Hello, children. I hope you're ready for the picture book.
In Norfolk, the Dersingham mobile library is on the move.
Every month, Andrew Stride
makes the 20-mile circuit via Wolferton, Sandringham
and Bawsey, with 2,000 books on board,
for his small but discerning clientele.
The library is one of those special places where people meet books. Physical books, that is.
The sort that sit on shelves waiting patiently to be found.
But even in Dersingham, things are changing.
A guy came on about nine months ago and he asked me
if he could have instructions to download free e-books
from the library system. He's about 85, I think he is.
I gave him the instructions. I haven't seen him since.
It was a wolf. Where's the wolf?
Shall we make him bigger? Yes.
This is the new screen age,
in which the app replaces the child's ABC,
and e-readers put e-books into the hands of millions.
When you can carry around a tower of books
on a device the size of a paperback,
you can't help wondering
what future is there for the books made of paper and ink?
There will always be people who fetishise printed books
and insist that it's a superior experience to flip through printed pages,
just as there are people who insist that LPs sound better than CDs.
But that doesn't make it so.
The essence of a book is not that it's ink on paper,
it's that it's a mechanism for transmitting ideas,
and so, if you get hung up on the object, you sort of can't go forward.
Disappear...is an excessively powerful word for what's going to happen.
But I do think that ten years from now,
when you walk on the aeroplane and everybody's reading,
out of 200 people on the plane,
there'll be four people who are reading a printed book.
You hear a lot of talk these days about the book of the future.
But what about a future without books -
could that really happen?
Will the page clicker replace the page turner?
Will libraries migrate to the internet?
Bookshops disappear?
And physical books become as outmoded as LPs?
Is this the final chapter in our long love affair with the book?
Do you remember what it felt like to do this?
NEEDLE CRACKLES
MUSIC: "The Man Who Sold The World" by David Bowie
SHUTTER CLICKS
And this?
And what about this?
And this?
# We passed upon... #
Technology expands the mind but shrinks the world,
making things that were once pleasurably different more or less the same.
Get the picture?
Well, now it looks as if the world is going to shrink still more
when books go digital.
A dozen little rites and rituals peculiar to book reading
are going to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Make no mistake -
this is the most profound revolution in the book business
since Johannes Gutenberg started flogging printed Bibles in 1455.
In the 500 years since Gutenberg,
our relationship with books has deepened -
they've become woven into the very fabric of our lives,
reassuring, familiar, taken for granted.
Until now.
Those of you who've seen my book,
whatever you make think of its contents,
will probably agree that it is a beautiful object.
And if the physical book,
as we've come to call it,
is to resist the challenge of the e-book,
it has to look like something worth buying and worth keeping.
APPLAUSE
So where did our passionate
and enduring love affair with books begin?
To find the answer, I've popped into the library.
Not any old library, mind you -
I was visiting the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
I was there to see some of the library's treasures
and to hear how books first came to our lives.
As Richard Ovenden, Keeper of the Special Collection, explained,
before the book came the roll.
This one, running twice the length of a long table,
contains just one of the 24 books from Homer's epic poem, The Iliad.
Not exactly something you could just dip into.
You would have read it very much like this.
Rolling one side out
and picking up the text in the other side as you read through it.
That's called scrolling, is it? Yeah, absolutely.
And, of course, we've kept that terminology through the centuries
and we've used it in the microfilm era,
and that's been now translated into the digital world.
The interesting thing that we find is that, as the first millennium
moves forward, that there is this move
from the scroll to what we now call the book,
or the Latin word for it is codex.
And the interesting thing is it happens much more readily
in the Christian communities and with Christian texts
than it does in the non-Christian.
What we have here is one of the earliest Latin books
to survive in England.
This is a text of Eusebius' Chronicles
that survives from the 5th century AD - 1,500 or 1,600 years old.
It's in incredible condition.
It's been kept together by the codex form very well.
Despite it's great, great age,
you can see how the technology works, you can move through the text.
I can hear it as well, I can hear the crackle.
The sound is wonderful, it's fabulous,
and you think that somebody reading this book in the 5th century
in southern Italy probably would have heard the same crackle.
As I look at this,
it's very recognisably a book.
If I took this and showed it to anyone, they'd say, "That's a book."
This could be 50 years old, 30 years old. It's actually 1,500 years old.
So this design, both form and function,
obviously having worked...worked for a very, very long time.
It's successful technology.
So the codex form begins to become dominate, because it works.
It's very convenient to move between different parts of a text,
much more rapidly than you can with the action of scrolling.
It's fascinating what you said,
because in an incredibly short time,
people are saying, "Will be have these in 100 years' time?"
And yet there's so much about this object, the feel of it,
the touch of it, the smell of it,
which immediately represents something to us,
in terms of our memory.
