1 00:00:02,160 --> 00:00:05,800 Hello, children. I hope you're ready for the picture book. 2 00:00:16,080 --> 00:00:20,760 In Norfolk, the Dersingham mobile library is on the move. 3 00:00:20,760 --> 00:00:23,720 Every month, Andrew Stride 4 00:00:23,720 --> 00:00:27,560 makes the 20-mile circuit via Wolferton, Sandringham 5 00:00:27,560 --> 00:00:30,640 and Bawsey, with 2,000 books on board, 6 00:00:30,640 --> 00:00:32,840 for his small but discerning clientele. 7 00:00:41,600 --> 00:00:47,280 The library is one of those special places where people meet books. Physical books, that is. 8 00:00:47,280 --> 00:00:52,320 The sort that sit on shelves waiting patiently to be found. 9 00:00:52,320 --> 00:00:56,480 But even in Dersingham, things are changing. 10 00:00:56,480 --> 00:01:02,720 A guy came on about nine months ago and he asked me 11 00:01:02,720 --> 00:01:06,320 if he could have instructions to download free e-books 12 00:01:06,320 --> 00:01:09,320 from the library system. He's about 85, I think he is. 13 00:01:09,320 --> 00:01:14,240 I gave him the instructions. I haven't seen him since. 14 00:01:19,760 --> 00:01:21,920 It was a wolf. Where's the wolf? 15 00:01:21,920 --> 00:01:25,240 Shall we make him bigger? Yes. 16 00:01:25,240 --> 00:01:27,680 This is the new screen age, 17 00:01:27,680 --> 00:01:31,600 in which the app replaces the child's ABC, 18 00:01:31,600 --> 00:01:37,640 and e-readers put e-books into the hands of millions. 19 00:01:45,280 --> 00:01:48,400 When you can carry around a tower of books 20 00:01:48,400 --> 00:01:50,200 on a device the size of a paperback, 21 00:01:50,200 --> 00:01:53,400 you can't help wondering 22 00:01:53,400 --> 00:01:58,360 what future is there for the books made of paper and ink? 23 00:02:05,040 --> 00:02:09,040 There will always be people who fetishise printed books 24 00:02:09,040 --> 00:02:12,160 and insist that it's a superior experience to flip through printed pages, 25 00:02:12,160 --> 00:02:15,440 just as there are people who insist that LPs sound better than CDs. 26 00:02:15,440 --> 00:02:18,040 But that doesn't make it so. 27 00:02:18,040 --> 00:02:21,480 The essence of a book is not that it's ink on paper, 28 00:02:21,480 --> 00:02:25,600 it's that it's a mechanism for transmitting ideas, 29 00:02:25,600 --> 00:02:30,000 and so, if you get hung up on the object, you sort of can't go forward. 30 00:02:33,120 --> 00:02:39,760 Disappear...is an excessively powerful word for what's going to happen. 31 00:02:39,760 --> 00:02:42,840 But I do think that ten years from now, 32 00:02:42,840 --> 00:02:46,160 when you walk on the aeroplane and everybody's reading, 33 00:02:46,160 --> 00:02:48,240 out of 200 people on the plane, 34 00:02:48,240 --> 00:02:52,040 there'll be four people who are reading a printed book. 35 00:02:56,600 --> 00:03:00,320 You hear a lot of talk these days about the book of the future. 36 00:03:00,320 --> 00:03:03,560 But what about a future without books - 37 00:03:03,560 --> 00:03:06,480 could that really happen? 38 00:03:06,480 --> 00:03:10,720 Will the page clicker replace the page turner? 39 00:03:10,720 --> 00:03:12,880 Will libraries migrate to the internet? 40 00:03:12,880 --> 00:03:16,760 Bookshops disappear? 41 00:03:16,760 --> 00:03:19,800 And physical books become as outmoded as LPs? 42 00:03:21,280 --> 00:03:26,280 Is this the final chapter in our long love affair with the book? 43 00:04:01,440 --> 00:04:04,600 Do you remember what it felt like to do this? 44 00:04:07,320 --> 00:04:10,920 NEEDLE CRACKLES 45 00:04:10,920 --> 00:04:14,840 MUSIC: "The Man Who Sold The World" by David Bowie 46 00:04:14,840 --> 00:04:16,680 SHUTTER CLICKS 47 00:04:16,680 --> 00:04:18,520 And this? 48 00:04:18,520 --> 00:04:19,760 And what about this? 49 00:04:19,760 --> 00:04:22,440 And this? 50 00:04:22,440 --> 00:04:25,640 # We passed upon... # 51 00:04:25,640 --> 00:04:29,520 Technology expands the mind but shrinks the world, 52 00:04:29,520 --> 00:04:34,560 making things that were once pleasurably different more or less the same. 53 00:04:34,560 --> 00:04:36,800 Get the picture? 54 00:04:36,800 --> 00:04:40,880 Well, now it looks as if the world is going to shrink still more 55 00:04:40,880 --> 00:04:43,240 when books go digital. 56 00:04:46,520 --> 00:04:50,520 A dozen little rites and rituals peculiar to book reading 57 00:04:50,520 --> 00:04:55,080 are going to be consigned to the dustbin of history. 58 00:05:06,040 --> 00:05:08,720 Make no mistake - 59 00:05:08,720 --> 00:05:12,320 this is the most profound revolution in the book business 60 00:05:12,320 --> 00:05:18,320 since Johannes Gutenberg started flogging printed Bibles in 1455. 61 00:05:18,320 --> 00:05:20,360 In the 500 years since Gutenberg, 62 00:05:20,360 --> 00:05:23,640 our relationship with books has deepened - 63 00:05:23,640 --> 00:05:26,560 they've become woven into the very fabric of our lives, 64 00:05:26,560 --> 00:05:29,240 reassuring, familiar, taken for granted. 65 00:05:29,240 --> 00:05:31,880 Until now. 66 00:05:31,880 --> 00:05:34,880 Those of you who've seen my book, 67 00:05:34,880 --> 00:05:37,480 whatever you make think of its contents, 68 00:05:37,480 --> 00:05:42,200 will probably agree that it is a beautiful object. 69 00:05:42,200 --> 00:05:44,040 And if the physical book, 70 00:05:44,040 --> 00:05:45,480 as we've come to call it, 71 00:05:45,480 --> 00:05:48,040 is to resist the challenge of the e-book, 72 00:05:48,040 --> 00:05:51,200 it has to look like something worth buying and worth keeping. 73 00:05:51,200 --> 00:05:54,400 APPLAUSE 74 00:05:59,280 --> 00:06:01,920 So where did our passionate 75 00:06:01,920 --> 00:06:05,280 and enduring love affair with books begin? 76 00:06:05,280 --> 00:06:08,600 To find the answer, I've popped into the library. 77 00:06:08,600 --> 00:06:10,080 Not any old library, mind you - 78 00:06:10,080 --> 00:06:13,840 I was visiting the Bodleian Library in Oxford. 79 00:06:13,840 --> 00:06:16,760 I was there to see some of the library's treasures 80 00:06:16,760 --> 00:06:19,680 and to hear how books first came to our lives. 81 00:06:21,800 --> 00:06:26,280 As Richard Ovenden, Keeper of the Special Collection, explained, 82 00:06:26,280 --> 00:06:28,240 before the book came the roll. 83 00:06:28,240 --> 00:06:32,320 This one, running twice the length of a long table, 84 00:06:32,320 --> 00:06:38,480 contains just one of the 24 books from Homer's epic poem, The Iliad. 85 00:06:38,480 --> 00:06:41,520 Not exactly something you could just dip into. 86 00:06:41,520 --> 00:06:45,960 You would have read it very much like this. 87 00:06:45,960 --> 00:06:48,760 Rolling one side out 88 00:06:48,760 --> 00:06:54,360 and picking up the text in the other side as you read through it. 89 00:06:54,360 --> 00:06:56,800 That's called scrolling, is it? Yeah, absolutely. 90 00:06:56,800 --> 00:07:02,840 And, of course, we've kept that terminology through the centuries 91 00:07:02,840 --> 00:07:05,080 and we've used it in the microfilm era, 92 00:07:05,080 --> 00:07:07,920 and that's been now translated into the digital world. 93 00:07:07,920 --> 00:07:11,840 The interesting thing that we find is that, as the first millennium 94 00:07:11,840 --> 00:07:15,440 moves forward, that there is this move 95 00:07:15,440 --> 00:07:19,480 from the scroll to what we now call the book, 96 00:07:19,480 --> 00:07:21,560 or the Latin word for it is codex. 97 00:07:21,560 --> 00:07:25,400 And the interesting thing is it happens much more readily 98 00:07:25,400 --> 00:07:29,880 in the Christian communities and with Christian texts 99 00:07:29,880 --> 00:07:31,920 than it does in the non-Christian. 100 00:07:31,920 --> 00:07:37,560 What we have here is one of the earliest Latin books 101 00:07:37,560 --> 00:07:40,800 to survive in England. 102 00:07:40,800 --> 00:07:43,240 This is a text of Eusebius' Chronicles 103 00:07:43,240 --> 00:07:48,920 that survives from the 5th century AD - 1,500 or 1,600 years old. 104 00:07:48,920 --> 00:07:50,520 It's in incredible condition. 105 00:07:50,520 --> 00:07:55,280 It's been kept together by the codex form very well. 106 00:07:55,280 --> 00:07:58,920 Despite it's great, great age, 107 00:07:58,920 --> 00:08:01,680 you can see how the technology works, you can move through the text. 108 00:08:01,680 --> 00:08:03,600 I can hear it as well, I can hear the crackle. 109 00:08:03,600 --> 00:08:06,520 The sound is wonderful, it's fabulous, 110 00:08:06,520 --> 00:08:11,280 and you think that somebody reading this book in the 5th century 111 00:08:11,280 --> 00:08:13,640 in southern Italy probably would have heard the same crackle. 112 00:08:13,640 --> 00:08:15,400 As I look at this, 113 00:08:15,400 --> 00:08:18,760 it's very recognisably a book. 114 00:08:18,760 --> 00:08:21,640 If I took this and showed it to anyone, they'd say, "That's a book." 115 00:08:21,640 --> 00:08:25,920 This could be 50 years old, 30 years old. It's actually 1,500 years old. 116 00:08:25,920 --> 00:08:31,040 So this design, both form and function, 117 00:08:31,040 --> 00:08:34,440 obviously having worked...worked for a very, very long time. 118 00:08:34,440 --> 00:08:36,920 It's successful technology. 119 00:08:36,920 --> 00:08:42,440 So the codex form begins to become dominate, because it works. 120 00:08:42,440 --> 00:08:45,360 It's very convenient to move between different parts of a text, 121 00:08:45,360 --> 00:08:49,280 much more rapidly than you can with the action of scrolling. 122 00:08:49,280 --> 00:08:52,160 It's fascinating what you said, 123 00:08:52,160 --> 00:08:54,360 because in an incredibly short time, 124 00:08:54,360 --> 00:08:58,840 people are saying, "Will be have these in 100 years' time?" 125 00:08:58,840 --> 00:09:02,320 And yet there's so much about this object, the feel of it, 126 00:09:02,320 --> 00:09:05,440 the touch of it, the smell of it, 127 00:09:05,440 --> 00:09:10,200 which immediately represents something to us, 128 00:09:10,200 --> 00:09:12,320 in terms of our memory. 