Burning the Page: The eBook Revolution and the Future of Reading

Lingo S changiN fst 2day. tnk u cn kip ^ W it? gr8. NP.

f nt, ur n 4 a vvv hrd time :(

Our language is changing, and lexicographers are jumping out of their ivory-tower windows.

The English language is no longer managed by an editorial team in the austere offices of Merriam-Webster, Inc., or the Oxford English Dictionary. Believe me, I know. I’ve met with their editors at their offices, and the spirit of the English language had fled. The English language is afoot in the world, and she’s not going to be penned up again.

New words sometimes used to take decades to trickle into the vocabulary, but now that happens faster than a speeding SMS message. We even have words that aren’t, strictly speaking, words. Both n00b and w00t are examples of leetspeak, internet slang that has gone mainstream. One 2012 estimate suggested that 8,500 new words enter the English language every year. Most of these are product names, such as Twitter or iPad.

What will language be like in the future? Will it be some strange hybrid of letters and numbers? Will new words be graced with arpeggios from the extended ASCII character set? Will we find serious works of fiction studded with smiley emoticons? Will the great American novel be written on a teen’s smartphone, one text message at a time, and broadcast live on the internet for everyone to read?

Language change is fundamental and unavoidable. That said, ebooks are accelerating this change. Ebook self-publishing, for example, encourages new words to enter the lexicon faster than ever before. This is because self-published ebooks are usually edited only by the authors and not by traditional editors, a shift in the process that is used at major publishing houses. Unpoliced by vigilant editors, new words from street culture or internet subcultures sometimes slip into self-published ebooks, intrude into the language, and achieve mainstream status.

And this is nothing to worry about.

You see, ebooks will hasten the rapid change in language and aid in its transformation. But let me pause for a moment to explain language change by way of an example.

I was in the hospital recently, visiting a friend recovering from surgery. She was coming out of anesthesia, and I was a little worried. There’s always a rare chance with anesthesia that a patient will die in her sleep. My friend had been out for a long time after the procedure and was finally coming round. As she grogged awake, I asked her if she was okay, and what she said sounded like, well, pure gibberish.

I was concerned, thinking she was speaking in tongues or had some brain damage. So I asked her to repeat it, and she did, slower this time. Still gibberish. I was about to fetch one of the nurses, when my friend finally explained that it was the opening of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and repeated it slowly:

She had memorized the passage as a kid and had recited it to prove to herself that her memory was still intact after anesthesia.

I didn’t recognize that this was Middle English. That surprised me, because I know modern English, and I’ve even studied Anglo-Saxon English. But I simply couldn’t understand what she said. There’s a gulf of centuries between Chaucer and us, and to a non-expert speaking one dialect, the other is unintelligible. I very much doubt that Chaucer would be able to understand our use of English, either, although he’d surely be fascinated.

Chaucer was a contemporary of Gutenberg, and since his time, English has been radically altered and vastly expanded. The Renaissance brought an explosion of Greco-Latinate words into our vocabulary. We can choose whether we want to sound pretentious or smart. We can obfuscate or hide. We can cogitate or think. The older German-tinted English words like “hide” and “think” are still here, but we can use grandiloquent ones too—like the word “grandiloquent” itself. Not only that, but there also has been an explosion of brand-name words, starting in the 1950s. Chaucer would have no idea how to xerox a PowerPoint—he would accuse you of speaking in tongues. Or “spekinde tungen.”

And it’s not just words that have changed. It’s style too.

English has a lilty, singsong quality when spoken. The words go up and down, like a buoy on the waves. You see this in stylized English writing too. But you don’t see it in text messages. And you don’t see it in business-speak.

I’ve suffered through countless Amazon deep dives and read reams of business requirement documents that, if stacked sky high, could be a splinter in God’s eye. These documents are logically organized, efficient, and detailed and yet devoid of the soul and sparkle of the English language herself. That’s ironic, because all of these documents were geared toward the Kindle, toward reinventing reading.

Text messages and the language of corporate documents are just two of many examples of how written English is changing. There’s nothing singsong about these styles. They’re factual and show how English has been bent. Words are reduced to their bare essentials, and sentences are constructed in business-ese to convey information logically and unambiguously. It’s as if we’re writing for computers or we ourselves have become mechanized.

Likewise, it’s not just the written form of language that’s changing. Some would argue that the content of writing is changing too. That we’re a culture that regurgitates existing facts and endlessly recirculates them, while our spirit of critical inquiry is devolving. In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr makes this very point. Easy access to Wikipedia and Google seem to be making it easier for us to find the fast answer, the quick sound-bite. But we’re losing the critical skill of inquiry, of diving deep into a subject through source material such as books and forming our own opinions. If a fact isn’t at our immediate fingertips or isn’t in the top ten results of a Google search, we give up.