Books are alive with the meanings of their makers.
And you can tell so much about the text itself,
but why it was written, who it was written for,
how it was meant to be understood,
from the form.
And that's something which is much harder to manage in a digital world.
The history of the book is a story of incremental technological advances -
most dramatically of all, from handwritten to printed books,
a revolutionary innovation
introduced into this country by William Caxton.
Tell us what this is.
This is the first book printed in the English language,
which was printed by William Caxton,
and he's using a typeface that is designed
to mimic the handwritten manuscripts of the same period.
That we can see here.
You can see the similarities in the letter forms in both,
and because the form of this book is so convincingly similar
to the manuscript that everyone was familiar with
is that he has to insert a preface at the start of the book
to make it absolutely clear that this was printed,
this was produced by this new technology called printing,
and it is not the same as the manuscript era,
and that every copy is the same.
Therefore I have practised and learned at my great charge and dispense
to ordain this said book in print
and it not written with pen and ink, as other books have been.
All the books of this story thus emprinted
as you see here
were begun in one day and also finished in one day.
William Caxton.
In the centuries after Gutenberg and Caxton,
the book business quickly evolved
to become one of the first truly modern manufacturing processes.
More and more books were produced more and more cheaply,
and the radical ideas they carried were spread ever more widely.
Finally, the mechanisation of printing
and the literacy that books had helped bring about
combined to create the mass-market book business that we know today.
But books have done far more than create a business.
They've helped to shape our world.
We made the books, and then the books made us.
Just ask Her Majesty the Queen,
as imagined by Alan Bennett in his recent bestseller,
The Uncommon Reader.
If you don't know the book,
it's the Queen, by accident,
strays into a mobile library,
which she finds parked at the back of Buckingham Palace,
and out of politeness, really,
she takes out a book and she gradually
begins to read, and as she reads,
her whole attitude to life changes.
"The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference.
"There was something lofty about literature.
"Books did not care who was reading them
"or whether one read them or not.
"All readers were equal, herself included.
"Literature, she thought, is a Commonwealth, letters a Republic.
"Once she got into her stride, it ceased to seem strange to her
"that she wanted to read,
"and books, to which she had taken so cautiously,
"gradually came to be her element."
APPLAUSE
But for all their links to the high-flown and the abstract,
there's something about books that remains reassuringly down-to-earth.
They've never lost their connection to the physical world from which they sprung.
When you see the industrial alchemy
that turns trees into paper, for example,
you begin to appreciate the sheer scale of operations that are required
to put physical books into the hands of readers.
MACHINE WHIRRS LOUDLY
MACHINE DROWNS OUT SPEECH
So books are inescapable, physical objects.
But they're also organic, just like their readers.
They might not live and breathe as we do,
but they can certainly smell like us.
Take a deep breath and meet someone with a nose for a good book.
Is this what you do for a living, Rachel, smelling books? Um, yes.
'Rachel Morrison's official job is as a librarian
'at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
'But she spends much of her time
'smelling the books in the MoMA library, all 300,000 of them,
'and carefully noting the olfactory essence of each.'
"1967-'68, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Reports.
"Smoky wool.
"1968, Directory Of Fellows. Sweet flowers.
"1994, The Order Of Things.
"Burnt tortilla.
"1951, Report. Perfume paper.
"1977, Two Philosophical Experiments.
"A hug with an elderly relative."
Where did that come from?
Um, well, when I hug my grandparents, they're usually wearing wool,
and my grandfather smokes, so I think it had this, like,
woolly, smoky smell, the way that smoke sort of sticks to wool.
"Cigars.
"Moss. Woody and wet.
"Campfire.
"Vacuum cleaner.
"Silly Putty.
"Play-Doh.
"Campfire..."
So do you think we actually really will miss the smell of books?
I think people will. I know that I will and that I do miss the smell.
There's something intimate about having a smell of a book,
and when you're reading something off a screen,
there's no intimacy.
Can you imagine, though... You know what's going to happen -
some smart person will think, "I've got all that right.
"Now I have to have to have a smell.
And they're going to... With every book you get,
there's probably going to be a special customised smell.
That would be interesting. Yeah, it'll be a special new app.
Yeah. You can have a smell app. Yeah, yeah.
Ah, yes - the "app".
One of those bland little words, like "tweet" or "blog" or "search"
that are quietly changing our world.
If you're wondering what could ever replace those wonderful
smelly old books, here's part of the answer.
The Elements, once a glossy coffee-table book,
now transformed into a content-rich, multimedia,
fully-interactive book app.
Since its launch 18 months ago,
more than a 250,000 copies of The Elements have been sold.
There's nothing to smell here.