129 00:09:12,320 --> 00:09:15,800 Books are alive with the meanings of their makers. 130 00:09:15,800 --> 00:09:20,760 And you can tell so much about the text itself, 131 00:09:20,760 --> 00:09:23,200 but why it was written, who it was written for, 132 00:09:23,200 --> 00:09:25,440 how it was meant to be understood, 133 00:09:25,440 --> 00:09:27,480 from the form. 134 00:09:27,480 --> 00:09:33,360 And that's something which is much harder to manage in a digital world. 135 00:09:35,480 --> 00:09:41,280 The history of the book is a story of incremental technological advances - 136 00:09:41,280 --> 00:09:45,440 most dramatically of all, from handwritten to printed books, 137 00:09:45,440 --> 00:09:46,800 a revolutionary innovation 138 00:09:46,800 --> 00:09:50,320 introduced into this country by William Caxton. 139 00:09:50,320 --> 00:09:52,080 Tell us what this is. 140 00:09:52,080 --> 00:09:55,040 This is the first book printed in the English language, 141 00:09:55,040 --> 00:09:56,720 which was printed by William Caxton, 142 00:09:56,720 --> 00:10:02,760 and he's using a typeface that is designed 143 00:10:02,760 --> 00:10:06,960 to mimic the handwritten manuscripts of the same period. 144 00:10:06,960 --> 00:10:08,400 That we can see here. 145 00:10:08,400 --> 00:10:13,040 You can see the similarities in the letter forms in both, 146 00:10:13,040 --> 00:10:17,840 and because the form of this book is so convincingly similar 147 00:10:17,840 --> 00:10:21,320 to the manuscript that everyone was familiar with 148 00:10:21,320 --> 00:10:24,360 is that he has to insert a preface at the start of the book 149 00:10:24,360 --> 00:10:27,200 to make it absolutely clear that this was printed, 150 00:10:27,200 --> 00:10:30,840 this was produced by this new technology called printing, 151 00:10:30,840 --> 00:10:34,720 and it is not the same as the manuscript era, 152 00:10:34,720 --> 00:10:36,120 and that every copy is the same. 153 00:10:40,600 --> 00:10:46,160 Therefore I have practised and learned at my great charge and dispense 154 00:10:46,160 --> 00:10:49,120 to ordain this said book in print 155 00:10:49,120 --> 00:10:52,880 and it not written with pen and ink, as other books have been. 156 00:10:52,880 --> 00:10:55,440 All the books of this story thus emprinted 157 00:10:55,440 --> 00:10:57,440 as you see here 158 00:10:57,440 --> 00:11:01,680 were begun in one day and also finished in one day. 159 00:11:01,680 --> 00:11:04,320 William Caxton. 160 00:11:07,640 --> 00:11:10,640 In the centuries after Gutenberg and Caxton, 161 00:11:10,640 --> 00:11:12,880 the book business quickly evolved 162 00:11:12,880 --> 00:11:15,520 to become one of the first truly modern manufacturing processes. 163 00:11:17,880 --> 00:11:23,040 More and more books were produced more and more cheaply, 164 00:11:23,040 --> 00:11:27,240 and the radical ideas they carried were spread ever more widely. 165 00:11:28,720 --> 00:11:33,000 Finally, the mechanisation of printing 166 00:11:33,000 --> 00:11:35,240 and the literacy that books had helped bring about 167 00:11:35,240 --> 00:11:40,520 combined to create the mass-market book business that we know today. 168 00:11:43,360 --> 00:11:47,000 But books have done far more than create a business. 169 00:11:47,000 --> 00:11:49,640 They've helped to shape our world. 170 00:11:49,640 --> 00:11:54,720 We made the books, and then the books made us. 171 00:11:54,720 --> 00:11:59,200 Just ask Her Majesty the Queen, 172 00:11:59,200 --> 00:12:02,640 as imagined by Alan Bennett in his recent bestseller, 173 00:12:02,640 --> 00:12:04,680 The Uncommon Reader. 174 00:12:04,680 --> 00:12:05,880 If you don't know the book, 175 00:12:05,880 --> 00:12:09,440 it's the Queen, by accident, 176 00:12:09,440 --> 00:12:12,600 strays into a mobile library, 177 00:12:12,600 --> 00:12:16,480 which she finds parked at the back of Buckingham Palace, 178 00:12:16,480 --> 00:12:18,720 and out of politeness, really, 179 00:12:18,720 --> 00:12:22,440 she takes out a book and she gradually 180 00:12:22,440 --> 00:12:26,200 begins to read, and as she reads, 181 00:12:26,200 --> 00:12:29,800 her whole attitude to life changes. 182 00:12:30,960 --> 00:12:36,040 "The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference. 183 00:12:36,040 --> 00:12:39,960 "There was something lofty about literature. 184 00:12:39,960 --> 00:12:42,480 "Books did not care who was reading them 185 00:12:42,480 --> 00:12:44,520 "or whether one read them or not. 186 00:12:44,520 --> 00:12:47,760 "All readers were equal, herself included. 187 00:12:47,760 --> 00:12:54,480 "Literature, she thought, is a Commonwealth, letters a Republic. 188 00:12:54,480 --> 00:12:58,280 "Once she got into her stride, it ceased to seem strange to her 189 00:12:58,280 --> 00:13:00,000 "that she wanted to read, 190 00:13:00,000 --> 00:13:03,160 "and books, to which she had taken so cautiously, 191 00:13:03,160 --> 00:13:06,720 "gradually came to be her element." 192 00:13:06,720 --> 00:13:09,080 APPLAUSE 193 00:13:18,440 --> 00:13:23,600 But for all their links to the high-flown and the abstract, 194 00:13:23,600 --> 00:13:27,920 there's something about books that remains reassuringly down-to-earth. 195 00:13:27,920 --> 00:13:31,960 They've never lost their connection to the physical world from which they sprung. 196 00:13:34,880 --> 00:13:37,320 When you see the industrial alchemy 197 00:13:37,320 --> 00:13:41,160 that turns trees into paper, for example, 198 00:13:41,160 --> 00:13:44,640 you begin to appreciate the sheer scale of operations that are required 199 00:13:44,640 --> 00:13:47,280 to put physical books into the hands of readers. 200 00:13:49,880 --> 00:13:53,480 MACHINE WHIRRS LOUDLY 201 00:14:06,160 --> 00:14:10,000 MACHINE DROWNS OUT SPEECH 202 00:14:10,000 --> 00:14:13,080 So books are inescapable, physical objects. 203 00:14:13,080 --> 00:14:17,720 But they're also organic, just like their readers. 204 00:14:17,720 --> 00:14:19,800 They might not live and breathe as we do, 205 00:14:19,800 --> 00:14:22,000 but they can certainly smell like us. 206 00:14:27,480 --> 00:14:32,760 Take a deep breath and meet someone with a nose for a good book. 207 00:14:51,120 --> 00:14:56,000 Is this what you do for a living, Rachel, smelling books? Um, yes. 208 00:14:56,000 --> 00:14:59,880 'Rachel Morrison's official job is as a librarian 209 00:14:59,880 --> 00:15:03,000 'at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 210 00:15:03,000 --> 00:15:04,880 'But she spends much of her time 211 00:15:04,880 --> 00:15:10,760 'smelling the books in the MoMA library, all 300,000 of them, 212 00:15:10,760 --> 00:15:14,640 'and carefully noting the olfactory essence of each.' 213 00:15:16,720 --> 00:15:21,920 "1967-'68, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Reports. 214 00:15:21,920 --> 00:15:24,280 "Smoky wool. 215 00:15:24,280 --> 00:15:28,800 "1968, Directory Of Fellows. Sweet flowers. 216 00:15:28,800 --> 00:15:31,480 "1994, The Order Of Things. 217 00:15:31,480 --> 00:15:34,320 "Burnt tortilla. 218 00:15:34,320 --> 00:15:38,160 "1951, Report. Perfume paper. 219 00:15:38,160 --> 00:15:43,520 "1977, Two Philosophical Experiments. 220 00:15:43,520 --> 00:15:46,680 "A hug with an elderly relative." 221 00:15:46,680 --> 00:15:48,400 Where did that come from? 222 00:15:48,400 --> 00:15:52,800 Um, well, when I hug my grandparents, they're usually wearing wool, 223 00:15:52,800 --> 00:15:56,840 and my grandfather smokes, so I think it had this, like, 224 00:15:56,840 --> 00:16:02,720 woolly, smoky smell, the way that smoke sort of sticks to wool. 225 00:16:06,600 --> 00:16:09,840 "Cigars. 226 00:16:09,840 --> 00:16:13,520 "Moss. Woody and wet. 227 00:16:14,520 --> 00:16:17,640 "Campfire. 228 00:16:17,640 --> 00:16:19,680 "Vacuum cleaner. 229 00:16:19,680 --> 00:16:22,320 "Silly Putty. 230 00:16:22,320 --> 00:16:24,080 "Play-Doh. 231 00:16:24,080 --> 00:16:25,920 "Campfire..." 232 00:16:25,920 --> 00:16:30,640 So do you think we actually really will miss the smell of books? 233 00:16:30,640 --> 00:16:36,040 I think people will. I know that I will and that I do miss the smell. 234 00:16:36,040 --> 00:16:40,320 There's something intimate about having a smell of a book, 235 00:16:40,320 --> 00:16:44,200 and when you're reading something off a screen, 236 00:16:44,200 --> 00:16:47,320 there's no intimacy. 237 00:16:47,320 --> 00:16:51,400 Can you imagine, though... You know what's going to happen - 238 00:16:51,400 --> 00:16:54,360 some smart person will think, "I've got all that right. 239 00:16:54,360 --> 00:16:56,040 "Now I have to have to have a smell. 240 00:16:56,040 --> 00:16:57,960 And they're going to... With every book you get, 241 00:16:57,960 --> 00:17:01,440 there's probably going to be a special customised smell. 242 00:17:01,440 --> 00:17:05,080 That would be interesting. Yeah, it'll be a special new app. 243 00:17:05,080 --> 00:17:08,080 Yeah. You can have a smell app. Yeah, yeah. 244 00:17:10,800 --> 00:17:13,440 Ah, yes - the "app". 245 00:17:13,440 --> 00:17:17,960 One of those bland little words, like "tweet" or "blog" or "search" 246 00:17:17,960 --> 00:17:21,760 that are quietly changing our world. 247 00:17:21,760 --> 00:17:25,760 If you're wondering what could ever replace those wonderful 248 00:17:25,760 --> 00:17:28,880 smelly old books, here's part of the answer. 