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Now that books are finally entering the world of networked, digital text, they will undergo the same transformation that Web pages have experienced over the past 15 years. Blogs, remember, were once called "Web logs," cultivated by early digital pioneers who kept a record of information they found online, quoting and annotating as they browsed.
With books becoming part of this universe, "booklogs" will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, "In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.") You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning.
Think of it as a permanent, global book club.
-- Steven Johnson for The Wall Street Journal
I suppose there could be some fun aspects in the new world of e-books, but I hope it will be only an extra option for our reading experience. I feel locked in to the old world of solitary thought between one reader and his book. For me, reading a book is tantamount to a religious meditation. It feels like quality time with the power of the word. I love the speed and hyper-communicativeness of the Internet, but in the end, it strikes me as being crassly utilitarian - more about skimming and clicking than deep thinking, and more about socializing than making one's peace with God, so to speak.
With books becoming part of this universe, "booklogs" will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, "In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.") You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning.
Think of it as a permanent, global book club.
-- Steven Johnson for The Wall Street Journal
I suppose there could be some fun aspects in the new world of e-books, but I hope it will be only an extra option for our reading experience. I feel locked in to the old world of solitary thought between one reader and his book. For me, reading a book is tantamount to a religious meditation. It feels like quality time with the power of the word. I love the speed and hyper-communicativeness of the Internet, but in the end, it strikes me as being crassly utilitarian - more about skimming and clicking than deep thinking, and more about socializing than making one's peace with God, so to speak.
