TEDxSalford

Does The Book Have a Future?

The future of the book is yet to be written. In our futuristic society we are used to receiving information through an intimate relationship with technology; in a generation or so, any alternatives to this will seem archaic. But the change doesn’t have to be frightening.

The potential that technology brings to the book has born a creative, vibrant scene of entrepreneurs who are pushing the boundaries of the medium. These changes may be necessary for the survival of the book.

One such change is occurring within the publishing industry, where uncertainty about what lies ahead for the printed page is a hot issue. Technology is pervasive, and we know the way we consume information is changing.

In reaction to this publishers are currently running events around the world in an attempt to understand and predict the digital market. Success attained by a certain ebook has certainly charmed them away from indecision, they know ebooks are the future, but what this future is precisely remains a grey area.

We can say with some conviction that the written word is not going anywhere soon, but its place in the 21st century is going to be drastically different; methods of communication will become increasingly homogenised and hard to separate from one another: in the near future a book might not a book at all. This is the work of innovative thinkers such as software developer Mike Matas.

Reading, in Matas’ vision, is no longer an act of processing chunks of text but an interactive and immersive experience which grants new ways to digest a text and utilises an array tools for exploring the medium. In his talk, Matas demos the first full­ length interactive book for the iPad
featuring swipeable video, graphics and data visualizations which the ‘user’ can play with. The book is “Our Choice,” Al Gore’s sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Critics of this new kind of book may look at the technology in dismay. They’ll worry about the potential loss of the traditional book, perhaps concerned that the developments are simply bells and whistles which distract from the real content. To an extent their worries are legitimate: it would be a sad loss to see all the descriptive passages in novels wiped clean, relying solely on real images to paint the scene would be a real loss.

Luckily, this is unlikely to happen, at least I think so. As the medium develops there is no doubt we will see some authors make this kind of storytelling decision, but as long as a market for literary fiction remains, and I’m sure it will, there still remains a bright future for even the most Dickensian prose.

Imagining the future of this kind of technology, the immersive ebook, can take us to some interesting places: Academics could follow references as hyperlinks, making it easier to see a citation in context; authors could exploit the hybrid nature of the form to create a new kind of artwork; digital scrapbooks would be possible; and the  integration of video in technical or cooking manuals could become an invaluable resource.

Undoubtedly some of these possible forms will catch on where others will struggle. But for the time being the only limit is imagination. Watching the video, it’s possible to see a real future for this technology, it’s an ingenious amalgamation of the things we use to understand and learn from our increasingly connected world.