The Future of Reading

The future of reading is very much in doubt. In this century, reading could soar to new heights or crash and burn. Some educators and librarians fear that sustained reading for learning, for work, and for pleasure may be slowly dying out as a widespread social practice. Only at living history farms will we see people reading. For decades the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been studying the reading habits of adult Americans, issuing a series of reports with rousingly alliterative titles such as “Reading at Risk” (July 2004) and “Reading on the Rise” (January 2009). Sometime in the 21st century, the NEA may need to issue the sobering final report in the series, “Reading, Rest in Peace.”

Several social and technological developments of the 20th century, such as television, electronic games, and even comic books, have been generally perceived as threats to literacy and the practice of reading. For some reading purists, even the growing popularity of ebooks and audiobooks is a signal that the end of real, true reading is near. On the other hand, computer information networks and new personal, portable electronic reading appliances—Kindle is the current darling—may result in an innovative, long-term growth in reading. Never before has so much reading material been so easily and quickly available to so many people. If reading founders, it will not be because of a dearth of things to read.

Reading also entails an economy. Incredibly, the publishing industry currently is experiencing as much Sturm und Drang as housing and the job market. As Kindle versions outsell hardcover editions of some best sellers, the publishing industry, hot on the heels of the music and movie industries, is scrambling to envision and develop a model that will actually work. Libraries are feeling the heat, too, because many of these early e-reading platforms, which combine a large online bookstore, a rapid and easy-to-use distribution system, and a portable reading device into a complete reading experience, seem to be eliminating libraries from the equation.

Clearly something important and fundamental is happening to books and reading. Libraries need to be part of this reading revolution, supporting and defending the rights of digital readers, experimenting with new reader services, collecting new genres and media formats, and providing access for all readers to the devices, networks, content, and online communities that will continue to emerge.

Books are the primary brand of libraries. “Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources,” the 2005 OCLC report on an extensive survey of thousands of library users, notes, “Roughly 70 percent of respondents, across all geographic regions and U.S. age groups, associate library first and foremost with books. There was no runner-up.” Brands are wonderful to create, nurture, and protect, but for any institution, its power base ultimately trumps brand. If push comes to shove, and it's about to, my advice is to cling to your power base—readers—not your brand. Granted, most libraries will serve anyone, including people looking to verify a fact, people looking for a job (recently a major population served by many public libraries), and even loblollies just looking for a place to get in out of the weather, be it hot or cold.

Because readers are atomized and disorganized as a power bloc, librarians must continue serving as clear, organized, professional advocates for them. In addition to freedom to read campaigns, we need to be advocates and even evangelists for new forms of reading. We cannot rest on our pulpy laurels.

Reading already is an umbrella term encompassing a wide variety of human behaviors. At one end of the continuum, we see individuals who pore painstakingly over an intense, dense text, such as a poetic, philosophical, or religious work. At the other extreme, some people have developed a practice of rapidly skimming through long lists of bibliographic citations, dipping into the abstracts, references, tables, citations, and full text as their interest is piqued. We could call this type of reading skimmy-dipping, which wasn't even possible a quarter century ago. The recent launch of Google Fast Flip (fastflip.googlelabs.com) may make skimmy-dipping even easier and more respectable.

The boundaries and varieties of reading experiences continue to expand and evolve. For example, perhaps the way gamers interact with highly structured, complex games qualifies as a new form of reading. It is more meaningful and accurate to state that these power players are reading the game rather than merely playing it. Three-dimensional walk-in virtual books, such as the version of Fahrenheit 451 created by the avatar Daisyblue Hefferman in Second Life, explore the intersection between reading and participatory theater. Harvard Library's Robert Darnton would like to create a layered ebook in the shape of a pyramid, including not only the “traditional” text of a book but also data sets, music, and other supporting material.

Reading on screens, especially on small, dedicated e-reading devices such as the Kindle and the Sony Reader, is causing ripples of interest and unrest in the reading population, not to mention among authors, publishers, and librarians. The effects and efficacy of e-reading are hotly discussed. Some people suggest that reading on a screen is slower than reading print on paper, with less long-term retention of the material. Perhaps that is because we cut our teeth with the act of gazing at any screen by staring at 90-minute movies and 30-minute sitcoms, few of which encourage us to ponder their deeper meanings once they've played out.

