Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading

to yearn for. Books can inspire us toward greatness. Books can give us moral guidance or connect with us in ways that even our friends and families can’t. I’m sure you have a few prized books that are almost part of you, part of your identity, books that are worth a tremendous amount to you even though they may be scuffed up and battered or dog-eared and underlined.
    Books are essential. And it’s important that they don’t go away.
    But surely we can improve on books, now that we’re moving into the digital age. If we could redesign reading, what would it look like?
    Books serve many purposes. Sometimes we read for entertainment, and sometimes we read to learn. Sometimes we read for distraction or inspiration or edification or to fight the sheer boredom of a long plane trip. But if I had to distill books down to one core cultural purpose, it would be to teach. Books hold the repository of human knowledge, and then some. Even an innocent romance or mystery encodes social mores, cultural stereotypes, details about a time and a place, and an author’s insights into the world. The primary cultural function of a book is to teach, and other functions are simply stylized elaborations and innovations on this core function.
    So if books, at their core, are about teaching and learning, experiencing and enjoying, then the best redesign of a book would leverage experience itself. Consider, for example, the experience of walking with your dad through the forest as a kid, as he points out all the trees and their names. As you taste some of the cranberries and blueberries growing on the shrubs, he tells you how they grow and what they’re used for. You’re likely to learn and remember more from a genuine experience like this than you would from a dry, uninviting text.
    Perhaps linear line-by-line reading as we know it will fade to a quaint pastime like butter churning or horseback riding once holographic learning is developed—I’m thinking of a Star Trek -ian innovation like the Holodeck.
    In that TV show, the Holodeck was a space the size of a large theater populated by holograms—projections of people, places, and objects—with which crew members could interact. If books could be translated into Holodeck-style experiences, you would not read a book by linearly regarding one row of text after another, line by line, page by page, but by directly experiencing it.
    Instead of reading about the characters in a romance novel, you would be one of them and interact with the others. The novel would be staged and scripted, and you would be a character in the script wearing period-style clothing. Imagine how history lessons, not to mention global ethics, would be revitalized if you had to participate in a simulation of World War II during school instead of reading about it as a series of dry events and facts. Imagine how many more students might take an interest in algebra or topology if they could experience a Möbius strip by walking on its surface.
    That said, Holodeck-style experiential learning isn’t on our immediate technological horizon. In the short term, the future of ebooks might look a lot like an evolved version of Apple’s own iBook product. With tables, 3D rotating images, embedded multimedia, and multiple typographic options, it certainly engages the eyes and ears. Especially on a device the size of an iPad. I think this is great, although sometimes such multimedia enhancements are distracting enough to take readers away from the main points of the text. Sort of like a PowerPoint presentation with too many bells and whistles and too much clip art.
    Experiential reading may well become the next stage in reading’s redesign—for certain kinds of books, at least. I think the only time reading will still be preferred in the traditional linear line-by-line style is when it’s no longer used for teaching purposes. There are some palaces of the imagination too tenuous to build from celluloid, some stretches of the mind for which no map suffices but the reader’s own personality. Some books need to be presented in their original form, and any additional visual or auditory or virtual details would be an imposition, an interpretation. Creating an experiential, Holodeck-style simulation of a book requires one or more people to script the book, and that scripting locks the book into just one interpretation.
    Indeed, we see this with movies now. There have been many remakes of classic plays like Hamlet , each subtly