249 00:17:28,880 --> 00:17:31,920 The Elements, once a glossy coffee-table book, 250 00:17:31,920 --> 00:17:37,000 now transformed into a content-rich, multimedia, 251 00:17:37,000 --> 00:17:40,560 fully-interactive book app. 252 00:17:40,560 --> 00:17:42,920 Since its launch 18 months ago, 253 00:17:42,920 --> 00:17:46,760 more than a 250,000 copies of The Elements have been sold. 254 00:17:46,760 --> 00:17:48,680 There's nothing to smell here. 255 00:17:48,680 --> 00:17:53,400 Except the sweet smell of success. 256 00:17:53,400 --> 00:17:56,680 The Elements was produced by Touch Press, 257 00:17:56,680 --> 00:18:01,760 set up by former TV producer Max Whitby and Theo Gray, 258 00:18:01,760 --> 00:18:05,000 a scientist and science writer. 259 00:18:05,000 --> 00:18:08,520 Here they are in a teleconference 260 00:18:08,520 --> 00:18:12,560 with writer Simon Winchester, discussing a new app, Skulls. 261 00:18:12,560 --> 00:18:15,800 ..will be spinning slowly to give you a visual prompt. 262 00:18:15,800 --> 00:18:19,160 The photos of the skulls are fully interactive. 263 00:18:19,160 --> 00:18:23,200 Landscape we see more as the coffee-table reading mode 264 00:18:23,200 --> 00:18:25,680 for the app, and the portrait is the book text reading mode. 265 00:18:25,680 --> 00:18:30,440 (OVER COMPUTER) I must say I'm enormously impressed 266 00:18:30,440 --> 00:18:34,480 and pleased with it. There are so many choices, 267 00:18:34,480 --> 00:18:39,560 and I feel somewhat all at sea but at the same time rather excited 268 00:18:39,560 --> 00:18:42,200 and stimulated by it. 269 00:18:42,200 --> 00:18:45,800 We are absolutely publishers, yeah. We think of ourselves as publishers 270 00:18:45,800 --> 00:18:46,920 first and foremost. 271 00:18:46,920 --> 00:18:50,360 We happen to use software as the kind of ink we print with, 272 00:18:50,360 --> 00:18:55,400 but we are making books written by authors with a story to tell, 273 00:18:55,400 --> 00:18:58,240 and I think our electronic books are very much 274 00:18:58,240 --> 00:19:01,680 beautiful, leather-bound, carefully printed books. 275 00:19:01,680 --> 00:19:05,360 The Elements didn't start as a blank sheet of paper - 276 00:19:05,360 --> 00:19:08,600 there was already a successful physical book - 277 00:19:08,600 --> 00:19:14,280 but for its author, this had always lacked a certain...magic. 278 00:19:14,280 --> 00:19:20,200 What I thought is suppose Harry Potter had this book - it would be a much better book, 279 00:19:20,200 --> 00:19:23,440 because if he got it out of the Hogwarts library and opened it up, 280 00:19:23,440 --> 00:19:26,720 these objects would pop up off the page 281 00:19:26,720 --> 00:19:29,480 and they would turn or he could look at... 282 00:19:29,480 --> 00:19:32,800 They would somehow be much more physical, much more present, 283 00:19:32,800 --> 00:19:35,640 than they are in the print form. 284 00:19:35,640 --> 00:19:38,280 And one of the design goals for The Elements was to see, 285 00:19:38,280 --> 00:19:41,920 "How close can we come to the Harry Potter version of this book?" 286 00:19:41,920 --> 00:19:44,760 When you're trying to imagine the new kinds of books 287 00:19:44,760 --> 00:19:50,240 that go onto these devices, you need to think what the device can do 288 00:19:50,240 --> 00:19:53,080 that really goes beyond the printed page. 289 00:19:55,400 --> 00:19:59,040 VOICE FROM DEVICE: 'Unreal City 290 00:19:59,040 --> 00:20:02,640 'Under the brown fog of a winter dawn 291 00:20:02,640 --> 00:20:06,840 'A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many 292 00:20:06,840 --> 00:20:10,880 'I had not thought death had undone so many...' 293 00:20:10,880 --> 00:20:15,240 There will always be people who fetishise printed books, 294 00:20:15,240 --> 00:20:19,280 insist it's a superior experience to flip through printed pages, 295 00:20:19,280 --> 00:20:22,760 just as there are people who insist that LPs sound better than CDs, 296 00:20:22,760 --> 00:20:24,400 but that doesn't make it so. 297 00:20:24,400 --> 00:20:27,840 It's kind of annoying to have to hold a book open, 298 00:20:27,840 --> 00:20:31,880 and if you slip, the pages flip, and if you're trying to read in bed, 299 00:20:31,880 --> 00:20:34,680 lying on your side, it's very stressful, 300 00:20:34,680 --> 00:20:38,040 and you might become attached to it in the same way 301 00:20:38,040 --> 00:20:42,240 that you become attached to the scratchy, noisy sound of an LP, 302 00:20:42,240 --> 00:20:44,720 but for the most part, most people, 303 00:20:44,720 --> 00:20:47,640 when given what is objectively speaking 304 00:20:47,640 --> 00:20:51,040 a better reading experience, you'll get over it. 305 00:21:00,800 --> 00:21:02,440 For the traditional book business, 306 00:21:02,440 --> 00:21:05,000 "getting over it" is proving difficult. 307 00:21:05,000 --> 00:21:09,880 An enormous spanner has been tossed into some very complex works. 308 00:21:09,880 --> 00:21:13,920 The physicality of books, the fact that, till now, 309 00:21:13,920 --> 00:21:17,440 they've had to be manufactured, warehoused, distributed 310 00:21:17,440 --> 00:21:19,400 and sold over the counter 311 00:21:19,400 --> 00:21:22,160 has shaped the publishing industry. 312 00:21:23,840 --> 00:21:27,440 The costly infrastructure, from the printing plants 313 00:21:27,440 --> 00:21:29,600 to distribution centres like this one, 314 00:21:29,600 --> 00:21:33,520 the tangled economics, from authors' advances and royalty payments 315 00:21:33,520 --> 00:21:37,760 to the sale or return of books from book shops. 316 00:21:37,760 --> 00:21:39,520 Even, you might argue, 317 00:21:39,520 --> 00:21:41,960 the philosophy of the book business itself 318 00:21:41,960 --> 00:21:44,560 as a cultural as well as commercial enterprise. 319 00:21:44,560 --> 00:21:49,720 All of these can be traced back to the fact that books are things. 320 00:21:49,720 --> 00:21:54,000 But the book has been dematerialised and, with it, 321 00:21:54,000 --> 00:21:58,000 most of the assumptions upon which the book business was founded. 322 00:21:59,280 --> 00:22:04,320 Publishers are really built around one fundamental capability, 323 00:22:04,320 --> 00:22:08,440 which is their ability to put books on book store shelves. 324 00:22:08,440 --> 00:22:12,440 Everything revolves around the physical entity of the book, 325 00:22:12,440 --> 00:22:15,600 rather than what's in the book, 326 00:22:15,600 --> 00:22:19,160 in the way that most of the publishing business is organised. 327 00:22:19,160 --> 00:22:23,000 They are perfectly all right putting a memoir, travel book, cook book, 328 00:22:23,000 --> 00:22:25,440 a piece of fiction all in the same box. 329 00:22:25,440 --> 00:22:29,040 Go to the same place, and when it got to that place, 330 00:22:29,040 --> 00:22:31,720 the person at the other end would put it on the right shelf, 331 00:22:31,720 --> 00:22:33,760 so that the consumer could find it. 332 00:22:33,760 --> 00:22:37,840 Given all this, it's not surprising that the branch of the book business 333 00:22:37,840 --> 00:22:42,640 that's been shaken by the chilliest winds has been the book shop, 334 00:22:42,640 --> 00:22:46,560 from the smallest local independent to the mightiest chain. 335 00:22:46,560 --> 00:22:50,200 Borders, which once boasted 1,200 stores worldwide, 336 00:22:50,200 --> 00:22:54,520 closed the last of them just a few months ago. 337 00:22:54,520 --> 00:22:58,480 Five years from now, if a book sells a lot of copies, 338 00:22:58,480 --> 00:23:02,600 the chances are overwhelming that it will sell most of them online. 339 00:23:02,600 --> 00:23:04,560 Online can be print or digital - 340 00:23:04,560 --> 00:23:06,680 it doesn't mean they all have to be e-books - 341 00:23:06,680 --> 00:23:10,320 but that shift from purchasing in stores, 342 00:23:10,320 --> 00:23:13,920 of which there are thousands that need to be covered, 343 00:23:13,920 --> 00:23:18,040 to purchasing online, at which there are... 344 00:23:18,040 --> 00:23:23,520 you know, a dozen touch points that basically get you to everything, 345 00:23:23,520 --> 00:23:25,120 is the huge change in the industry 346 00:23:25,120 --> 00:23:28,560 and the big challenge to the biggest publishers. 347 00:23:28,560 --> 00:23:32,080 I don't mean to suggest there will be no book stores ten years from now. 348 00:23:32,080 --> 00:23:37,320 There'll be some book stores, but it won't be enough book stores to build a business on. 349 00:23:37,320 --> 00:23:41,600 It will be an ancillary part of the market, not the core of the market, 350 00:23:41,600 --> 00:23:43,640 and that's all part of what drives the fear. 351 00:23:45,880 --> 00:23:50,760 So here they are, then - representatives of what, until about five minutes ago, 352 00:23:50,760 --> 00:23:53,400 was the book business. 353 00:23:53,400 --> 00:23:56,640 A publisher, Gail Rebuck of Random House, 354 00:23:56,640 --> 00:23:58,000 an agent, Ed Victor, 355 00:23:58,000 --> 00:24:02,760 and a writer, Ewan Morrison. 356 00:24:02,760 --> 00:24:06,440 These are the people of the book in their natural habitat, 357 00:24:06,440 --> 00:24:10,240 thinking aloud about an uncertain future. 358 00:24:10,240 --> 00:24:12,080 We have to change. How can we not? 359 00:24:12,080 --> 00:24:15,240 I changed very early, because I represented 360 00:24:15,240 --> 00:24:17,120 the late, great Douglas Adams, 361 00:24:17,120 --> 00:24:20,400 who was talking about this in the 1980s. 362 00:24:20,400 --> 00:24:24,480 He would say to me, "Ed, the business you're in is obsolete. 