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

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:
    Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
    The droghte of March hath perced to the roote…
    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