Others report that e-reading has reinvigorated their interest in reading and the frequency with which they read. Jenny Levine, the Shifted Librarian and information maven, blogged last year about how the amount of reading she'd done during the early months of her relationship with her Kindle went way up. Nicholson Baker notes in a recent New Yorker article, “Maybe the Kindle was the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of.”

Reading is one human activity that is at once both intensely cerebral and lusciously sensory. In the late 1990s, when ebooks were struggling to gain a toehold with the American reading public, staunch defenders of reading print on paper as the only true and useful form of reading argued that reading an ebook on a portable device lacked the tactile and olfactory richness of holding a printed book. E-reading developers and enthusiasts have taken up the gauntlet to make e-reading a compelling, satisfying sensory experience.

Reading always has been multisensory. The look, feel, smell, and heft of a printed book all contribute to the overall experience of reading. Reading probably will become more sensational throughout this century, as multimedia information objects become intertwined into digital texts. While visual reading (in private, in a comfy chair) may be considered by many to be the platonic ideal of reading, perhaps the growth areas of reading in this century will rely on other senses. The eyes don't have it. Tactile reading, such as Braille, and auditory reading of audiobooks already have achieved prominence—Braille among the blind and audiobooks throughout the general population—and olfactory reading, drawing on our sense of smell, and gustatory reading, based on our sense of taste, may not be outlandishly impossible. Digesting a good book could become literal. Romance writer Jude Deveraux already has embraced these ideas. As Motoko Rich writes in the New York Times (9/30/09), “Ms. Deveraux said she envisioned new versions of books enhanced by music or even perfume. 'I'd like to use all the senses,' she said.”

Audiobooks are one of the precious few success stories of American publishing in this decade. Many readers find that auditory reading complements their visual reading habits. People can listen to audiobooks in Bed (although I tend to nod off), at the Beach, and in the Bath—the 3 Killer B's of Reading—but also while commuting and traveling long distances, gardening, and in other situations where holding a printed book and depending on one's eyes is troublesome or downright dangerous.

Where audio leads, video often follows. Television toddled after, then trampled radio. Bradley Inman, the developer of Vook (www.vook.com), has bet the farm that reading text and watching videos are on the verge of melding into a more complete and compelling information experience. Vook, like Book Glutton (www.bookglutton.com), also weaves in the ability to connect with friends, family, and fellow readers as you read (or, ahem, vead), all from the comfort of your browser or mobile device.

Vook is an interesting early example of an experience that attempts to solve two problems wrought by the long tail of digital multimedia. One is the loss of what Brad Stone in his New York Times article (4/4/09) called the “transportive appeal” of traditional books. The images on the covers, the impressive fonts on real paper, and the hefty tangibility of quality paper all contribute along with the text to the transportive quality of the experience of reading a good book. Reading pixels on a screen diminishes the transportive appeal. The second problem is that multiple alternative media options are just a swish of the thumb away on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Time and attention are the precious commodities of our age. Books and vooks must compete with videos, movies, TV episodes, and other media all delivered to the same personal, portable device.

A good reading experience involves content, which can be understood as the bridge or synapse between the mind of the author and the mind of the reader, and the device, pulpy or plastic, bulky or svelte. Both the content and the device seem to be in a phase of wild experimentation. The size and type of screen used, the battery life, the wireless network, the file format, and other basic building blocks are all in a state of flux.

Distribution of content is important, too, probably more important in the long haul than the feature set and price point for all the e-reader devices that are hitting the market. Content has to be both discoverable and deliverable. Once delivered, it has to be engaging, interactive, and malleable. Years hence when the histories of the early decades of the e-reading revolution are written, one aspect that may stand out as revolutionary is not the device design and the technologies supporting these new devices (they really are rather ugly and pedestrian) but the quantum leap in distribution that accompanied the rollout of these devices. The idea of being able to download any of over a million titles in less than a minute from just about anywhere is compelling and new. This fact is forcing many libraries to rethink their collection development and content retention policies, not to mention interlibrary loan.

