LJ Q&A: The Social Life Of Books

Write, read, blog, rip, share any good books lately? A conversation with Ben Vershbow

By Andrew Richard Albanese -- Library Journal, 5/15/2006

Megacompanies like Google and Amazon.com have grabbed the headlines with their programs to sell book content. But tucked away in a quiet corner of Brooklyn, a small band of big thinkers is plotting the book's true destiny. Founded in 2004 with support from the MacArthur and Mellon foundations, the Institute for the Future of the Book, although based in Brooklyn, is hosted by the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, where the institute's founder, Bob Stein, serves as a director of research. The ten members of the institute have a simple yet complex goal: combining new ways of thinking with new media to forge a new path for expression.

In short, the institute is working toward a vision of what books can be. This summer, it will release the first version of Sophie, an "all-purpose tool" for creating multimedia texts. Like the institute itself, Sophie's mission is both simple and complex: to help authors easily create books that use any medium (see the "Link List" on p. 30). It's a key goal, because the future of the book lies in the hands of authors first. Give them the tools they need to deliver dynamic, digital books, and dynamic digital books will flourish.

Of course, it's not at all simple. Minds, laws, and businesses as well as technology will need to change. Recently, one of the institute's fellows, Ben Vershbow, caught our eye with a fascinating three-part meditation on both the past and the future of the book, "The Book Is Reading You," on the institute's blog. LJ caught up with Vershbow to talk further about how the book is developing, both in terms of what is happening and what could be happening, good and bad.

LJ: Your series of articles on the if:book blog, "The Book Is Reading You," is fascinating stuff. What motivated this examination?

BV: Well, we at the institute have been looking closely at Google ever since it announced its library project at the end of 2004. We've always been deeply interested in how search engines are shaping the information environment, but bringing books into the picture, and in such large numbers, opened up a whole new front. It took a company as big and ambitious as Google to begin hauling the print corpus into the networked environment. Over time, however, as it became clear that there was going to be a fight over the legality of what Google was doing, I was dismayed to see the debate become polarized into pro- and anti-Google camps, trading volleys of op-eds. On the one side were the usual technoevangelists, a good many librarians, and some forward-thinking authors. On the other were the publishing establishment, the Authors' Guild, and copyright conservatives in general. The Institute for the Future of the Book really doesn't fall into either camp.

You write about the "social life" of books, and I know you don't mean where books go to hang out and cross-reference. What do you mean?

Well, to a certain extent, I do mean that books will be able to go hang out and cross-reference. I think digital libraries will be in constant communication with each other, sharing patterns of use, exchanging user-created metadata, building maps of meaning out of the recorded behaviors and interests of readers. Parts of books will reference parts of other books. Books will be woven together out of components in remote databases and servers. So, in some ways books will have a life of their own. But you're right, what I'm getting at primarily is the social life of readers and authors that will exist around and inside of books.

How do you see that developing?

Soon, books will literally have discussions inside of them, both live chats and asynchronous exchanges through comments and social annotation. You will be able to see who else out there is reading that book and be able to open up a dialog with them. You already see evidence of this in Wikipedia's "discussion" pages and revision histories where the writers and editors negotiate the collaborative development of articles. Wikipedia is a totally new kind of book in that it is never static, always growing. It has boundaries, but these boundaries are always shifting and are highly porous. We also see social interaction in the reading and interpretation of texts-on blogs, for example, discussion forums, social bookmarking sites, Amazon reader reviews, and thousands of nonpublic venues like [discussion lists] and email. Again, this sort of interaction is not inherently new, but the Internet allows it to be recorded, aggregated, and woven together in astonishing new ways that defy geography and time.

Is blogging a good example of this?

In many respects, the blogosphere is a society of readers, all publishing their notes and reflections in real time and linking to fellow readers. In addition to what we write and say, in addition to the links we chisel into our text by hand, we bloggers have a few basic mechanical tools to help foster connections and build semantic bridges. Trackbacks, for instance, little signals that automatically tell one blog that it is being referenced by another, or tagging, where your site sends notifications to Technorati, the leading blog search engine, saying that something has been published on a particular spread of topics and enabling readers who are searching those topics to potentially find their way to your post. All of these things are just the primitive beginnings of a much richer architecture of discourse that could eventually be built into books.

At a symposium at the University of Michigan, a publisher said he viewed the web as the world's largest ebook. He hoped the same way people "rip" CDs, we would soon begin to "rip" books. What is your vision for the book?

I appreciate this idea of the web as the world's largest ebook, but I think a slightly more limiting definition is useful. In the decade or so leading up to the web, the CD-ROM was the future of the book: a bounded, physical object that you could buy and sell like a paper book and that in many ways resembled a book yet harnessed the power of computers, with multimedia, interactivity, and all that. Then came the network and everything changed.

At the institute, we talk about "the networked book." This involves many of the things we've talked about already-the book as a place, as social software-but basically we're talking about the book at its most essential, a structured, sustained intellectual experience, a mover of ideas-reinvented in a peer-to-peer ecology. The structure part is crucial, though. Whereas the web is a massive, diffuse array, more like a library than an individual book, a book provides some sort of shape, even if that shape is malleable and the boundaries porous, even if the edges of books overlap. A good future of the book is one that combines the best qualities of physical books with the best qualities of the network.

