searchable—as if a small room in a library were compressed to a single living document. "How could you do that before?" he asks.

Now imagine that for all books. "Reading becomes a community activity," writes Kelly. "Bookmarks can be shared with fellow readers. Marginalia can be broadcast … In a very curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, large single text: the world's only book."