363 00:24:24,480 --> 00:24:28,720 "We're no longer going to manufacture physical books, 364 00:24:28,720 --> 00:24:32,000 "hunks of molecules," he said. 365 00:24:32,000 --> 00:24:35,760 The one thing that hasn't changed is the essence of what we do 366 00:24:35,760 --> 00:24:39,120 as publishers, and that's curators - 367 00:24:39,120 --> 00:24:43,480 it's selecting, it's choosing the books we want to publish, 368 00:24:43,480 --> 00:24:48,640 it's the editor working in close collaboration with the author, 369 00:24:48,640 --> 00:24:51,760 shaping the book, developing the book and then, ultimately, 370 00:24:51,760 --> 00:24:54,160 bringing it to its public. 371 00:24:54,160 --> 00:24:58,440 We don't really mind how we deliver books, in whatever form. 372 00:24:58,440 --> 00:25:01,440 What is a book really? Is it its body or its soul? 373 00:25:01,440 --> 00:25:04,280 We're in the business of the soul of books. 374 00:25:04,280 --> 00:25:10,960 But what happens when a book's soul is transformed into a data stream? 375 00:25:12,240 --> 00:25:16,480 Digitised, downloadable and never more than a click away 376 00:25:16,480 --> 00:25:18,960 from the infinite possibility of the internet? 377 00:25:18,960 --> 00:25:21,480 It's almost at the point where we can't really talk 378 00:25:21,480 --> 00:25:25,000 about books any more as a separate entity, because, really, 379 00:25:25,000 --> 00:25:29,640 what is a book? What is a piece of music? It's an MP4, 380 00:25:29,640 --> 00:25:33,760 or you can upload it on different formats in about 10 to 15 seconds. 381 00:25:33,760 --> 00:25:35,760 As soon as books go digital, they become 382 00:25:35,760 --> 00:25:37,600 another piece of digital content. 383 00:25:37,600 --> 00:25:42,480 Therefore, if we lose that respect and reverence 384 00:25:42,480 --> 00:25:44,880 for the book and the book just becomes like an MP4 385 00:25:44,880 --> 00:25:47,640 or a QuickTime movie, then that will be the end of the book, basically. 386 00:25:47,640 --> 00:25:52,120 Ultimately, I think the point is that if we get it right, 387 00:25:52,120 --> 00:25:55,360 and physical books remain a part of the market, 388 00:25:55,360 --> 00:25:56,920 and I haven't got a crystal ball - 389 00:25:56,920 --> 00:26:01,560 I don't know whether they'll be 50% of the market or 20% or whatever. 390 00:26:01,560 --> 00:26:05,640 But actually, the opportunity for getting more people to read books, 391 00:26:05,640 --> 00:26:08,880 if they're available both digitally, widely available 392 00:26:08,880 --> 00:26:12,200 and discoverable, and in physical form, 393 00:26:12,200 --> 00:26:14,160 I think it's very exciting. 394 00:26:14,160 --> 00:26:17,440 What concerns me is Generation Y, who are the same size as the baby boomers, 395 00:26:17,440 --> 00:26:20,840 they're really the next market, and Gen Y consume 396 00:26:20,840 --> 00:26:24,640 about 78% of all textual material already online. 397 00:26:24,640 --> 00:26:26,120 So I can't... 398 00:26:26,120 --> 00:26:30,240 You know, within a generation, it's going to be the same for books, 399 00:26:30,240 --> 00:26:34,440 I'm afraid. There's no way that you can instil in them the need to start using books 400 00:26:34,440 --> 00:26:38,920 if they've never had that experience. 401 00:26:38,920 --> 00:26:43,000 Along with concerns about how the book-reading public is changing 402 00:26:43,000 --> 00:26:46,640 are anxieties about powerful new players 403 00:26:46,640 --> 00:26:48,280 who've appeared in the book market. 404 00:26:48,280 --> 00:26:51,520 I think we're at a crucial juncture just now, 405 00:26:51,520 --> 00:26:54,360 where the publishers have to get together again, 406 00:26:54,360 --> 00:26:56,800 because there are forecasts going on in Silicon Valley just now 407 00:26:56,800 --> 00:26:59,840 about who the three main publishers are going to be in ten years' time. 408 00:26:59,840 --> 00:27:02,480 Google, Amazon... Google and Apple. 409 00:27:02,480 --> 00:27:05,160 Amazon and Apple. These are the three companies 410 00:27:05,160 --> 00:27:08,080 that are going to rule our industry. They do now. 411 00:27:08,080 --> 00:27:11,520 Amazon, Apple and Google are these monoliths, 412 00:27:11,520 --> 00:27:15,720 international monoliths, and we are, you know, 413 00:27:15,720 --> 00:27:20,200 we're not exactly tiny, but we're not big in the publishing industry, 414 00:27:20,200 --> 00:27:22,640 and what we're doing, what they rely on us to do, 415 00:27:22,640 --> 00:27:25,920 is to provide them with content. And we do. For free, as well. 416 00:27:25,920 --> 00:27:28,280 Well, the big issue for me is about discovery, 417 00:27:28,280 --> 00:27:30,320 because it's all very well... We might discover 418 00:27:30,320 --> 00:27:32,880 all these wonderful new writers, 419 00:27:32,880 --> 00:27:36,280 but how's the public meant to discover them? Because, actually, 420 00:27:36,280 --> 00:27:41,880 discovering online is a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. 421 00:27:41,880 --> 00:27:44,720 So book shops are absolutely essential to us. 422 00:27:44,720 --> 00:27:48,200 They are essential, you know, to the culture of this country. 423 00:27:48,200 --> 00:27:50,440 I mean, we are becoming a bit of a book desert. The independents 424 00:27:50,440 --> 00:27:55,360 who give a lot of the soul and the individuality to choice 425 00:27:55,360 --> 00:28:00,560 are being knocked off on literally a weekly basis. 426 00:28:00,560 --> 00:28:02,200 And with libraries closing, 427 00:28:02,200 --> 00:28:05,640 I think this point of discovery is a real issue. 428 00:28:08,080 --> 00:28:09,960 The spectre at this feast 429 00:28:09,960 --> 00:28:13,400 is what used to be called the record industry, 430 00:28:13,400 --> 00:28:16,840 brought to its knees by the side-effects of digitisation - 431 00:28:16,840 --> 00:28:22,120 piracy, file-sharing and the assumption among consumers 432 00:28:22,120 --> 00:28:25,520 that if it's digital, then it ought to be cheap 433 00:28:25,520 --> 00:28:28,280 or, preferably, free. 434 00:28:28,280 --> 00:28:32,360 I really think we should be fighting for a really strong copyright law. 435 00:28:32,360 --> 00:28:36,240 This is one of the reasons authors have to stick with publishers, 436 00:28:36,240 --> 00:28:40,240 actually, and not run off. And agents. And agents, yes. Yes! 437 00:28:40,240 --> 00:28:43,240 It's because... We fight for you. It's because there is a common battle 438 00:28:43,240 --> 00:28:46,800 against the draining away of copyright law 439 00:28:46,800 --> 00:28:48,520 and copyright protection. 440 00:28:48,520 --> 00:28:50,960 I think people should be paid for what they do. 441 00:28:50,960 --> 00:28:54,640 It takes a year to write a book. True. It takes a year. 442 00:28:54,640 --> 00:28:57,880 You're preaching to the converted. Exactly, but I'm just really worried 443 00:28:57,880 --> 00:29:01,560 that we are all going to be out of a job in about ten years' time, 444 00:29:01,560 --> 00:29:04,360 so you can look at us as three coffins that are sitting here, 445 00:29:04,360 --> 00:29:07,320 and we've missed this great opportunity... 446 00:29:07,320 --> 00:29:10,440 I want to talk about William Goldman. 447 00:29:10,440 --> 00:29:12,920 William Goldman wrote a famous book 448 00:29:12,920 --> 00:29:14,960 called Adventures In The Screen Trade, 449 00:29:14,960 --> 00:29:19,600 but it could be any media trade, and he said, "The most important thing 450 00:29:19,600 --> 00:29:22,440 "to remember about Hollywood executives is this - 451 00:29:22,440 --> 00:29:26,200 "nobody knows anything. And just in case you didn't get that..." 452 00:29:26,200 --> 00:29:29,360 and he puts it in huge type... "Nobody knows anything." 453 00:29:29,360 --> 00:29:33,040 So I submit to all of you that we don't know anything. 454 00:29:36,600 --> 00:29:39,920 Maybe William Goldman was right, but that won't stop us 455 00:29:39,920 --> 00:29:43,120 trying to make sense of these strange days we're in, 456 00:29:43,120 --> 00:29:45,000 when, as Karl Marx put it, 457 00:29:45,000 --> 00:29:50,400 "All that was once solid seems to be melting into air." 458 00:30:01,040 --> 00:30:06,120 'Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, for example, describes 459 00:30:06,120 --> 00:30:11,160 'a near future in which America has collapsed into political anarchy. 460 00:30:11,160 --> 00:30:14,040 'The Chinese are running the global economy, 461 00:30:14,040 --> 00:30:17,080 'and everyone is addicted to their apparats, 462 00:30:17,080 --> 00:30:21,360 'seductive mobile devices that plug them directly into the wired world, 463 00:30:21,360 --> 00:30:28,440 'trading 24/7 global connectivity in exchange for their privacy, 464 00:30:28,440 --> 00:30:32,520 'their individuality and, ultimately, their humanity. 465 00:30:32,520 --> 00:30:38,000 'Only hapless hero Lenny struggles to resist, thanks to his books.' 466 00:30:40,240 --> 00:30:42,880 "I celebrated my wall of books. 467 00:30:42,880 --> 00:30:46,960 "I counted the volumes on my 20-foot-long modernist bookshelf 468 00:30:46,960 --> 00:30:51,440 "to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my sub-tenant. 469 00:30:51,440 --> 00:30:54,680 " 'You're my sacred ones,' I told the books. 470 00:30:54,680 --> 00:30:56,520 " 'No-one but me still cares about you, 471 00:30:56,520 --> 00:30:58,560 " 'but I'm going to keep you with me for ever, 472 00:30:58,560 --> 00:31:01,480 " 'and one day, I'll make you important again.' " 473 00:31:05,440 --> 00:31:10,520 'Tracking down this prophet of the book-less future wasn't easy. 474 00:31:10,520 --> 00:31:15,160 'Gary was somewhere in upstate New York, working on a new novel, 475 00:31:15,160 --> 00:31:17,200 'far from the tweeting crowd.' 476 00:31:30,600 --> 00:31:32,640 HE KNOCKS ON DOOR 477 00:31:34,280 --> 00:31:38,880 Gary, I presume. I'm Gary, yeah. And you're for sale. 478 00:31:38,880 --> 00:31:41,400 Well, actually, it's completely false. 