What is a book? Simple enough question. It’s a text between two covers, right? That text can be a story (A KISS BEFORE DYING) or it can be philosophy (NATURAL HISTORY OF RELIGION). It can be anything and everything in between--so long as it’s got pages between two covers.
Well, the answer gets considerably more complex than that. Who made the book? The author? the publisher? the compositor? the copy editor? the acquisitions editor? The author didn’t make the book; the author created the manuscript, nonfiction or fiction, from which the book was in turn made by all the aforementioned people and more. A book is a complex object. It is the material artifact of the community of its makers.
A book comes with all kinds of codes, which if you know how to break those codes, you can find out all sorts of cool information. There are bibliographical codes--which edition is it? what was included/exclude for this edition? --and social codes--who’s reading this and how?--and linguistic codes--what kind of language did the author and/or editor chose? That’s probably considerably more than most people ever read of their books.
What happens when we go digital?
This was the narrative question Michael Suarez, the director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, used to drive his talk, “The Future of the Book in the Digital World.” It was part of the Virginia Festival of the Book.
Suarez is hardly a Luddite, even if he is a poetry professor. He stated flat out that the digital world is here to stay. His talk was rather a cost-benefit analysis. It was a means to getting us thinking about gain and loss and whether we want to be master of technology or mastered by it.
To digitize is to make an image. Digitization produces a simulacrum--a representation of that which is absent.
A digitized book page isn’t a not a page anymore; it’s a picture. And in that picture, we lose information. The different ways a text can be read are reduced to one, so the social codes are gone. In digital, there is only the digital edition, so there goes the bibliographical codes. The only thing left is the linguistic code. The language remains.
Suarez calls this an environment of privation. How can we know what’s missing if we don’t spend time with what’s present? What’s present is the actual, physical books. He drew his understanding from studies that show students at Trinity College, Dublin (not exactly the University of Phoenix) can’t make the connection between the screen image they’re studying in their rooms and the books that are across campus in the library.
<snark>Yet another comment on undergraduate laziness, but I absolutely refuse to go there.</snark>
He also used examples from art history, which has been taught for decades from slides, not the real pictures hanging in the museums. (I have to confess I’ve never taken a formal art history class though I have done a quickie course from the Teaching Company. I enjoyed it, but it was done via DVD. Talk about remediation) Anyway, Suarez pointed out that students suffered from a systematic falsification. The reproduction, not the original, takes center stage. This changes the way we see--despite an acknowledged distortion. We don’t see, feel, or understand the physical.
In books, a digital image doesn’t always reproduce the most important stuff. The red text of rubrics in a hand-pressed book can easily be lost in a picture. Is it important? Oh, yeah. That red text is only the most important text in the whole book. We wouldn’t know it though, if we didn’t have access to the physical book.
Think about marginalia. Margin notes represent a single person’s deep reading of a text. It’s a singular pursuit. It’s a conversation that one person has with one text. It reveals much about what the reader brings to that text--viewpoint, knowledge, clarity of thought, interest, among other things. Marginalia goes out the window in digitization.
There’s an article in THE ATLANTIC by Kevin Charles Redmon on this subject--”As Kindles Take Over, What Happens to Margin Notes?” His concerns were mirrored by Suarez. Yes, the Kindle does have highlighting and note-taking capabilities. Damned if I’m going to use them.
Now, marginalia taken to great length produces what’s known as the gloss. Glosses in the Middle Ages became more important than the actual texts. Part of this had to do with who had produced the glosses. To give a hypothetical example, St. Thomas Aquinas’s glosses were more important than, say, Ibn Rushd’s or St. Augustine’s texts. Glosses then were produced on the glosses.
To use Suarez’s words on my example--an environment of privation. This environment of not seeing the original sources was amending by the Renaissance. It’s motto was ad fontes, to the sources.
Google defends itself by saying the process of digitization transforms the books into something else. Yeah, it does. The techies from last year’s VFB--”Book Technology: Cutting Edge to Bleeding Edge”--were all aglow. They were enthusiastic about new technologies to create text and new software to allow all kinds of interaction with the text and with other people. Much of the driving force behind this new stuff lay in the possibilities of human and computer interaction with the book.
www.nowcomment.com allegedly turns documents into conversation. UVa apparently uses this as a teaching tool. The idea is to free up the data contained within the book and to make the data a socially produced collaboration.
Sounds spiffy, doesn’t it? Not really. A book already is a socially produced collaboration, so who are the techies kidding? Themselves, I think. They’re not thinking in terms of loss. They’re only interested in their cool toys. Just because you can do something, boys and girls, doesn’t mean you should do it. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, either. It just means you should always think about what you’re doing.
For me, reading is a solitary pleasure. It calms me. If I want to invite somebody to my reading, then I get my husband to read aloud to me. (He’s got a much better voice than I do.) Even with marginalia, I’m not necessarily interested in a conversation with the previous notetaker. (In a library book, if the notes become too intrusive to my reading, I take an eraser to them, if I can. Ink notes in a library book drive me insane.) I don’t want to turn deep, concentrated reading into a networked activity conducted at the speed of light.
I think the next book I am going to read is PROUST AND THE SQUID. I also think I’m going to save my Kindle for my fiction. My history books will still be books--so I can make my own marginalia and keep my scholarly conversations with the text private.
Have you noticed what went missing during this essay? The book itself.
What is a book? A rapidly disappearing set of pages between two covers? Perhaps, but I doubt it. Like Robert Darnton, I don’t think the book’s going away anytime soon. Like Michael Suarez, I think the digital world is here to stay. I also think more people are going to take time to think about what they’re doing in this digital world. I hope they push back against its excesses. We’ve already got too many environments of privation.