How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write
Steven Johnson
In his article How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write Steven Johnson expresses some of the concerns we’ve already addressed in this class and brings up a number of new ideas. It appears as though the “deep reading” conversation is still alive and kicking…
Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained 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 to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.
Johnson mentions the endless threads the internet makes available to us and applies it to the E-Book. The “deep reading” issue has been discussed many times but Johnson puts it in the context of actually reading books. We are so used to being able to move from page to page, subject to subject, etc. on the web, but books are limited in this capacity. Johnson says,
We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.
Will our flighty internet reading move to physical books? Will we start skipping from chapter to chapter, skimming the text, putting down one story and starting another? Will we lose the capacity to read a book in its entirety from beginning to end? When I used to have time to read whatever I wanted I would read several books at the same time. I may have begun multiple books but I always read them from start to finish. But now, now that “internet reading” is so tightly entwined in my day to day life and the lives of my peers, could I still do that?
Another important point that Johnson brings up is the effect of E-Books\moving narrative to the internet will have on how books are written. We are now seeing a return to stories in installments through the use of E-Books\Kindles, etc. and the community aspect of such works. The internet will allow us to talk about individual pages, paragraphs, sentences, etc., tagging and commenting in a global community. Johnson considers how all of this could shape the way stories are written.
Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.
Johnson also says that it could be as simple as a few changes words, but the possibilities are endless. So is this the future? Writing for rank and a good slot on the Google search results list? I guess we’ll have to see.
ladybartleby 