479 00:31:41,400 --> 00:31:43,040 There's no honey for sale here. 480 00:31:46,680 --> 00:31:47,960 '100 years ago, 481 00:31:47,960 --> 00:31:53,400 'the novelist EM Forster challenged his readers to only connect. 482 00:31:53,400 --> 00:31:57,840 'The challenge these days, according to Gary, is only disconnect.' 483 00:31:59,080 --> 00:32:03,720 This place, to me, is the ultimate privilege. 484 00:32:03,720 --> 00:32:08,840 Because there is no broadband signal, there's the wood behind me, 485 00:32:08,840 --> 00:32:11,680 you know, that's technology where I am right now. 486 00:32:11,680 --> 00:32:15,280 And I pay for this quite a lot, not in terms of the rent, 487 00:32:15,280 --> 00:32:17,160 but in terms of being disengaged from society. 488 00:32:17,160 --> 00:32:22,000 It almost takes a kind of religious conviction to say no to it. 489 00:32:22,000 --> 00:32:24,440 Because everyone's at the party. 490 00:32:24,440 --> 00:32:26,080 You're sitting in this cabin... 491 00:32:26,080 --> 00:32:28,080 down there somewhere there's a big party, 492 00:32:28,080 --> 00:32:30,720 and everyone's screaming for your attention. 493 00:32:30,720 --> 00:32:33,600 And you're saying, "No, I'm going to stay here with my book." 494 00:32:33,600 --> 00:32:37,080 And I remember as a child, this was me as well. 495 00:32:37,080 --> 00:32:39,760 Everyone was saying, "Come on down, Gary, let's play," 496 00:32:39,760 --> 00:32:42,560 and I'd say, "Hold on, I just want to finish this book." 497 00:32:42,560 --> 00:32:44,760 And that's what it's like now as well, 498 00:32:44,760 --> 00:32:47,440 except the party's everywhere, because the party's in your pocket. 499 00:32:47,440 --> 00:32:52,160 It's pinging and blinging and clinging and singing and dinging. 500 00:32:52,160 --> 00:32:55,720 It just wants you to say, "You know, I'm going to put this down, 501 00:32:55,720 --> 00:33:00,800 "because this letter from my cell phone provider is very interesting. 502 00:33:00,800 --> 00:33:06,080 "Save $49 on a new iPhone GS39 - that's pretty important." 503 00:33:08,120 --> 00:33:11,200 'He's an extreme case, as he'd be the first to admit. 504 00:33:11,200 --> 00:33:16,160 'As a child, growing up Jewish in the dying days of the Soviet Union, 505 00:33:16,160 --> 00:33:20,520 'books were more than just something you picked up to pass the time.' 506 00:33:20,520 --> 00:33:23,760 I grew up, obviously, in a household where books were... 507 00:33:23,760 --> 00:33:27,000 The most important thing that you could do with your life 508 00:33:27,000 --> 00:33:30,320 is just to read a book. My parents had a very clear idea that you start with Chekhov, 509 00:33:30,320 --> 00:33:33,080 then you move on to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky 510 00:33:33,080 --> 00:33:34,920 in your teens, you know, so... 511 00:33:36,360 --> 00:33:40,840 I remember my father going to a parents-teachers conference, 512 00:33:40,840 --> 00:33:45,880 and the teacher said, "We hear your son is reading Tolstoy," 513 00:33:45,880 --> 00:33:47,960 and my father said, "No, he's just on Chekhov!" 514 00:33:47,960 --> 00:33:51,800 And I remember the first books I got as a five-year-old, 515 00:33:51,800 --> 00:33:54,640 four-year-old, five-year-old. 516 00:33:54,640 --> 00:33:58,720 They were... I mean, they were so beautiful. 517 00:33:58,720 --> 00:34:01,920 They were made out of cheap Soviet crap, 518 00:34:01,920 --> 00:34:05,000 but I remember buying masking tape 519 00:34:05,000 --> 00:34:06,800 so I could bind them up when they were falling apart. 520 00:34:06,800 --> 00:34:09,440 So the book itself... you treasured the object? 521 00:34:09,440 --> 00:34:12,680 I took them with me to America, you know, 522 00:34:12,680 --> 00:34:15,760 and continued to bind them up as they continued to fall apart. 523 00:34:15,760 --> 00:34:18,200 Their spines were made out of straw or I don't know what. 524 00:34:18,200 --> 00:34:19,800 But they meant so much. 525 00:34:19,800 --> 00:34:22,280 Books get older, you know - 526 00:34:22,280 --> 00:34:24,360 unlike text files, they yellow and fray. 527 00:34:26,120 --> 00:34:29,840 Books are... They stand against youth, in a sense. 528 00:34:29,840 --> 00:34:34,640 And we live in a culture where youth is the only thing that's important. 529 00:34:34,640 --> 00:34:37,560 So books remind us of mortality, in a sense, 530 00:34:37,560 --> 00:34:42,560 because they also get old and die, and the body also gets old and dies. 531 00:34:42,560 --> 00:34:46,120 So of course I'm scared for books. 532 00:34:46,120 --> 00:34:50,080 "What kind of freaked me out was that I saw Len reading a book. 533 00:34:50,080 --> 00:34:53,360 "No, it didn't smell, he uses Pine-Sol on them. 534 00:34:53,360 --> 00:34:56,400 "And I don't mean scanning a text like we did in Euro classics 535 00:34:56,400 --> 00:35:00,600 "with that Chatterhouse Of Parma, I mean seriously reading. 536 00:35:00,600 --> 00:35:04,880 "He had this ruler out and he was moving it down the page very slowly, 537 00:35:04,880 --> 00:35:07,560 "and just, like, whispering little things to himself, 538 00:35:07,560 --> 00:35:10,200 "like trying to understand every little part of it. 539 00:35:10,200 --> 00:35:13,280 "I was going to Ting my sister, but I was so embarrassed 540 00:35:13,280 --> 00:35:17,760 "I just stood there and watched him read, which lasted like half an hour, 541 00:35:17,760 --> 00:35:21,240 "and finally he put the book down, and I pretended like nothing happened. 542 00:35:21,240 --> 00:35:22,880 "And then I snuck a peek, 543 00:35:22,880 --> 00:35:26,040 "and it was that Russian guy Tolsoy he was reading. 544 00:35:26,040 --> 00:35:28,280 "I guess it figures, cos Lenny's parents are like from Russia. 545 00:35:28,280 --> 00:35:34,200 "But this Tolsoy was a 1,000 page-long book, not a stream, 546 00:35:34,200 --> 00:35:37,800 "and Lenny was like on page 930, like almost finished." 547 00:35:37,800 --> 00:35:41,080 One of the inciting incidents for this novel 548 00:35:41,080 --> 00:35:44,880 was that a television repair man came to my apartment, 549 00:35:44,880 --> 00:35:47,080 he was in his early 20s, and he said, 550 00:35:47,080 --> 00:35:49,840 "Oh, man, why do you have all these books?" 551 00:35:49,840 --> 00:35:52,080 He was disgusted by them. Truly disgusted. 552 00:35:52,080 --> 00:35:55,240 And then he looked at my television, which was maybe 25 inches long, 553 00:35:55,240 --> 00:35:59,080 and he said, "Such a small TV." 554 00:35:59,080 --> 00:36:03,800 I'm not against change, progress, I'm not against technology. 555 00:36:03,800 --> 00:36:07,360 But this happened so quickly that, in terms of maintaining 556 00:36:07,360 --> 00:36:11,160 one's humanity, remembering what it was like to be a human being, 557 00:36:11,160 --> 00:36:15,160 remembering all the analogue physical qualities that make us so, 558 00:36:15,160 --> 00:36:17,440 it just happened too fast for some of us. 559 00:36:19,440 --> 00:36:21,640 What do you have there? 560 00:36:23,320 --> 00:36:24,880 It's a book. 561 00:36:24,880 --> 00:36:26,160 Do you scroll down? 562 00:36:26,160 --> 00:36:29,600 No. I turn the page. It's a book. 563 00:36:29,600 --> 00:36:31,880 Can you blog with it? No. 564 00:36:31,880 --> 00:36:34,280 It's a book. 565 00:36:34,280 --> 00:36:35,920 Well, can it tweet? 566 00:36:35,920 --> 00:36:37,520 No. 567 00:36:38,840 --> 00:36:42,680 Can it text? Can it wi-fi? Does it need a password? 568 00:36:42,680 --> 00:36:44,400 No. 569 00:36:44,400 --> 00:36:46,480 Can it do this? ALARM BLARES 570 00:36:46,480 --> 00:36:51,080 No. It's a book. 571 00:36:55,240 --> 00:36:58,880 'For those at the forefront of the revolution, 572 00:36:58,880 --> 00:37:01,360 'mourning the passing of a physical book 573 00:37:01,360 --> 00:37:04,600 'seems self-indulgent and sentimental. 574 00:37:04,600 --> 00:37:08,400 'The future is already here. It's time to embrace its possibilities.' 575 00:37:11,480 --> 00:37:13,640 I think the future of the book as we know it 576 00:37:13,640 --> 00:37:16,520 really sort of goes into directions. 577 00:37:16,520 --> 00:37:17,960 There's a... 578 00:37:17,960 --> 00:37:22,240 In terms of the physical object, it's going to be an art object, 579 00:37:22,240 --> 00:37:25,840 it's going to be something that's very expensive and only for the rich. 580 00:37:25,840 --> 00:37:28,200 Most of us are going to get our information 581 00:37:28,200 --> 00:37:29,440 from electronic documents. 582 00:37:29,440 --> 00:37:33,000 I have no sentimentality about the physical book at all. 583 00:37:33,000 --> 00:37:34,520 And I grew up... 584 00:37:34,520 --> 00:37:38,400 My dad was in the business, I grew up in a house loaded with books. 585 00:37:38,400 --> 00:37:41,920 I still live in a house loaded with books, they're great furniture, 586 00:37:41,920 --> 00:37:45,640 I'm delighted to have them around, but I don't find them 587 00:37:45,640 --> 00:37:48,920 particularly useful for narrative text reading compared to the iPhone. 588 00:37:48,920 --> 00:37:52,360 The essence of a book is not that it's ink on paper, 589 00:37:52,360 --> 00:37:56,240 it's that it's a mechanism for transmitting ideas, 590 00:37:56,240 --> 00:38:01,840 and so if you get hung up on the object, you sort of can't go forward. 591 00:38:01,840 --> 00:38:04,640 But if you sort of grasp what books are really for, 592 00:38:04,640 --> 00:38:07,440 then you start to get excited about the different forms they can take. 593 00:38:07,440 --> 00:38:11,800 I don't understand the resistance to it. 594 00:38:11,800 --> 00:38:17,280 I mean, the value of having not just A book 595 00:38:17,280 --> 00:38:23,320 but all the books you want on your person all the time, I mean, how... 596 00:38:23,320 --> 00:38:27,880 what particular added value comes from the printed page 597 00:38:27,880 --> 00:38:31,320 that can substitute for that? I just don't see it. 598 00:38:34,480 --> 00:38:37,600 The first assumption to be overturned is that reading 599 00:38:37,600 --> 00:38:40,840 is a solitary activity, a private liaison 600 00:38:40,840 --> 00:38:42,760 between you and the writer, 601 00:38:42,760 --> 00:38:44,920 conducted between the covers of a book. 602 00:38:44,920 --> 00:38:49,960 Digital makes the private public. 