Occasionally I read something that bothers me in obscure and subtle ways. Such things gnaw at me and lead to reflection. Recently an article at an important journalism education site (Poynter) by a distinguished e-journalist and professor (Bill Adair, who has created a Pulitzer-wining news site) provoked such a reaction. The only way I can explain it is to say that it strikes both at the heart of my beliefs about books, how we interact with them, and how important they are in shaping our patterns of cognition (and hence our fundamental construction of reality).
Adair writes about his disappointment in current ebooks and discusses the kind multimedia ebooks he would like to see. He begins with a biography of Bruce Springsteen that he feels ought to have included recordings of the music. Given the mess that music copyright has become, the author did not try to incorporate audio files, but agreed with Adair that this should happen in the future. Perhaps this would have been a good idea, but the lack of music forced Adair to go out and construct his own soundtrack as he read the book. Adair says he downloaded several albums. I wonder if he also searched out interesting and different performances of these songs on the web of which he was previously unaware? Is that important? The difference between the two behaviors is the difference between two different levels or kinds of engagement with the book and the music.
The second book Adair read is Dan Brown's Inferno. He understandably wanted to see maps, illustrations, and other materials described in the book. He did find a website that pulled together this material, but felt it should have been built into the ebook. Unlike the Springsteen bio, what he wanted here was not too different from an illustrated edition of a print book, though he would have liked animated maps showing the movements of the characters. I find myself more sympathetic to this than I do to his desire for a soundtrack, partly because of the tradition of illustrations in books and partly because of peculiarity in the way I related to music.
Adair confronts me with a fundamentally different perspective on the book than the one I have evolved over the half-century of my existence. In this article, Adair gives the impression of wanting ebooks to be self-contained vehicles for consumption. I'm not sure that is his intention, some comments towards the end of the article point beyond that, but it is how it initially struck me. Quite possibly I misrepresent him in some important ways and am merely using him as a stalking horse.
Books have been at the center of my life since infancy. I was read to even before I was born, and many of my most vivid childhood memories are of being read to or reading. That seems to be true for a lot of people, each of whom has their own understanding of, and relationship, to books. Three books that I was given as a child and teenager shaped by perception of books in ways I did not then understand. I was a precocious reader and my grandmother Reed gave me a set of the full Encyclopedia Britannica at the age of eight. This was not the children's edition, but the complete, adult, 1968 edition. It sat on the shelves of my bedroom closet where I could easily reach it. My mother still laughs about seeing me sitting cross-legged on the bed with volumes of it open in front of me. In the days before Wikipedia it was my place for quickly finding information. Anything I wanted to find was seemingly in its pages, and it created in me the habit of looking things up as they struck me. Today it sits, cherished, but rarely used, on the bottom shelf of a bookcase in my living room, replaced by the Internet. From those volumes I developed a lifetime's habits that have carried over into the age of the web, but also gained an understanding of how all information is interrelated and how one must go beyond the confines of a single book, even one as voluminous and authoritative as the Britannica.
Years later, the Britannica was inadvertently involved in another important lesson about the authority of books. In working in early modern European history, one inevitably confronts the witch craze and its difficult historiography. One of the stranger incidents is the witch-cult theory of Egyptologist Margaret Murray that rose to prominence in the 1920s and 1930s. Briefly, she held that there had been an organized pagan cult that survived from the neolithic to the end of the Middle Ages in Europe. Her influence on academics was never large, but her ideas were propagated to the wider public (being embraced by the emerging neopagan and wiccan movements, as well as by numerous horror writers and movie makers) both through her books and through having authored the article on witchcraft in the 1929 Britannica. She fell into complete disrepute academically in the Sixties after the publication of Elliot Rose's critique of her work, A Razor for a Goat. This drove home to me the transitory nature of the authority of books, but also something of the complex web of relations between books.
The second of the three works that were shaping my understanding of book at that early age was W.S. Barring-Gould's The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Barring-Gould collected all 56 original short stories and four novels, along with several essays on pressing subjects (such as the exact number of wives Dr. Watson had), into a wonderful two-volume edition, the broad margins of which were filled with notes on obscure points of Sherlockian chronology, names, places, events, objects that were no longer so familiar (such as antimacassars) and why they were so named, and the values of old British coins. (I gained a solid working knowledge of pre-decimal British coins that stood me in good stead when studying history at a graduate level.) Barring-Gould showed me how much could be gleaned from works of fiction about the world and also how those fictional worlds could interpenetrate with our own. It made me understand that scholarship and fiction could not only live together, but could also complement and supplement one another. Later, reading Samuel Rosenberg's Naked Is the Best Disguise: The Death and Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, a deeply flawed but fascinating book on Conan Doyle and his creation, I was led back to Barring-Gould more than once. I think this was one of the first times I began to notice the interplay that can occur between books.
The third book was Brigadier Peter Young's Edgehill, 1642: The Campaign and Battle, published in the 1970s by Roundwood Press, as part of a series that also includes Young's Marston Moor, 1644: The Campaign and Battle, and Margaret Toynbee's Cropredy Bridge, 1644: The Campaign and Battle. The book is a good, solid account of the two opposing armies and actions of the first campaign of the English Civil Wars. What distinguishes this, and its accompanying volumes, from most histories is the extensive publication of contemporary sources and accounts of the battle that make up about half of the book. It is possible for the reader to have easy access to the materials the author used and to see the battle through many different eyes. It's something that I wish could be done more often. For me as a high school student, I suppose it opened up something of the how the author had gone about his work and also something of the historical method for the first time. It also gave me access to the network of connections that exist between a published book and its sources, which of course is part of a much larger network of interdependent books and sources.
Peter Young's approach in Edgehill brings us back to a parallel track to what Adair would like to see in ebooks. Young provided original source material, pictures, and maps. All of that was possible in a printed book, but of course the animations, video, and sound have not been possible. Were he alive and writing today, I have little doubt that an Edgehill ebook would at least contain animated maps, along with animated diagrams or videos of re-enactors demonstrating the complexities of seventeenth-century military drill. In fact it could well contain performances of contemporary songs also.
So what is it that struck me so viscerally in Adair's article and gnaws at me as I write this? I think it is a fundamental difference between two different platforms, one I've not really seen explored in essays, though surely I've just missed it. What Young was doing in Edgehill and Barring-Gould did in his Annotated Sherlock Holmes was to try to expand the web of relationships beyond the text. In Young's case, he wanted to open up sources he had used, but that would require travel, or at least a microfilm machine, to access in most instances. Barring-Gould was trying to open up an existing text to make it more accessible to readers and perhaps more interesting. Both were dealing with the limitations of ink on paper, and, as happens so often, pushing up against a technical limitation led to a creative solution. Fundamentally, it was about increasing access.
The ebooks Adair critiques are completely different creatures. An ebook exists on a platform that can do many other things, far beyond just presenting text and pictures. In almost all cases, the possibility of instantly going out and exploring the net to find additional resources exists. Adair is arguing that those resources be pre-packaged by the author and publisher. While that is convenient, it is also an attempt to reduce the scope of discovery by making it too easy for the reader not to explore what might be out there. Fundamentally, it is about limiting access.
More and more we are seeing this kind of approach in etextbooks from the major publishers. For them, textbooks are no longer books, but elaborate, interactive, multimedia platforms, seemingly intended to keep the student in a walled garden and dependent on their products. The etextbook today is often an accumulation of texts, interactive animations, video, online quizzes and assignments, collaborative note-taking, to the point that the instructor can almost seem superfluous. It attempts to be a totality.
Adair may not have this in mind. He is writing for journalists and in the last part of his article, he is advocating using multimedia in books as a means for journalists to bring difficult-to-access content to readers, but in the next sentence refers to Hollywood using enhanced ebooks to promote television and the recent film version of Les Miserables.
Let me suggest a scenario. Suppose Dan Brown's publishers decide to put out a special, deluxe, enhanced ebook of his best-known work, The Da Vinci Code for its tenth anniversary. Presume for a moment that they want to provide an experience that will cause readers to pay a higher price for this ebook. They certainly have a mountain of material from which to choose. They could easily include the text, parts or all of the movie (perhaps having the book and movie keyed to each other in such as way that clicking on a line in the book would take one to the corresponding scene in the movie, and that clicking on a scene in the movie took the viewer to the corresponding chapter in the book). They could have very high definition images of the paintings that play such a critical part in the story. There is, for instance, a 16 gigapixel image of Da Vinci's Last Supper available that allows viewers to move in for super closeups. (That works out to more than one pixel for every 4/1000th's of an inch.) While the file size would make it prohibitive to include the whole image in an ebook right now, it would allow the publisher to include very high-quality closeups of specific features of the painting mentioned in the book. The ebook might also contain any of a number of essays (in print or video) that take readers through the symbolism and history of the book. Add to that an online forum where readers could discuss the book, maybe even chat with the author on occasion, and the publisher would certainly charge a premium. They might even be able to use the forum to market other products. But it would be closed, pulling the consumer (I'm not sure the buyer of this work should be called a reader) ever deeper into the product, rather than directing them out, to find other understandings of the art works, other interpretations of the symbols, the whole sordid history of the Priory of Sion, or even the larger world of Grail research or a reading of the Gnostic gospels.
In short, I am reacting to a difference between consumption and reading, between life in a walled garden and a life of exploration. This brings us back to the web of books I mentioned earlier. At some point in my life, I became aware of this phenomenon. I'm not sure when or how, but I do know that historians were actively exploring this when I was in college. Carlo Ginzburg's oddly titled work, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, was the first that I read. Using transcripts of two heresy trials of a Friulian miller named Domenico Scandella (also known as Menocchio), Ginzburg tried to reconstruct the books he had read, how he read them, and how these books became interconnected and exerted a mutual influence on one another (and with folk beliefs) in Menocchio's mind. (The title refers to Menocchio's belief that God did not create the world, but that it arose from spontaneous generation, just as it was believed that worms were spontaneously generated by the fermentation of cheese.)
A decade after Ginzburg, Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton published an important micro-study of the reading habits of Elizabethan polymath Gabriel Harvey ("Studied for Action": How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy, Past and Present, 129, Nov. 1990). By analyzing the copious annotations Harvey made in the margins of his books, Jardine and Grafton were able to study the way he referred back and forth to them, as well as how his reading influenced an important political circle at Elizabeth's court. As with Menochhio, but in a much more organized fashion, they were able to examine the way reading one work influenced the understanding of another. In short, they were able to sketch out a small web of works and their interconnections.
My own studies at the time were attempting to unravel how printing, firearms, and, to a lesser extent clocks, influenced the cognitive world of sixteenth-century military intellectuals. The most sophisticated and studied of them, Machiavelli, gave a clear, if metaphorical, guide to the interplay of his reading and experience in a famous letter to Francesco Vettori. He describes his composition process as a conversation between various historical figures, which we knew he drew from Livy and from more recent historical works, as well as from his own personal experience as a diplomat. He constructed his longest work, the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, around the great Roman historian, whose work we know he had known since childhood. Yet he clearly drew conclusions from it that are unsupported by Livy's examples and that must have come form his reading of others, as well as from personal experience as a bureaucrat and diplomat.
Isn't this the manner in which we all read. We do not read any one book in isolation. Instead we read one book in the context of all we have read before. I am most aware of this in reading non-fiction, and particularly history, but am conscious of it too in reading fiction. It may be that Sherlock Holmes pops up when reading a mystery, or Carl Jung when reading a science fiction novel. In some cases, there are straightforward reasons for this. Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin are clearly and openly a take off on Holmes (both Sherlock and Mycroft) and Watson. Plot elements are widely borrowed from one author of fiction to another. Rosenberg, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes study Naked Is the Best Disguise, at one point made his living as a lawyer for a film studio. One of the major lessons he learned was that when two stories share plot elements, it is more likely that they derive them from a third, common source, rather than one making a direct borrowing from the other. It's been said that most modern authors owe Shakespeare royalties.
But sometimes in fiction it is less obvious. I don't know if Frank Herbert consciously borrowed ideas about the collective unconscious from Jung in his six Dune novels, but I find it impossible to read them without thinking about Jung, as well of course, to the explicit references to the Oresteia - as most of the major characters bear the same family name (Atreides). With the references to the Oresteia, a whole other set of associations unfold, across the many different versions of the plays, starting with Aeschylus and concluding with the Sartre, Eugene O'Neill, and T.S. Eliot, the last two with their wonderful observations on the playing out of curses, metaphorical and otherwise, and Sartre's play with its desolation reflecting back on the existential crises of Herbert's main characters. Herbert's novels, for many years the best selling science fiction of all time, encourage this kind of exploration beyond their boundaries and reflection on their ideas. They draw one inward into oneself but also push one out to see the world as a complex of ecology of living beings and developing minds.
There are many different styles of reading. It may be that creating a closed and self-referencing platform is exactly what some readers want. The problem, to me, is that this may become the norm. Commerce has a way of progressively reducing and homogenizing our options until they are all the same. If our ebooks must be enhanced, I want the ability to turn those features on and off. I don't want them to be intrusive, obnoxiously distracting me from the text. For instance, the faint underlining, that Kindle uses to show popular highlights, is sometimes annoying and something I toggle on and off. Even page turning animations that most reading apps offer as an option are distracting to me.
More problematic is what the walled gardens of our textbooks, and potentially our children and young adult books might offer to the next generation. Will they be encouraged to go out and look up things on their own, or will it all be spoon fed to them? Will critical reading be possible to such a generation, or will they fall for the apparent totality of information presented to them? That is what bothers me about Adair's article. It is not that I believe he advocates anything like this, but, rather, that the path he suggests will lead publishers down a path that ends there.