Except the sweet smell of success.
The Elements was produced by Touch Press,
set up by former TV producer Max Whitby and Theo Gray,
a scientist and science writer.
Here they are in a teleconference
with writer Simon Winchester, discussing a new app, Skulls.
..will be spinning slowly to give you a visual prompt.
The photos of the skulls are fully interactive.
Landscape we see more as the coffee-table reading mode
for the app, and the portrait is the book text reading mode.
(OVER COMPUTER) I must say I'm enormously impressed
and pleased with it. There are so many choices,
and I feel somewhat all at sea but at the same time rather excited
and stimulated by it.
We are absolutely publishers, yeah. We think of ourselves as publishers
first and foremost.
We happen to use software as the kind of ink we print with,
but we are making books written by authors with a story to tell,
and I think our electronic books are very much
beautiful, leather-bound, carefully printed books.
The Elements didn't start as a blank sheet of paper -
there was already a successful physical book -
but for its author, this had always lacked a certain...magic.
What I thought is suppose Harry Potter had this book - it would be a much better book,
because if he got it out of the Hogwarts library and opened it up,
these objects would pop up off the page
and they would turn or he could look at...
They would somehow be much more physical, much more present,
than they are in the print form.
And one of the design goals for The Elements was to see,
"How close can we come to the Harry Potter version of this book?"
When you're trying to imagine the new kinds of books
that go onto these devices, you need to think what the device can do
that really goes beyond the printed page.
VOICE FROM DEVICE: 'Unreal City
'Under the brown fog of a winter dawn
'A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many
'I had not thought death had undone so many...'
There will always be people who fetishise printed books,
insist it's a superior experience to flip through printed pages,
just as there are people who insist that LPs sound better than CDs,
but that doesn't make it so.
It's kind of annoying to have to hold a book open,
and if you slip, the pages flip, and if you're trying to read in bed,
lying on your side, it's very stressful,
and you might become attached to it in the same way
that you become attached to the scratchy, noisy sound of an LP,
but for the most part, most people,
when given what is objectively speaking
a better reading experience, you'll get over it.
For the traditional book business,
"getting over it" is proving difficult.
An enormous spanner has been tossed into some very complex works.
The physicality of books, the fact that, till now,
they've had to be manufactured, warehoused, distributed
and sold over the counter
has shaped the publishing industry.
The costly infrastructure, from the printing plants
to distribution centres like this one,
the tangled economics, from authors' advances and royalty payments
to the sale or return of books from book shops.
Even, you might argue,
the philosophy of the book business itself
as a cultural as well as commercial enterprise.
All of these can be traced back to the fact that books are things.
But the book has been dematerialised and, with it,
most of the assumptions upon which the book business was founded.
Publishers are really built around one fundamental capability,
which is their ability to put books on book store shelves.
Everything revolves around the physical entity of the book,
rather than what's in the book,
in the way that most of the publishing business is organised.
They are perfectly all right putting a memoir, travel book, cook book,
a piece of fiction all in the same box.
Go to the same place, and when it got to that place,
the person at the other end would put it on the right shelf,
so that the consumer could find it.
Given all this, it's not surprising that the branch of the book business
that's been shaken by the chilliest winds has been the book shop,
from the smallest local independent to the mightiest chain.
Borders, which once boasted 1,200 stores worldwide,
closed the last of them just a few months ago.
Five years from now, if a book sells a lot of copies,
the chances are overwhelming that it will sell most of them online.
Online can be print or digital -
it doesn't mean they all have to be e-books -
but that shift from purchasing in stores,
of which there are thousands that need to be covered,
to purchasing online, at which there are...
you know, a dozen touch points that basically get you to everything,
is the huge change in the industry
and the big challenge to the biggest publishers.
I don't mean to suggest there will be no book stores ten years from now.
There'll be some book stores, but it won't be enough book stores to build a business on.
It will be an ancillary part of the market, not the core of the market,
and that's all part of what drives the fear.
So here they are, then - representatives of what, until about five minutes ago,
was the book business.
A publisher, Gail Rebuck of Random House,
an agent, Ed Victor,
and a writer, Ewan Morrison.
These are the people of the book in their natural habitat,
thinking aloud about an uncertain future.
We have to change. How can we not?
I changed very early, because I represented
the late, great Douglas Adams,
who was talking about this in the 1980s.
He would say to me, "Ed, the business you're in is obsolete.
"We're no longer going to manufacture physical books,
"hunks of molecules," he said.
The one thing that hasn't changed is the essence of what we do
as publishers, and that's curators -
it's selecting, it's choosing the books we want to publish,
it's the editor working in close collaboration with the author,
shaping the book, developing the book and then, ultimately,
bringing it to its public.