603 00:38:49,960 --> 00:38:53,840 We all grew up thinking that reading was something we did by ourselves. 604 00:38:53,840 --> 00:38:59,400 But reading, really up until the mid-19th century, was something 605 00:38:59,400 --> 00:39:01,560 that people mostly did in groups. 606 00:39:01,560 --> 00:39:06,840 Really, silent reading by yourself is something that really has only 607 00:39:06,840 --> 00:39:11,040 come of age in the last, you know, 150 years or so. 608 00:39:11,040 --> 00:39:15,440 And so it's perfectly natural that we think that's the way to do it, 609 00:39:15,440 --> 00:39:19,840 but there are other ways, and I think that we're now realising that 610 00:39:19,840 --> 00:39:23,080 one of the fantastic things about putting books online, 611 00:39:23,080 --> 00:39:25,800 if you format them properly, 612 00:39:25,800 --> 00:39:29,920 is that readers can start to write notes in the margin. 613 00:39:29,920 --> 00:39:32,200 You and I could read a book together, you in London, me in New York, 614 00:39:32,200 --> 00:39:34,880 and we can engage in a conversation that's quite deep. 615 00:39:37,360 --> 00:39:43,040 Bookmarks, highlights and notes can already be shared online, 616 00:39:43,040 --> 00:39:47,240 and often are, whether you realise it or not. 617 00:39:47,240 --> 00:39:52,160 Every time you highlight a passage on your Kindle, for example, 618 00:39:52,160 --> 00:39:56,960 it's added automatically to Amazon's database of popular highlights. 619 00:39:56,960 --> 00:40:02,920 Though unlike Winston Smith in 1984, you are able to opt out. 620 00:40:02,920 --> 00:40:07,160 And every time you buy a book online, 621 00:40:07,160 --> 00:40:10,200 it adds more details to your digital profile. 622 00:40:10,200 --> 00:40:13,160 You've always been able to tell a lot about someone 623 00:40:13,160 --> 00:40:15,400 by browsing their bookshelves. 624 00:40:15,400 --> 00:40:21,000 Now online retailers can tell a lot about you by browsing yours. 625 00:40:21,000 --> 00:40:26,640 For writers, too, all this interconnectivity means big changes. 626 00:40:26,640 --> 00:40:31,360 So my sense is that, as we go forward, that the value of content 627 00:40:31,360 --> 00:40:35,080 is heading towards zero, and so the question remains, 628 00:40:35,080 --> 00:40:37,440 "So what are people going to pay for?" 629 00:40:37,440 --> 00:40:41,520 And our sense is that people will pay for context and community, 630 00:40:41,520 --> 00:40:45,600 they'll pay to know something about the text that they're reading 631 00:40:45,600 --> 00:40:49,040 or watching, or they will pay for community, 632 00:40:49,040 --> 00:40:51,840 they'll pay for the opportunity 633 00:40:51,840 --> 00:40:55,160 to see what other people are thinking about the same text. 634 00:40:55,160 --> 00:40:59,560 Right now, the way it works is I am a publisher. 635 00:40:59,560 --> 00:41:03,760 I give an advance to an author, they deliver a manuscript to me, 636 00:41:03,760 --> 00:41:05,200 they go away. 637 00:41:05,200 --> 00:41:07,720 Well, suppose we did it a little differently. 638 00:41:07,720 --> 00:41:11,920 Suppose the author starts to learn what musicians have learned, 639 00:41:11,920 --> 00:41:15,080 that they get paid to show up, and that in fact, 640 00:41:15,080 --> 00:41:18,680 they get an advance to some extent, 641 00:41:18,680 --> 00:41:23,760 but then people start subscribing to an author's work, and the author 642 00:41:23,760 --> 00:41:27,200 actually shows up on the pages, the author is part of the process, 643 00:41:27,200 --> 00:41:30,240 and people subscribe to this work as long as it's interesting to them. 644 00:41:32,480 --> 00:41:35,760 Digital visionaries see themselves as the natural successors 645 00:41:35,760 --> 00:41:41,000 of Gutenberg and Caxton, the masters of a disruptive technology. 646 00:41:42,200 --> 00:41:44,440 If you buy McLuhan's sort of thesis, 647 00:41:44,440 --> 00:41:48,360 which was that print changed everything for humanity, 648 00:41:48,360 --> 00:41:51,760 it gave rise to the Enlightenment, to our understanding 649 00:41:51,760 --> 00:41:54,280 of what an individual is, to capitalism, to the nation state, 650 00:41:54,280 --> 00:41:57,680 then none of those things would have happened if we hadn't had print. 651 00:41:57,680 --> 00:42:03,360 Well, arguably, digital technology is even a bigger, 652 00:42:03,360 --> 00:42:05,080 more profound invention than print. 653 00:42:05,080 --> 00:42:08,920 SHIP'S HORN BLARES 654 00:42:14,640 --> 00:42:16,840 'Marshall McLuhan. 655 00:42:16,840 --> 00:42:20,080 'Now, there's a name to conjure with in these digital days.' 656 00:42:22,040 --> 00:42:24,280 More than half a century ago, 657 00:42:24,280 --> 00:42:27,520 McLuhan argued that, just as the invention of print 658 00:42:27,520 --> 00:42:31,200 had changed the way we understand the world and our place in it, 659 00:42:31,200 --> 00:42:34,440 so the new electronic medium of television 660 00:42:34,440 --> 00:42:38,080 would change us in equally profound ways. 661 00:42:38,080 --> 00:42:42,800 According to McLuhan, the book was an extension of the eye, 662 00:42:42,800 --> 00:42:47,000 but television was an extension of our nervous systems. 663 00:42:53,120 --> 00:42:56,800 The distinction, he said, was critical, far more important 664 00:42:56,800 --> 00:42:59,640 than the actual content of the book or the television programme. 665 00:42:59,640 --> 00:43:03,640 The medium, as he put it, is the message. 666 00:43:05,160 --> 00:43:09,800 The TV viewer is being X-rayed at every moment. 667 00:43:09,800 --> 00:43:13,000 The light is coming through the screen at him 668 00:43:13,000 --> 00:43:15,960 and penetrating him completely, as in an X-ray. 669 00:43:15,960 --> 00:43:20,120 And people go inside texts, they get involved, 670 00:43:20,120 --> 00:43:23,200 and they go inside themselves. The electric age is one of X-ray. 671 00:43:29,200 --> 00:43:32,920 'According to McLuhan, print had fostered a visual culture, 672 00:43:32,920 --> 00:43:35,360 'by which he meant analytical, objective, 673 00:43:35,360 --> 00:43:38,600 'rational, individualistic. 674 00:43:43,080 --> 00:43:47,760 'Electronic media, he believed, create an oral culture, 675 00:43:47,760 --> 00:43:52,360 'emotional, subjective, irrational and collective.' 676 00:43:52,360 --> 00:43:54,200 When you surround people with electric information, 677 00:43:54,200 --> 00:43:58,560 the overload of information becomes fantastic. 678 00:44:02,200 --> 00:44:05,480 The only way in which people can conduct their lives 679 00:44:05,480 --> 00:44:08,680 is by recognising the structural patterns of that around them, 680 00:44:08,680 --> 00:44:11,560 instead of trying to classify information. 681 00:44:13,600 --> 00:44:15,640 'In the centenary of his birth, 682 00:44:15,640 --> 00:44:19,080 'as Gutenberg man morphs into digital man, 683 00:44:19,080 --> 00:44:23,120 'McLuhan's ideas, often obscure, sometimes contradictory, 684 00:44:23,120 --> 00:44:26,880 'suddenly seem to make more sense. 685 00:44:26,880 --> 00:44:29,800 'I've come to Vancouver to meet someone 686 00:44:29,800 --> 00:44:34,080 'who's made a close study of McLuhan for a new biography. 687 00:44:34,080 --> 00:44:37,120 'The biographer is writer and artist Douglas Copeland, 688 00:44:37,120 --> 00:44:40,360 'author of Generation X and a dozen other novels 689 00:44:40,360 --> 00:44:44,840 'that have successfully trawled the waters of the digital ocean.' 690 00:44:54,800 --> 00:44:58,040 This is someone who knows all about what goes into a book - 691 00:44:58,040 --> 00:45:02,160 and I don't just mean the writing of one. 692 00:45:02,160 --> 00:45:05,160 So, Douglas, you must know something about the physicality of books, 693 00:45:05,160 --> 00:45:08,920 because you have actually eaten a novel, you've chewed it. 694 00:45:08,920 --> 00:45:13,480 That is your novel. That is actually Generation X, my first novel. 695 00:45:13,480 --> 00:45:18,800 What made you chew it? Er, at the time, it was just sheer instinct. 696 00:45:18,800 --> 00:45:24,840 That was back about ten years ago, and at that point, 697 00:45:24,840 --> 00:45:27,080 I'd been writing novels for a decade. 698 00:45:27,080 --> 00:45:29,720 I'd also been using the internet for a decade 699 00:45:29,720 --> 00:45:33,800 and I honestly felt that my brain was changing. 700 00:45:33,800 --> 00:45:37,080 You take the book, you soak it in water 701 00:45:37,080 --> 00:45:39,680 and then you sit down and you watch television 702 00:45:39,680 --> 00:45:41,520 and while you're watching TV, 703 00:45:41,520 --> 00:45:44,200 you sort of chew the book up, you pulp it 704 00:45:44,200 --> 00:45:47,840 into these little, tiny pellets that end up being about that big per page, 705 00:45:47,840 --> 00:45:51,240 then you let the pellets dry for about four days 706 00:45:51,240 --> 00:45:53,920 and then watch television again and while you watch TV, 707 00:45:53,920 --> 00:45:56,320 you unravel the pellets, 708 00:45:56,320 --> 00:46:00,800 so they're about as chewed-up as you can get them 709 00:46:00,800 --> 00:46:05,520 and still have them be intact, and the ink, apparently - 710 00:46:05,520 --> 00:46:08,960 my doctor told me after the fact - is cyanidic, 711 00:46:08,960 --> 00:46:11,960 it's poison, so it's not a pleasant experience. 