By making information universally accessible, ebooks have a great role to play in reinvigorating our critical thinking skills. But nobody has made the text of current ebooks searchable online in a public way. It will be a culture-awakening moment when Google or Amazon or another retailer indexes their ebooks and makes them available on internet search results beyond their own pay-walls. We’ll have primary-source knowledge available at our fingertips and undiluted by opinion or Wikipedia editors. Until this happens, our ebooks are still too far away—even if they’re only inches beyond our fingertips.

Content is currently buried in ebooks, and typically, only public domain books have their texts fully searchable on the internet. What this means is that books—our greatest repository of knowledge and inspiration—aren’t participating in conversations with us online, with the exception of public-domain ebooks that lag by at least ninety years. Social mores have changed. We no longer say “twenty-three skidoo,” for example. Much of the searchable ebook content is culturally irrelevant, and that which is relevant is hidden.

By preventing ebook content from showing up in the results of internet searches, we’re missing out on some great information. This is most true for nonfiction. Even newspaper and magazine publishers are smart enough to put their content online where it’s relevant—but not book publishers. It will take a tidal shift, a sea-change in opinion about ebook pricing models, before this happens. That is sad and short-sighted, in my opinion, because it means that instead of getting expert facts from within books written by professionals, we’re getting misinformation and novice opinions when we perform certain kinds of web searches.

For example, “Is creatine powder healthy when exercising?” or “Can I have caffeine when I’m pregnant?” No public-domain 1920s self-help book offers answers to these questions, because words like “creatine” or “caffeine” were not used in these contexts then. But there are hundreds of chat rooms and forums with wildly diverging amateur answers. Publishers would perhaps argue that this information is valuable and that I should just buy the book and read it. True, but how do I even know which book to buy? If ebooks were universally searchable on the web, I’d at least know which one to buy. As it is now, I don’t.

I’m not worried, though. This will shift, in time, as surely as language itself. Publishers will relax their objections to making content searchable, and retailers like Amazon and Google will quickly step in to enable this feature. And then we’ll be reunited with the words we’ve been speaking all along.

Bookmark: Dog-Eared Pages

A month before I started working at Amazon, I was in Kansas City, the home of a great old-fashioned, retro-modern printer called Hammerpress. It is part of the vibrant Kansas City arts scene. On the first Friday of every month in summer, all the streets are full of barbeque and ice cream stalls and the art stores and studios open for you to meet with the artists.

When I was there, Hammerpress handed out some bookmarks. These wonderful strips of thick card-stock had been printed using old-time Western fonts and crazy dingbats of the moon and sun and tombstones in black and gold inks. And even though I think bookmarks are as archaic as business cards, I still use them when I read my print books.

Sadly, there’s nothing quite so spectacular and well-designed to use when I digitally bookmark my current page. In fact, most of the time, I don’t bother bookmarking my digital reading anymore. When I leave a Nook book and continue reading it hours or days later, it knows where I left off, so there’s simply no need for bookmarking. Nonetheless, if I wanted to digitally bookmark it, I still could—and sure enough, you see the upper right-hand corner of the screen fold over, dog-earing the page.

There’s no such thing as a personalized digital bookmark, though. But then, you could argue that such bookmarks were gimmicky in the print world anyway, just opportunities for salesmen to sell you adjuncts to your reading life that you never needed. Hammerpress will keep doing fine. They make music posters for bands like Yo La Tengo and are not in it for the bookmarks. I don’t know any company that is. It’s a sensitive soul indeed who will shed a tear for the death of the printed bookmark.

This type of demise has always happened as one technology replaces another. I have to admit that, as a bookish antiquarian and collector, I am sensitive to the passage of these older technologies. But as much as I would love to send a pneumatic tube with a love note inside it to my girlfriend, I know it’s impractical and I use email instead.

Still, the humble bookmark could be reinvigorated. Life could be breathed back into it. Instead of appropriating old print metaphors—a dog-eared page—why not reinvent the bookmark? Why not treat it as something at once digital and alive? If the purpose of a bookmark is to remind you of where you are in a given book, then broaden its purpose. Let it act as an agent of your other reminders and to-dos and calendars. Make it an agent of sorts with access to your personal schedule. Give the bookmark a personality, and let it speak. Let it remind you of appointments.

Give it a voice and a personality, and let it suggest when you’re reading late at night that you put your Nook away and get some sleep. We speak of dog-eared pages, so why not make the bookmark into a loyal dog of sorts, one that follows you around in your digital life. Let it also bookmark pages in your browser. Let it run off and fetch new information for you, similar to books or websites that you’re currently reading. Let your bookmark learn and adapt to your own needs and habits, and you’ll find a companion for life that follows you around, that dogs you as you read and travel through wordsome adventures.

But here’s the question: would you use such a digital bookmark? Would you trust it to find good reads for you? And do you even want your e-reader conspiring to make decisions about you behind your back?