We don't really mind how we deliver books, in whatever form.
What is a book really? Is it its body or its soul?
We're in the business of the soul of books.
But what happens when a book's soul is transformed into a data stream?
Digitised, downloadable and never more than a click away
from the infinite possibility of the internet?
It's almost at the point where we can't really talk
about books any more as a separate entity, because, really,
what is a book? What is a piece of music? It's an MP4,
or you can upload it on different formats in about 10 to 15 seconds.
As soon as books go digital, they become
another piece of digital content.
Therefore, if we lose that respect and reverence
for the book and the book just becomes like an MP4
or a QuickTime movie, then that will be the end of the book, basically.
Ultimately, I think the point is that if we get it right,
and physical books remain a part of the market,
and I haven't got a crystal ball -
I don't know whether they'll be 50% of the market or 20% or whatever.
But actually, the opportunity for getting more people to read books,
if they're available both digitally, widely available
and discoverable, and in physical form,
I think it's very exciting.
What concerns me is Generation Y, who are the same size as the baby boomers,
they're really the next market, and Gen Y consume
about 78% of all textual material already online.
So I can't...
You know, within a generation, it's going to be the same for books,
I'm afraid. There's no way that you can instil in them the need to start using books
if they've never had that experience.
Along with concerns about how the book-reading public is changing
are anxieties about powerful new players
who've appeared in the book market.
I think we're at a crucial juncture just now,
where the publishers have to get together again,
because there are forecasts going on in Silicon Valley just now
about who the three main publishers are going to be in ten years' time.
Google, Amazon... Google and Apple.
Amazon and Apple. These are the three companies
that are going to rule our industry. They do now.
Amazon, Apple and Google are these monoliths,
international monoliths, and we are, you know,
we're not exactly tiny, but we're not big in the publishing industry,
and what we're doing, what they rely on us to do,
is to provide them with content. And we do. For free, as well.
Well, the big issue for me is about discovery,
because it's all very well... We might discover
all these wonderful new writers,
but how's the public meant to discover them? Because, actually,
discovering online is a bit of a hit-and-miss affair.
So book shops are absolutely essential to us.
They are essential, you know, to the culture of this country.
I mean, we are becoming a bit of a book desert. The independents
who give a lot of the soul and the individuality to choice
are being knocked off on literally a weekly basis.
And with libraries closing,
I think this point of discovery is a real issue.
The spectre at this feast
is what used to be called the record industry,
brought to its knees by the side-effects of digitisation -
piracy, file-sharing and the assumption among consumers
that if it's digital, then it ought to be cheap
or, preferably, free.
I really think we should be fighting for a really strong copyright law.
This is one of the reasons authors have to stick with publishers,
actually, and not run off. And agents. And agents, yes. Yes!
It's because... We fight for you. It's because there is a common battle
against the draining away of copyright law
and copyright protection.
I think people should be paid for what they do.
It takes a year to write a book. True. It takes a year.
You're preaching to the converted. Exactly, but I'm just really worried
that we are all going to be out of a job in about ten years' time,
so you can look at us as three coffins that are sitting here,
and we've missed this great opportunity...
I want to talk about William Goldman.
William Goldman wrote a famous book
called Adventures In The Screen Trade,
but it could be any media trade, and he said, "The most important thing
"to remember about Hollywood executives is this -
"nobody knows anything. And just in case you didn't get that..."
and he puts it in huge type... "Nobody knows anything."
So I submit to all of you that we don't know anything.
Maybe William Goldman was right, but that won't stop us
trying to make sense of these strange days we're in,
when, as Karl Marx put it,
"All that was once solid seems to be melting into air."
'Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, for example, describes
'a near future in which America has collapsed into political anarchy.
'The Chinese are running the global economy,
'and everyone is addicted to their apparats,
'seductive mobile devices that plug them directly into the wired world,
'trading 24/7 global connectivity in exchange for their privacy,
'their individuality and, ultimately, their humanity.
'Only hapless hero Lenny struggles to resist, thanks to his books.'
"I celebrated my wall of books.
"I counted the volumes on my 20-foot-long modernist bookshelf
"to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my sub-tenant.
" 'You're my sacred ones,' I told the books.
" 'No-one but me still cares about you,
" 'but I'm going to keep you with me for ever,
" 'and one day, I'll make you important again.' "
'Tracking down this prophet of the book-less future wasn't easy.
'Gary was somewhere in upstate New York, working on a new novel,
'far from the tweeting crowd.'
HE KNOCKS ON DOOR
Gary, I presume. I'm Gary, yeah. And you're for sale.
Well, actually, it's completely false.
There's no honey for sale here.
'100 years ago,
'the novelist EM Forster challenged his readers to only connect.