712 00:46:14,800 --> 00:46:18,480 Doug's offbeat biography of McLuhan was published last year, 713 00:46:18,480 --> 00:46:23,160 complete with MapQuest directions, Wikipedia entries 714 00:46:23,160 --> 00:46:26,480 and YouTube reviews, making him part of the new media age 715 00:46:26,480 --> 00:46:30,440 to which his insights already seemed to belong. 716 00:46:30,440 --> 00:46:33,320 If the medium is the message, then of course 717 00:46:33,320 --> 00:46:36,920 the medium of the book, the physical book, 718 00:46:36,920 --> 00:46:39,400 is a completely different message 719 00:46:39,400 --> 00:46:42,080 to the medium of the electronic book, isn't it? 720 00:46:42,080 --> 00:46:43,880 Oh, it's a completely different experience. 721 00:46:43,880 --> 00:46:47,560 In terms of the way you take in the book in your brain 722 00:46:47,560 --> 00:46:52,280 and your experience of the book, I had this phone call with my agent, 723 00:46:52,280 --> 00:46:55,360 Eric, he's in New York, and we were both reading the new - 724 00:46:55,360 --> 00:46:58,280 well, then-new - Keith Richards biography, and I said, 725 00:46:58,280 --> 00:46:59,920 "Well, how far along are you?" 726 00:46:59,920 --> 00:47:02,800 and he's like, "11%." 727 00:47:02,800 --> 00:47:08,480 And it was like, "Ooh!" Just one of those chilling moments that defines an era for you. 728 00:47:08,480 --> 00:47:13,520 I was on PAGE 20-something - I felt like a real loser, actually, 729 00:47:13,520 --> 00:47:16,040 for not having a percentage. 730 00:47:17,600 --> 00:47:20,720 For Doug, McLuhan provides a perspective 731 00:47:20,720 --> 00:47:24,280 from which to understand what's happening today. 732 00:47:24,280 --> 00:47:28,600 I'm really finding with McLuhan that everything he wrote 733 00:47:28,600 --> 00:47:33,920 that seemed crazy or opaque or scary or, "What the hell?" 734 00:47:33,920 --> 00:47:39,640 if you look at it now is chillingly prescient. He really got it right. 735 00:47:41,600 --> 00:47:45,440 There's this scientific law, it's called Hebb's law, 736 00:47:45,440 --> 00:47:49,280 which is that neurons that fire together wire together 737 00:47:49,280 --> 00:47:52,920 and that any technology you encounter, whether it's a book 738 00:47:52,920 --> 00:47:58,640 or a screen or, you know, hopscotch, if you do it a lot, 739 00:47:58,640 --> 00:48:01,680 your neurons are going to fire in a certain way 740 00:48:01,680 --> 00:48:05,240 and then your brain says, "Oh, let's build a strong connection there." 741 00:48:05,240 --> 00:48:08,880 And when he was saying that the medium is the message, 742 00:48:08,880 --> 00:48:12,840 what he was anticipating, whether poetically or unwittingly, 743 00:48:12,840 --> 00:48:17,320 is what we're now learning through neuroscience, 744 00:48:17,320 --> 00:48:22,760 which is that a medium does literally make you the message. 745 00:48:22,760 --> 00:48:25,600 One McLuhan quote - "First we shape our tools 746 00:48:25,600 --> 00:48:27,080 "and then our tools shape us" - 747 00:48:27,080 --> 00:48:30,520 it feels very, very true and very prescient 748 00:48:30,520 --> 00:48:34,760 about this world we're all inhabiting now, doesn't it? 749 00:48:34,760 --> 00:48:37,160 The world of technology. Oh, I think so. 750 00:48:37,160 --> 00:48:39,480 I think, to be honest, the human attention span 751 00:48:39,480 --> 00:48:41,480 is about the length of one Beatles song, 752 00:48:41,480 --> 00:48:45,120 and after doing two-and-a-half minutes of anything, 753 00:48:45,120 --> 00:48:48,360 your brain naturally wants to go do that or do something 754 00:48:48,360 --> 00:48:51,360 or if you're online, check for e-mail 755 00:48:51,360 --> 00:48:56,640 or all the million things we do online, and in a world of text only, 756 00:48:56,640 --> 00:49:00,760 in a world only with the book, you may have that instinct but you don't act on it. 757 00:49:00,760 --> 00:49:06,120 I think that, you know, life has sort of become a series of blips 758 00:49:06,120 --> 00:49:08,320 and beeps and sequentialised tasks - 759 00:49:08,320 --> 00:49:10,560 and I'm not going to put judgment about that, 760 00:49:10,560 --> 00:49:13,880 because it's what's happening, you can't change it one way or the other. 761 00:49:13,880 --> 00:49:17,640 Because of this reliance on technology, 762 00:49:17,640 --> 00:49:22,920 this increasing reliance on these machines, is the next step just, 763 00:49:22,920 --> 00:49:25,160 you know, stick the chip, you know, in your wrist, 764 00:49:25,160 --> 00:49:27,120 take it out of the computer 765 00:49:27,120 --> 00:49:29,760 and you won't need to bother any more sitting in front of the computer, 766 00:49:29,760 --> 00:49:31,560 you can have it with you all the time? 767 00:49:31,560 --> 00:49:35,400 McLuhan seemed to predict that that was what would happen, 768 00:49:35,400 --> 00:49:38,360 that our brain will be displaced. 769 00:49:38,360 --> 00:49:41,600 Technically, we've actually already done that, 770 00:49:41,600 --> 00:49:43,120 we've already inserted the chip. 771 00:49:43,120 --> 00:49:48,320 Basically, all the memories that you have occur on the screen 772 00:49:48,320 --> 00:49:51,560 and somewhere else in the database inside the cloud, 773 00:49:51,560 --> 00:49:55,640 so it's an artificial memory, but as you have no memories of your own, 774 00:49:55,640 --> 00:49:58,080 you effectively become artificial intelligence, 775 00:49:58,080 --> 00:49:59,880 and we've always been wondering, 776 00:49:59,880 --> 00:50:02,320 "When's AI going to really, really happen?" 777 00:50:02,320 --> 00:50:03,760 And I do think we have to think, 778 00:50:03,760 --> 00:50:05,840 it's actually already here, it's us, 779 00:50:05,840 --> 00:50:07,840 we're the artificial intelligence 780 00:50:07,840 --> 00:50:09,840 and we have become the medium and the message. 781 00:50:09,840 --> 00:50:13,800 It's not just the book that's under assault, 782 00:50:13,800 --> 00:50:18,440 I think that the seemingly doomed nature of the printed book on paper, 783 00:50:18,440 --> 00:50:20,080 it's the canary in the coal mine. 784 00:50:20,080 --> 00:50:23,320 I think there's something else being lost as well. 785 00:50:38,720 --> 00:50:41,120 MUSIC: "Are 'Friends' Electric?" by Gary Numan 786 00:50:49,240 --> 00:50:53,480 Marshall McLuhan was a bit of a cultural pessimist. 787 00:50:53,480 --> 00:50:55,920 He thought television was the enemy 788 00:50:55,920 --> 00:50:58,880 back when there were only a handful of channels 789 00:50:58,880 --> 00:51:01,120 transmitting in black and white. 790 00:51:01,120 --> 00:51:03,280 Maybe the digital champions are right - 791 00:51:03,280 --> 00:51:06,200 we project anxieties about the future 792 00:51:06,200 --> 00:51:09,360 onto whatever the latest technology happens to be. 793 00:51:09,360 --> 00:51:14,680 Televisions, microwave ovens, mobile phones and now e-books. 794 00:51:14,680 --> 00:51:20,720 A stone age McLuhan would probably have bitched about the invention of the wheel. 795 00:51:32,480 --> 00:51:36,080 I've come to San Francisco for an injection of West Coast optimism. 796 00:51:36,080 --> 00:51:42,040 I'm here to meet an entrepreneur and inventor who's made fortunes 797 00:51:42,040 --> 00:51:46,720 several times over from the internet boom and the digital revolution. 798 00:51:46,720 --> 00:51:51,000 This is someone who firmly believes that friends ARE electric. 799 00:51:56,280 --> 00:52:01,520 Brewster Kahle is the founder and self-styled "digital librarian" 800 00:52:01,520 --> 00:52:03,120 of the Internet Archive, 801 00:52:03,120 --> 00:52:07,560 a not-for-profit organisation that's embarked on an ambitious programme 802 00:52:07,560 --> 00:52:11,680 to scan and digitise every book in the world 803 00:52:11,680 --> 00:52:15,400 and to make them available on the internet to all comers for free - 804 00:52:15,400 --> 00:52:19,840 subject, of course, to the objections of copyright holders. 805 00:52:19,840 --> 00:52:25,120 But the thing that sets this apart from similar projects, 806 00:52:25,120 --> 00:52:30,640 like Google's, for example, is that the Internet Archive doesn't just turn books into data - 807 00:52:30,640 --> 00:52:34,960 it also preserves them in their physical form. 808 00:52:34,960 --> 00:52:40,560 The Archive's stated aim is to get a copy of every book ever published, 809 00:52:40,560 --> 00:52:43,200 an ink-on-paper cede-back, 810 00:52:43,200 --> 00:52:44,800 just in case. 811 00:52:47,960 --> 00:52:51,720 'So what do you get for the librarian who wants everything? 812 00:52:54,760 --> 00:52:59,000 'Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 could be a good choice, 813 00:52:59,000 --> 00:53:01,080 'a novel about a society in which books are banned 814 00:53:01,080 --> 00:53:05,440 'and burned by the authorities while rebels in the underground 815 00:53:05,440 --> 00:53:08,400 'learn them off by heart to preserve them. 816 00:53:08,400 --> 00:53:11,440 'Yes, that sounds about right.' 817 00:53:13,480 --> 00:53:16,480 Now, people can understand the kind of digital aspect to this, 818 00:53:16,480 --> 00:53:18,520 this digital...the Internet Archive, 819 00:53:18,520 --> 00:53:21,400 but the fact is you're as passionate about physical books 820 00:53:21,400 --> 00:53:25,280 as you are about digital books, so every digital version you have, you have the physical book. 821 00:53:25,280 --> 00:53:30,160 We wanted to make sure that that copy was not lost, 822 00:53:30,160 --> 00:53:34,400 because in some sense, it's like the specimen of a butterfly 823 00:53:34,400 --> 00:53:36,720 or an ant that defines a species, 824 00:53:36,720 --> 00:53:40,080 this might be the book that defines the digital version 825 00:53:40,080 --> 00:53:42,120 that lives on for ever, 826 00:53:42,120 --> 00:53:45,080 so the idea is to preserve those physical books, 827 00:53:45,080 --> 00:53:50,200 so we've now figured out a mechanism, a technology, 828 00:53:50,200 --> 00:53:53,200 for basically storing these in temperature and humidity controls 829 00:53:53,200 --> 00:53:59,360 very inexpensively for the long term. And you love, obviously, looking at your library, 830 00:53:59,360 --> 00:54:03,640 you love the way that books look, the way they feel and in a way, 831 00:54:03,640 --> 00:54:06,920 what you've got done and how you've gone about it is to retain 832 00:54:06,920 --> 00:54:10,320 that sense of the particularity of each book that you're reading 833 00:54:10,320 --> 00:54:12,240 and its moment in time. 834 00:54:12,240 --> 00:54:15,000 Oh, yes, it's for the love of books. 