You write that Google's fair use claim for its Google Print project is bold and progressive but that its idea of ebooks is not. What's potentially dangerous about Google's and Amazon's ebook ventures?

All that stuff I talked about earlier on the social life of books? That simply will not be possible in a Google or Amazon ­ebook. In order to pacify skittish publishers terrified of losing control of their works online, Google and Amazon figured out that the answer was to sell not copies of ebooks but controlled access to online editions. You'd think this would be a good thing-designing books as social software for the network environment. But for security reasons, Google and Amazon ebooks will be antisocial spaces, bolted down in copyright enclosures and viewable only in your browser window while logged in.

What does this vision portend for the way we use book content?

Even if you pay for full online access to an in-copyright work, you will not be able to download it or copy pages or passages, let alone make notes or engage with other readers in the system. These will be books behind bars, treating the reader as a suspected criminal, monitoring patterns of use. The book will be reading you in more ways than you will be reading it. In some ways, we want books to read us because they can make use of the data to create meaningful connections. But this kind of reading is invasive and inhibiting.

At PLA in Boston, a Google representative conceded that there was a kind of love/hate relationship with Google. You also noted that you fall into both pro and anti camps. Why the schism?

While I agree with Google's fair use claim [for scanning library books] and celebrate the prospect of having the wealth of libraries searchable online, I am deeply concerned by the secrecy that shrouds Google Book Search. Here we have a private company that is coming to rival the Library of Congress in its centrality in the information ecosystem. We have five of the world's major research institutions offering up substantial portions of their collections for digitization and thousands of librarians apparently ecstatic at the prospect. And yet few seem to be concerned that Google's search system is nontransparent-that no one but Google knows why search results come up in the order that they do. Frankly, I'm surprised there hasn't been more of an uproar from librarians about this. It seems an affront to their nature as information scientists.

Why is this troubling?

People tell themselves that Google is not your typical commercial entity. That, somehow, it operates according to higher principles. I don't think we should have such faith. Google's recent actions in China prove that it is willing to compromise its principles in order to stay competitive.

How do we ensure that this social life of information on the net develops? Are these legislative endeavors, cultural, business?

Definitely all of the above. Lately I've been thinking about three big, let's say environmental issues that are of crucial importance in determining the conditions of the net: network neutrality, intellectual property, and privacy. Network neutrality refers not to the Internet as a medium but to the network infrastructure-the pipes-through which the Internet is carried. Right now a battle is being waged in this country by phone and cable companies for greater control over that infrastructure. Their goal is a deregulated network that will empower them to implement a tiered pricing system that prioritizes bandwidth for higher-paying clients on both the transmitting and the receiving end. Why should they, their reasoning goes, not be allowed to reap a greater profit from the pipes they own?

What's the inherent danger of a tiered system on the Internet?

Right now, the Internet is a level playing field. Bandwidth is blind. In a deregulated Internet, however, providers will be able to discriminate against certain services that are not paying for a privileged slice of the stream. Rich companies and users will be favored while smaller, independent voices will be put at a disadvantage. If this happens, the net as we know it will never be the same.

What about those who provide and use information today? Surely there are legal, cultural, and business interests in keeping information flowing?

Our notion of intellectual property also defines the parameters of how we interact with information and culture. Today's media industries want to preserve old business models built on scarcity in a network of abundance. Clearly, notions of value need to be recalibrated, but these industries are determined to stick with what they know. So, we find ourselves tangled in a web of restrictions, closely monitored in our use of media online. This leads us to privacy: the security of our online identities and that companies are constantly trying to know everything about us so as to market to us more effectively, to secure our little bit of attention. I think our baseline standard for privacy is gradually growing much softer without our ­really questioning whether this is okay. As you suggest, each of these issues touches on the legislative, the commercial, and the cultural. They all also come down, in one way or another, to ownership. Who owns the Internet? We the people who create it and make it meaningful or the companies that maintain the plumbing? Who owns works of authorship? Do we own them once we've paid a fair price for them, or are we always tourists in someone's closely surveilled online reserve? And perhaps most troubling, who owns our network identities?

What future for the print book? Is it even conceivable that future generations will eschew the benefit of multimedia?

It's really impossible to predict exactly what will happen to print books. Of one thing, though, I am pretty certain: the main arena of intellectual discourse is moving away from print to networked, digital media. That doesn't mean that certain forms of print books will not persist. In fact, the mass migration to computers and the Internet in some ways serves as a foil for print, dispensing with its more circumstantial uses and highlighting its most essential virtues. There are certain kinds of books I'm convinced will cease to exist on paper: directories, reference works, textbooks, travel guides, to name a few. But deep, linear narrative works read for pleasure like novels, biographies, and certain forms of history may persist in print for some time. Then again, this could simply be a generational question. People raised with high-quality electronic reading devices, using only multimedia electronic texts in school and forming little or no attachment to dead-tree media, may consider paper books at best fascinating antiquities, at worst, inert, useless things.