'The challenge these days, according to Gary, is only disconnect.'
This place, to me, is the ultimate privilege.
Because there is no broadband signal, there's the wood behind me,
you know, that's technology where I am right now.
And I pay for this quite a lot, not in terms of the rent,
but in terms of being disengaged from society.
It almost takes a kind of religious conviction to say no to it.
Because everyone's at the party.
You're sitting in this cabin...
down there somewhere there's a big party,
and everyone's screaming for your attention.
And you're saying, "No, I'm going to stay here with my book."
And I remember as a child, this was me as well.
Everyone was saying, "Come on down, Gary, let's play,"
and I'd say, "Hold on, I just want to finish this book."
And that's what it's like now as well,
except the party's everywhere, because the party's in your pocket.
It's pinging and blinging and clinging and singing and dinging.
It just wants you to say, "You know, I'm going to put this down,
"because this letter from my cell phone provider is very interesting.
"Save $49 on a new iPhone GS39 - that's pretty important."
'He's an extreme case, as he'd be the first to admit.
'As a child, growing up Jewish in the dying days of the Soviet Union,
'books were more than just something you picked up to pass the time.'
I grew up, obviously, in a household where books were...
The most important thing that you could do with your life
is just to read a book. My parents had a very clear idea that you start with Chekhov,
then you move on to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
in your teens, you know, so...
I remember my father going to a parents-teachers conference,
and the teacher said, "We hear your son is reading Tolstoy,"
and my father said, "No, he's just on Chekhov!"
And I remember the first books I got as a five-year-old,
four-year-old, five-year-old.
They were... I mean, they were so beautiful.
They were made out of cheap Soviet crap,
but I remember buying masking tape
so I could bind them up when they were falling apart.
So the book itself... you treasured the object?
I took them with me to America, you know,
and continued to bind them up as they continued to fall apart.
Their spines were made out of straw or I don't know what.
But they meant so much.
Books get older, you know -
unlike text files, they yellow and fray.
Books are... They stand against youth, in a sense.
And we live in a culture where youth is the only thing that's important.
So books remind us of mortality, in a sense,
because they also get old and die, and the body also gets old and dies.
So of course I'm scared for books.
"What kind of freaked me out was that I saw Len reading a book.
"No, it didn't smell, he uses Pine-Sol on them.
"And I don't mean scanning a text like we did in Euro classics
"with that Chatterhouse Of Parma, I mean seriously reading.
"He had this ruler out and he was moving it down the page very slowly,
"and just, like, whispering little things to himself,
"like trying to understand every little part of it.
"I was going to Ting my sister, but I was so embarrassed
"I just stood there and watched him read, which lasted like half an hour,
"and finally he put the book down, and I pretended like nothing happened.
"And then I snuck a peek,
"and it was that Russian guy Tolsoy he was reading.
"I guess it figures, cos Lenny's parents are like from Russia.
"But this Tolsoy was a 1,000 page-long book, not a stream,
"and Lenny was like on page 930, like almost finished."
One of the inciting incidents for this novel
was that a television repair man came to my apartment,
he was in his early 20s, and he said,
"Oh, man, why do you have all these books?"
He was disgusted by them. Truly disgusted.
And then he looked at my television, which was maybe 25 inches long,
and he said, "Such a small TV."
I'm not against change, progress, I'm not against technology.
But this happened so quickly that, in terms of maintaining
one's humanity, remembering what it was like to be a human being,
remembering all the analogue physical qualities that make us so,
it just happened too fast for some of us.
What do you have there?
It's a book.
Do you scroll down?
No. I turn the page. It's a book.
Can you blog with it? No.
It's a book.
Well, can it tweet?
No.
Can it text? Can it wi-fi? Does it need a password?
No.
Can it do this? ALARM BLARES
No. It's a book.
'For those at the forefront of the revolution,
'mourning the passing of a physical book
'seems self-indulgent and sentimental.
'The future is already here. It's time to embrace its possibilities.'
I think the future of the book as we know it
really sort of goes into directions.
There's a...
In terms of the physical object, it's going to be an art object,
it's going to be something that's very expensive and only for the rich.
Most of us are going to get our information
from electronic documents.
I have no sentimentality about the physical book at all.
And I grew up...
My dad was in the business, I grew up in a house loaded with books.
I still live in a house loaded with books, they're great furniture,
I'm delighted to have them around, but I don't find them
particularly useful for narrative text reading compared to the iPhone.
The essence of a book is not that it's ink on paper,
it's that it's a mechanism for transmitting ideas,
and so if you get hung up on the object, you sort of can't go forward.
But if you sort of grasp what books are really for,
then you start to get excited about the different forms they can take.
I don't understand the resistance to it.