835 00:54:15,000 --> 00:54:18,480 I mean, what treasures they are. 836 00:54:18,480 --> 00:54:23,200 So many people have spent so many years not just writing the words 837 00:54:23,200 --> 00:54:27,000 but also making the physical artefact, and about how it's laid out, 838 00:54:27,000 --> 00:54:30,440 and so if we're going to go and try and offer these books 839 00:54:30,440 --> 00:54:32,800 with the same gusto that we grew up with 840 00:54:32,800 --> 00:54:36,280 to the next generation, let's do it as well as possible. 841 00:54:36,280 --> 00:54:39,960 We may go and use them in new and different ways and take them apart 842 00:54:39,960 --> 00:54:43,240 and fly them into virtual-reality worlds - 843 00:54:43,240 --> 00:54:45,280 great, but let's not lose 844 00:54:45,280 --> 00:54:48,480 the treasures that are the physical books 845 00:54:48,480 --> 00:54:52,280 that our society has grown on for a few centuries. 846 00:54:52,280 --> 00:54:58,160 We get ten million downloads a month of these old books. Ten million! 847 00:54:58,160 --> 00:54:59,680 That's pretty good! 848 00:54:59,680 --> 00:55:06,440 And the idea of a worldwide population diving into materials 849 00:55:06,440 --> 00:55:10,080 that are decades, centuries old, I think is quite encouraging. 850 00:55:10,080 --> 00:55:14,720 I've brought you a gift, Brewster, for the library. 851 00:55:14,720 --> 00:55:18,080 This is Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. 852 00:55:18,080 --> 00:55:21,200 I've chosen it rather selectively, 853 00:55:21,200 --> 00:55:24,680 because this is a rather important book for your library, I think. 854 00:55:24,680 --> 00:55:28,960 Oh, I think this is a fantastic book, of course, but you know, 855 00:55:28,960 --> 00:55:31,560 I think he was somewhat wrong. 856 00:55:31,560 --> 00:55:35,240 The idea that there's people going out and burning books, 857 00:55:35,240 --> 00:55:37,680 actually, I'm not sure is the real problem. 858 00:55:37,680 --> 00:55:39,560 It's that it's getting flooded, 859 00:55:39,560 --> 00:55:41,960 that there's just so much information, 860 00:55:41,960 --> 00:55:45,200 so surfacing great books like this is the right thing to do, 861 00:55:45,200 --> 00:55:49,040 but I think this does add a good compendium at the end, 862 00:55:49,040 --> 00:55:51,880 which is, people become books. 863 00:55:51,880 --> 00:55:55,320 They incorporate, they read a book so much that they become the book 864 00:55:55,320 --> 00:56:01,000 and they can recite the book, so it asks us, "Which book are we?" 865 00:56:01,000 --> 00:56:03,920 And I think everyone that's read one of these can say, 866 00:56:03,920 --> 00:56:08,120 "OK, if I were walking around in the woods, what book would I be?" 867 00:56:08,120 --> 00:56:11,960 And I think I would be either Euclid's Elements, 868 00:56:11,960 --> 00:56:14,240 that was written at the Library of Alexandria, 869 00:56:14,240 --> 00:56:15,880 or Ben Franklin's autobiography. 870 00:56:15,880 --> 00:56:19,000 What book would you be? That's a very interesting one. 871 00:56:19,000 --> 00:56:21,360 Only because it was an important book to me, 872 00:56:21,360 --> 00:56:24,200 I would be Candide by Voltaire, you know that book? 873 00:56:24,200 --> 00:56:28,880 Ah, good one! Yes. That's not just a book, it's a style of life. 874 00:56:28,880 --> 00:56:30,640 It's terrific. 875 00:56:35,080 --> 00:56:38,600 'To end the tour, Brewster took me to the Archive's inner sanctum.' 876 00:56:38,600 --> 00:56:41,480 This is pretty extraordinary. Explain this! 877 00:56:41,480 --> 00:56:45,520 Welcome to the Internet Archive. Who are they? 878 00:56:45,520 --> 00:56:49,000 These are terracotta archivists. These are us. 879 00:56:49,000 --> 00:56:51,600 These are the people that are building the archive. 880 00:56:52,520 --> 00:56:55,920 'Originally a Christian Scientist temple, 881 00:56:55,920 --> 00:57:00,000 'the building remains a temple of a sort. 882 00:57:00,000 --> 00:57:04,400 'Anyone who works here for five years is immortalised in clay, 883 00:57:04,400 --> 00:57:08,680 'just like the warriors and foot soldiers of ancient China.' 884 00:57:08,680 --> 00:57:12,720 We see ourselves as a step in a long tradition. 885 00:57:12,720 --> 00:57:16,200 Yes, people think, "Oh, the digital world, everything's new again, 886 00:57:16,200 --> 00:57:19,440 "we can reinvent everything, we don't have to read history." 887 00:57:19,440 --> 00:57:22,920 Um, we don't think that's true in the least. 888 00:57:22,920 --> 00:57:24,960 So let me show you something else. Yeah. 889 00:57:24,960 --> 00:57:28,200 There's the actual servers, the stacks, 890 00:57:28,200 --> 00:57:32,240 the materials that actually are serving the public, 891 00:57:32,240 --> 00:57:36,080 are here in this space as well. 892 00:57:36,080 --> 00:57:42,400 These are the actual computer systems that store books, music and video. 893 00:57:42,400 --> 00:57:44,640 Every light that's blinking 894 00:57:44,640 --> 00:57:48,120 is either somebody uploading or downloading something. 895 00:57:48,120 --> 00:57:54,320 Those are people all over the world accessing millions of books. 896 00:57:54,320 --> 00:57:58,840 The idea that every one of those lights represents somebody caring, 897 00:57:58,840 --> 00:58:02,320 somebody using, somebody leveraging the library 898 00:58:02,320 --> 00:58:09,120 sort of in some sense brings a physicality to a very digital world. 899 00:58:14,120 --> 00:58:18,360 There are now millions of books up there, somewhere in the cloud, 900 00:58:18,360 --> 00:58:22,320 that mist of invisible data that cloaks our world. 901 00:58:22,320 --> 00:58:25,600 If things continue the way they are going, your book shelf, 902 00:58:25,600 --> 00:58:30,480 your book shop and your library will be up there too before long, 903 00:58:30,480 --> 00:58:33,800 along with your music, your photographs, your letters, 904 00:58:33,800 --> 00:58:38,040 your diaries, your newspaper, your shopping lists, your memories, 905 00:58:38,040 --> 00:58:40,920 your dreams and your secrets, 906 00:58:40,920 --> 00:58:45,680 all the things that have made you who you are. 907 00:58:50,880 --> 00:58:53,440 But meantime, back on terra firma, 908 00:58:53,440 --> 00:58:57,840 real books and virtual books exist side by side. 909 00:58:59,280 --> 00:59:05,080 This is, for now at least, the best of all possible worlds. 910 00:59:05,080 --> 00:59:09,680 As it says in Candide, "You can browse the shelves in the old way 911 00:59:09,680 --> 00:59:13,440 "or you can plug into the cloud and bring a digital book down to Earth." 912 00:59:13,440 --> 00:59:18,720 Good morning. Good morning. I'd like to buy a copy of Robinson Crusoe. 913 00:59:18,720 --> 00:59:21,560 OK. Did you have a particular version in mind? 914 00:59:21,560 --> 00:59:23,640 Can you show me what you've got? Yeah. 915 00:59:24,760 --> 00:59:27,880 So through this machine, we have kind of newer versions, 916 00:59:27,880 --> 00:59:31,440 with new covers and nice typeface. 917 00:59:31,440 --> 00:59:33,920 We also have facsimiles of the old originals 918 00:59:33,920 --> 00:59:36,560 that have been scanned from libraries. 919 00:59:36,560 --> 00:59:40,200 There's versions from the late 1800s, early 1900s, 920 00:59:40,200 --> 00:59:41,640 there's a Japanese version, 921 00:59:41,640 --> 00:59:44,680 there's all sorts of things will show up on this database. 922 00:59:46,240 --> 00:59:48,320 You can even find copies 923 00:59:48,320 --> 00:59:51,400 with the stamps, stains and battle scars of real books, 924 00:59:51,400 --> 00:59:55,680 and once you've made your choice, you can print a physical copy 925 00:59:55,680 --> 00:59:59,920 of that book in the time it takes to make an espresso. 926 00:59:59,920 --> 01:00:03,800 MUSIC: "Brazil" 927 01:00:19,680 --> 01:00:21,760 It looks like a book. 928 01:00:23,040 --> 01:00:24,680 It feels like a book. 929 01:00:27,800 --> 01:00:29,480 It even smells like a book. 930 01:00:30,600 --> 01:00:32,920 It IS a book, and it took five minutes. 931 01:00:34,120 --> 01:00:37,560 There you go, sir. Thank you very much. 932 01:00:40,760 --> 01:00:42,800 We can't really blame technology 933 01:00:42,800 --> 01:00:45,440 for ending our long relationship with books. 934 01:00:45,440 --> 01:00:49,800 All technology has done is to offer us a choice - 935 01:00:49,800 --> 01:00:52,120 to stay on our desert island, 936 01:00:52,120 --> 01:00:55,520 secure and separate with the books we love, 937 01:00:55,520 --> 01:00:58,080 or to strike out into the unknown 938 01:00:58,080 --> 01:01:01,840 and navigate the digital ocean. 939 01:01:03,080 --> 01:01:06,760 And who's to say what strange and surprising adventures 940 01:01:06,760 --> 01:01:08,320 await us there? 941 01:01:10,800 --> 01:01:13,840 MUSIC: "Brazil" 942 01:01:50,800 --> 01:01:53,280 Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd 943 01:01:53,280 --> 01:01:55,680 E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk