The death (and resurrection) of the e-book
The internets are buzzing about the launch of Amazon’s Kindle, and David Weinberger leads the charge against biblioluddism, declaring that “our hearts will break a little” but the e-book will replace the paper book within the next century.
Let’s assume with the enthusiasts that in the next few years, most if not all of the objections to either of the Sony or Amazon readers will be addressed, creating a fashionable consumer object that allows untrammeled and effortless access to content and all of the interactive reader goodness that David talks about in his piece, sufficiently differentiated from and superior to more generic computing devices like notebooks or phones to enable a viable market category.
Another, more hidden, assumption behind the ascendancy of the e-book is the permanence and sustainability of the global supply chains and manufacturing processes necessary to produce computing devices like an e-book reader and the storage and networking services that it depends on. What would happen to e-books when that economic system falters or collapses in the face of a black-swan-style global catastrophe? As currently conceived, it’s safe to say that the e-book would die as well, e-ink interfaces slowly dimming around the world as the intellectual production of the mid-twenty-first century goes dark. On the face of it, committing blithely to the e-book as just another step on the path from the cuneiform through the codex book seems a risky move from a cultural preservation point of view. Instead of physically burning the library, as has happened so often in the past, the new barbarians could simply take it permanently offline.
But before we dismiss the e-book on that basis, let’s ask this question: how can we design an e-book device that is as durable, self-contained and long-lasting as the paper book?
It seems to me that this could be a way to address the general issue of the sustainability of digital information. Most approaches to the ideas of digital preservation deal with the problem at the level of national archives or distributed services out on the cloud. The idea of being able to drive the problem down to one of making the e-book reader a very-long-term storage and display device that could be, for example, buried and exhumed a century later with its content still accessible, might be a better long-term solution than others I’ve seen discussed. It has the advantage of making the securing of knowledge an individual act involving an owned object. In this way, the e-book could advance the survivability of intellectual products, rather than making them more vulnerable.
It’s a problem in computer engineering and materials science that goes well beyond my area of expertise, but it would be interesting to see how this could be accomplished. It might even save our civilization.