Whenever you deliver content on a device, managing and protecting everyone's rights are at issue. When ink was pressed into paper to create a printed book, managing the rights was relatively easy, and governing the making of copies was the dominant management tool. Now that content has gone digital, and is staying digital throughout the life cycle, managing and protecting everyone's rights have become more complex and contentious. For many, DRM (digital rights management) is a four-letter word. While DRM isn't quite in the same league as, say, the issue of health care in American life, DRM will continue to have a debilitating effect on the e-reading revolution until a solution that is generally acceptable to all parties (or at least the ones left standing) is reached.

For starters, we all need to move beyond the belief that managing the making of copies is the best way to assert rights in the digital era. Libraries, as public good institutions, have the august responsibility to promulgate and defend the rights of libraries and of the reading public, while respecting the rights of authors, publishers, aggregators, and manufacturers.

Authors, readers, and everyone in the middle create relationships of some sort. We could characterize these relationships as power struggles or as elaborate dances, but certainly some sort of relationship exists between authors, readers, and the so-called gatekeepers in between—agents, editors, publicists, publishers, booksellers, content aggregators and resellers, and libraries, to name a few. That complex web of relationships is based on the various technologies and social revolutions that create and inform reading opportunities.

For example, the rapid rise in the popularity of the novel in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries can be attributed to the growth and diffusion of literacy throughout the British population and a change in the production of paper, which, unfortunately, in the end turned out to be a horribly acidic manufacturing decision but lucrative nonetheless. Without these technological and social revolutions, Dickens might have toiled in obscurity, or even abandoned creative writing to return to legislative reporting or perhaps even bootblacking.

As we move further into the 21st century, this balance of power will shift. Readers have an opportunity to gain more power and control over their reading experiences, but it will not come to pass without a struggle. Librarians need to help readers and be advocates for them during this messy process.

Take font size and font type, for example. That used to be the province of the typesetter and printer, working in concert with publishers and, in some instances, directly with the author. Willa Cather, for example, was very interested in how her novels were typeset and presented on the page. As we get into the e-reading era, the control of font size and font type almost certainly will shift to the reader. Each reader will decide which type and size works best at that particular moment of reading. Readers should be driving the fontifical bus.

The growth of online reading and cloud reading, of which Book Glutton and the Amanda Project (www.theamandaproject.com) are early examples, is creating online communities of current readers of a book, as well as interesting new dynamics between authors and readers. Authors may become mayors of these online communities, and readers may become deputized authors, suggesting new characters and plot twists. In the good old days, first you read the book, then you discussed it with fellow readers. Now it is becoming a single, combined process.

The recent brouhaha over the text-to-speech (TTS) feature of the Amazon Kindle is an interesting early skirmish in the coming revolution concerning the balance of power among authors, readers, and everyone else. The Kindle was designed and manufactured to be able to turn any ebook into an audiobook on demand through the use of TTS software embedded in the device. Although most people continue to prefer natural human-narrated audiobooks, synthetic TTS audio renditions have improved, become more natural, and thus acceptable to many readers. Readers like the feature, especially blind and low-vision users (even though the Kindle as a device is not very accessible to this particular population), but the Authors Guild does not. The issue seems to boil down to money. Amazon had licensed the ebook rights for titles available in Kindle editions but not audiobook rights, which generally are more expensive. When the Authors Guild rattled its saber, Amazon capitulated, enabling the audiobook rightsholders to disable the TTS feature in the Kindle. Readers, who stood to gain the most from a decent, easy-to-invoke TTS feature on a portable e-reading device, had little or no say in the decision.

Genres and publishing practices are not sacrosanct. The types of things we will read in the future may not resemble the things we read today. U.S. romance readers have been able to get a chapter a day of an existing book on the phone for a while, but new genres such as cell phone novels—in their pure state, novels that are both written and read on cell phones—are emerging. The cell phone novel first surfaced in Japan about 2003. By 2007, five of the top ten best-selling novels in Japan were cell phone novels. The phenomenon has spread to China and Korea, and even an English-language cell phone novel web site, www.textnovel.com, has sprung up. The rapid and deep deployment of networked handheld information devices—the number of cell phone subscriptions is now over 60 percent of the world's population—may have a profound impact not only on how we read (and write) but also on what we read.

Readers themselves may have a vital role to play in this genre bending. The future of reading may involve empowering readers to add characters and story lines to evolving communal works. Building on the conceptual work and early prototypes from hypertext novelists, Lisa Holton from Fourth Story Media (www.fourthstorymedia.com) and others are developing new reading and media experiences—readia, I reckon—that make interacting with content more engaging for young readers by allowing them to change and contribute to the shared stories.

The impact of these new forms of reading on libraries and librarianship could be profound. For example, they may force us to confront the archival impulse and mission to preserve and protect. Books may cease to be fixed utterances that, once published (whatever that may come to mean), begin a long trip to eternity during which any changes in the text or the text-bearing-device are perceived as crimes against nature and against the inviolable text. Books may become more like fleeting communal experiences, with little or no promise of sustained integrity. Whatever their makeup, they will be books, and they will be read.

All libraries serve readers, and the best libraries serve readers well. As the nature of reading and the population of readers continue to evolve in this century, libraries will need to develop, test, and deploy new services. For example, libraries must come to grips with the experience of reading on personal, portable, networked devices, which seems to be the emerging dominant type of reading. Entire segments of the reading public may look to libraries for preloaded (or easy-to-load with compelling library content) devices that can be used without any out-of-pocket expense.

Because readers are the power base of libraries (as well as of bookstores and other organizations), we also can serve them well by articulating and advocating for their needs, desires, and interests. Authors, publishers, aggregators, and distributors are not the enemies of readers and libraries, but nature abhors a vacuum. If readers don't assert their rights in the dawning e-reading era, someone else will snatch up those rights.

To that end, I suggest that libraries and library associations develop, promulgate, and defend a Reader Bill of Rights for the Digital Era. Here are a few draft planks:

• The reader should be empowered and able to control the mode of reading on his or her e-reading appliance of choice. Specifically, a TTS feature should be available for all books. TTS is not an audio performance. It enables auditory reading, a mode of reading gaining in popularity. Readers should be able to switch quickly from visual to auditory or tactile reading and back, with olfactory and gustatory options if/when they are developed.

• The reader should be empowered and able to control the presentation aspects of the ebook. For visual reading, this includes factors such as font size, font type, font color, and background color. For TTS audiobooks, this includes factors such as a male or female voice, playback speed (sans Alvin and the Chipmunks), choice of accents (e.g., British, Australian, American Midwest, American Southern for English), with similar accent choices for other languages.

• Readers, individually and in groups, have the right to add to and embellish a text, as long as the embellishments (e.g., notes, highlighting, marginalia, new characters, new episodes) are clearly distinguishable from the primary text.

• The reader has a right to save and share these embellishments, or keep them private.

When a reader purchases a book, he or she owns access to that text in all modes and instances and on all devices, for the duration of the ownership agreement. The length of the agreement may be for a specified period of time (a day, a week, a fortnight, a semester, etc.), or until death do the reader and the text part, or in perpetuity, meaning that a reader could leave a text with that reader's embellishments in a will to his or her kith and kin.

This last point is the tip of an iceberg capable of sinking many a ship. Rather than buy an instance of a text, which made sense when instances of a text involved a static relationship between the text and the text-bearing device, such as a text printed on paper, in the future the selling and leasing of reading material would make more sense if we lease access to the text itself, regardless of whatever hardware and software we use now and in the future to create a reading experience with that text.

Reports of the death of reading are premature. Readers are resilient and inventive. What worries me is not so much that reading will become an attenuated, marginalized field of practice but that the developmental paths of librarianship and reading will diverge in the 21st century. We may wander off from our power base, or it will evolve away from us.

Librarians should encourage—nay, aid and abet—experimentation in reading. We need to cleave to the needs and wants of readers. We must continue to study their reading habits, then design and redesign our content collections, systems, and services to help them improve and maximize their reading experiences. We are in a long-term commitment with readers. We need to be vocal, flexible, and patient as the longstanding relationship between readers and the libraries that serve them continues to evolve.