I mean, the value of having not just A book
but all the books you want on your person all the time, I mean, how...
what particular added value comes from the printed page
that can substitute for that? I just don't see it.
The first assumption to be overturned is that reading
is a solitary activity, a private liaison
between you and the writer,
conducted between the covers of a book.
Digital makes the private public.
We all grew up thinking that reading was something we did by ourselves.
But reading, really up until the mid-19th century, was something
that people mostly did in groups.
Really, silent reading by yourself is something that really has only
come of age in the last, you know, 150 years or so.
And so it's perfectly natural that we think that's the way to do it,
but there are other ways, and I think that we're now realising that
one of the fantastic things about putting books online,
if you format them properly,
is that readers can start to write notes in the margin.
You and I could read a book together, you in London, me in New York,
and we can engage in a conversation that's quite deep.
Bookmarks, highlights and notes can already be shared online,
and often are, whether you realise it or not.
Every time you highlight a passage on your Kindle, for example,
it's added automatically to Amazon's database of popular highlights.
Though unlike Winston Smith in 1984, you are able to opt out.
And every time you buy a book online,
it adds more details to your digital profile.
You've always been able to tell a lot about someone
by browsing their bookshelves.
Now online retailers can tell a lot about you by browsing yours.
For writers, too, all this interconnectivity means big changes.
So my sense is that, as we go forward, that the value of content
is heading towards zero, and so the question remains,
"So what are people going to pay for?"
And our sense is that people will pay for context and community,
they'll pay to know something about the text that they're reading
or watching, or they will pay for community,
they'll pay for the opportunity
to see what other people are thinking about the same text.
Right now, the way it works is I am a publisher.
I give an advance to an author, they deliver a manuscript to me,
they go away.
Well, suppose we did it a little differently.
Suppose the author starts to learn what musicians have learned,
that they get paid to show up, and that in fact,
they get an advance to some extent,
but then people start subscribing to an author's work, and the author
actually shows up on the pages, the author is part of the process,
and people subscribe to this work as long as it's interesting to them.
Digital visionaries see themselves as the natural successors
of Gutenberg and Caxton, the masters of a disruptive technology.
If you buy McLuhan's sort of thesis,
which was that print changed everything for humanity,
it gave rise to the Enlightenment, to our understanding
of what an individual is, to capitalism, to the nation state,
then none of those things would have happened if we hadn't had print.
Well, arguably, digital technology is even a bigger,
more profound invention than print.
SHIP'S HORN BLARES
'Marshall McLuhan.
'Now, there's a name to conjure with in these digital days.'
More than half a century ago,
McLuhan argued that, just as the invention of print
had changed the way we understand the world and our place in it,
so the new electronic medium of television
would change us in equally profound ways.
According to McLuhan, the book was an extension of the eye,
but television was an extension of our nervous systems.
The distinction, he said, was critical, far more important
than the actual content of the book or the television programme.
The medium, as he put it, is the message.
The TV viewer is being X-rayed at every moment.
The light is coming through the screen at him
and penetrating him completely, as in an X-ray.
And people go inside texts, they get involved,
and they go inside themselves. The electric age is one of X-ray.
'According to McLuhan, print had fostered a visual culture,
'by which he meant analytical, objective,
'rational, individualistic.
'Electronic media, he believed, create an oral culture,
'emotional, subjective, irrational and collective.'
When you surround people with electric information,
the overload of information becomes fantastic.
The only way in which people can conduct their lives
is by recognising the structural patterns of that around them,
instead of trying to classify information.
'In the centenary of his birth,
'as Gutenberg man morphs into digital man,
'McLuhan's ideas, often obscure, sometimes contradictory,
'suddenly seem to make more sense.
'I've come to Vancouver to meet someone
'who's made a close study of McLuhan for a new biography.
'The biographer is writer and artist Douglas Copeland,
'author of Generation X and a dozen other novels
'that have successfully trawled the waters of the digital ocean.'
This is someone who knows all about what goes into a book -
and I don't just mean the writing of one.
So, Douglas, you must know something about the physicality of books,
because you have actually eaten a novel, you've chewed it.
That is your novel. That is actually Generation X, my first novel.
What made you chew it? Er, at the time, it was just sheer instinct.
That was back about ten years ago, and at that point,
I'd been writing novels for a decade.
I'd also been using the internet for a decade
and I honestly felt that my brain was changing.
You take the book, you soak it in water
and then you sit down and you watch television
and while you're watching TV,
you sort of chew the book up, you pulp it
into these little, tiny pellets that end up being about that big per page,
then you let the pellets dry for about four days
and then watch television again and while you watch TV,
you unravel the pellets,
so they're about as chewed-up as you can get them
and still have them be intact, and the ink, apparently -
my doctor told me after the fact - is cyanidic,
it's poison, so it's not a pleasant experience.
Doug's offbeat biography of McLuhan was published last year,
complete with MapQuest directions, Wikipedia entries
and YouTube reviews, making him part of the new media age
to which his insights already seemed to belong.
If the medium is the message, then of course
the medium of the book, the physical book,
is a completely different message
to the medium of the electronic book, isn't it?
Oh, it's a completely different experience.
In terms of the way you take in the book in your brain
and your experience of the book, I had this phone call with my agent,
Eric, he's in New York, and we were both reading the new -
well, then-new - Keith Richards biography, and I said,
"Well, how far along are you?"
and he's like, "11%."
And it was like, "Ooh!" Just one of those chilling moments that defines an era for you.
I was on PAGE 20-something - I felt like a real loser, actually,
for not having a percentage.
For Doug, McLuhan provides a perspective
from which to understand what's happening today.
I'm really finding with McLuhan that everything he wrote
that seemed crazy or opaque or scary or, "What the hell?"
if you look at it now is chillingly prescient. He really got it right.
There's this scientific law, it's called Hebb's law,
which is that neurons that fire together wire together
and that any technology you encounter, whether it's a book
or a screen or, you know, hopscotch, if you do it a lot,
your neurons are going to fire in a certain way
and then your brain says, "Oh, let's build a strong connection there."
And when he was saying that the medium is the message,
what he was anticipating, whether poetically or unwittingly,
is what we're now learning through neuroscience,
which is that a medium does literally make you the message.
One McLuhan quote - "First we shape our tools
"and then our tools shape us" -
it feels very, very true and very prescient
about this world we're all inhabiting now, doesn't it?
The world of technology. Oh, I think so.
I think, to be honest, the human attention span
is about the length of one Beatles song,
and after doing two-and-a-half minutes of anything,
your brain naturally wants to go do that or do something
or if you're online, check for e-mail
or all the million things we do online, and in a world of text only,
in a world only with the book, you may have that instinct but you don't act on it.
I think that, you know, life has sort of become a series of blips
and beeps and sequentialised tasks -
and I'm not going to put judgment about that,
because it's what's happening, you can't change it one way or the other.
Because of this reliance on technology,
this increasing reliance on these machines, is the next step just,
you know, stick the chip, you know, in your wrist,
take it out of the computer
and you won't need to bother any more sitting in front of the computer,
you can have it with you all the time?
McLuhan seemed to predict that that was what would happen,
that our brain will be displaced.
Technically, we've actually already done that,
we've already inserted the chip.
Basically, all the memories that you have occur on the screen
and somewhere else in the database inside the cloud,
so it's an artificial memory, but as you have no memories of your own,
you effectively become artificial intelligence,
and we've always been wondering,
"When's AI going to really, really happen?"
And I do think we have to think,
it's actually already here, it's us,
we're the artificial intelligence
and we have become the medium and the message.
It's not just the book that's under assault,
I think that the seemingly doomed nature of the printed book on paper,
it's the canary in the coal mine.
I think there's something else being lost as well.
MUSIC: "Are 'Friends' Electric?" by Gary Numan
Marshall McLuhan was a bit of a cultural pessimist.
He thought television was the enemy
back when there were only a handful of channels
transmitting in black and white.
Maybe the digital champions are right -
we project anxieties about the future
onto whatever the latest technology happens to be.
Televisions, microwave ovens, mobile phones and now e-books.
A stone age McLuhan would probably have bitched about the invention of the wheel.
I've come to San Francisco for an injection of West Coast optimism.
I'm here to meet an entrepreneur and inventor who's made fortunes
several times over from the internet boom and the digital revolution.
This is someone who firmly believes that friends ARE electric.
Brewster Kahle is the founder and self-styled "digital librarian"
of the Internet Archive,
a not-for-profit organisation that's embarked on an ambitious programme
to scan and digitise every book in the world
and to make them available on the internet to all comers for free -
subject, of course, to the objections of copyright holders.
But the thing that sets this apart from similar projects,
like Google's, for example, is that the Internet Archive doesn't just turn books into data -
it also preserves them in their physical form.
The Archive's stated aim is to get a copy of every book ever published,
an ink-on-paper cede-back,
just in case.
'So what do you get for the librarian who wants everything?
'Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 could be a good choice,
'a novel about a society in which books are banned
'and burned by the authorities while rebels in the underground
'learn them off by heart to preserve them.
'Yes, that sounds about right.'
Now, people can understand the kind of digital aspect to this,
this digital...the Internet Archive,
but the fact is you're as passionate about physical books
as you are about digital books, so every digital version you have, you have the physical book.
We wanted to make sure that that copy was not lost,
because in some sense, it's like the specimen of a butterfly
or an ant that defines a species,
this might be the book that defines the digital version
that lives on for ever,
so the idea is to preserve those physical books,
so we've now figured out a mechanism, a technology,
for basically storing these in temperature and humidity controls
very inexpensively for the long term. And you love, obviously, looking at your library,
you love the way that books look, the way they feel and in a way,
what you've got done and how you've gone about it is to retain
that sense of the particularity of each book that you're reading
and its moment in time.
Oh, yes, it's for the love of books.
I mean, what treasures they are.
So many people have spent so many years not just writing the words
but also making the physical artefact, and about how it's laid out,
and so if we're going to go and try and offer these books
with the same gusto that we grew up with
to the next generation, let's do it as well as possible.
We may go and use them in new and different ways and take them apart
and fly them into virtual-reality worlds -
great, but let's not lose
the treasures that are the physical books
that our society has grown on for a few centuries.
We get ten million downloads a month of these old books. Ten million!
That's pretty good!
And the idea of a worldwide population diving into materials
that are decades, centuries old, I think is quite encouraging.
I've brought you a gift, Brewster, for the library.
This is Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
I've chosen it rather selectively,
because this is a rather important book for your library, I think.
Oh, I think this is a fantastic book, of course, but you know,
I think he was somewhat wrong.
The idea that there's people going out and burning books,
actually, I'm not sure is the real problem.
It's that it's getting flooded,
that there's just so much information,
so surfacing great books like this is the right thing to do,
but I think this does add a good compendium at the end,
which is, people become books.
They incorporate, they read a book so much that they become the book
and they can recite the book, so it asks us, "Which book are we?"
And I think everyone that's read one of these can say,
"OK, if I were walking around in the woods, what book would I be?"
And I think I would be either Euclid's Elements,
that was written at the Library of Alexandria,
or Ben Franklin's autobiography.
What book would you be? That's a very interesting one.
Only because it was an important book to me,
I would be Candide by Voltaire, you know that book?
Ah, good one! Yes. That's not just a book, it's a style of life.
It's terrific.
'To end the tour, Brewster took me to the Archive's inner sanctum.'
This is pretty extraordinary. Explain this!
Welcome to the Internet Archive. Who are they?
These are terracotta archivists. These are us.
These are the people that are building the archive.
'Originally a Christian Scientist temple,
'the building remains a temple of a sort.
'Anyone who works here for five years is immortalised in clay,
'just like the warriors and foot soldiers of ancient China.'
We see ourselves as a step in a long tradition.
Yes, people think, "Oh, the digital world, everything's new again,
"we can reinvent everything, we don't have to read history."
Um, we don't think that's true in the least.
So let me show you something else. Yeah.
There's the actual servers, the stacks,
the materials that actually are serving the public,
are here in this space as well.
These are the actual computer systems that store books, music and video.
Every light that's blinking
is either somebody uploading or downloading something.
Those are people all over the world accessing millions of books.
The idea that every one of those lights represents somebody caring,
somebody using, somebody leveraging the library
sort of in some sense brings a physicality to a very digital world.
There are now millions of books up there, somewhere in the cloud,
that mist of invisible data that cloaks our world.
If things continue the way they are going, your book shelf,
your book shop and your library will be up there too before long,
along with your music, your photographs, your letters,
your diaries, your newspaper, your shopping lists, your memories,
your dreams and your secrets,
all the things that have made you who you are.
But meantime, back on terra firma,
real books and virtual books exist side by side.
This is, for now at least, the best of all possible worlds.
As it says in Candide, "You can browse the shelves in the old way
"or you can plug into the cloud and bring a digital book down to Earth."
Good morning. Good morning. I'd like to buy a copy of Robinson Crusoe.
OK. Did you have a particular version in mind?
Can you show me what you've got? Yeah.
So through this machine, we have kind of newer versions,
with new covers and nice typeface.
We also have facsimiles of the old originals
that have been scanned from libraries.
There's versions from the late 1800s, early 1900s,
there's a Japanese version,
there's all sorts of things will show up on this database.
You can even find copies
with the stamps, stains and battle scars of real books,
and once you've made your choice, you can print a physical copy
of that book in the time it takes to make an espresso.
MUSIC: "Brazil"
It looks like a book.
It feels like a book.
It even smells like a book.
It IS a book, and it took five minutes.
There you go, sir. Thank you very much.
We can't really blame technology
for ending our long relationship with books.
All technology has done is to offer us a choice -
to stay on our desert island,
secure and separate with the books we love,
or to strike out into the unknown
and navigate the digital ocean.
And who's to say what strange and surprising adventures
await us there?
MUSIC: "Brazil"
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk