The culture of the book in American higher education is in crisis. New e-reader technology, coupled with the rising cost of print production and the shrinking budgets of university presses and libraries, has led many academics to fret about the future of the book. They are right to worry. The culture of the book—the culture in which most scholars have built their careers—is no longer tenable, a reality that resonates with implications for research, tenure, and promotion. To move forward, academe must transform itself from a fundamentally print culture to one that is fundamentally digital.
The reasons are obvious. Paper-and-ink books are more expensive to produce (and reproduce) than their digital doubles, and more difficult to disseminate, search, and recycle. In short, digital books are more affordable, accessible, and environmentally friendly. So why has academe been slow to embrace digital publishing? Why, for example, do many in the academy discriminate against digital content by demanding that it also be available in print, as if only a print version can legitimate its digital double?
Many concerns about the intellectual quality of digital publications are valid, and digital content can be easier to plagiarize. But those concerns are historical, not permanent. There is nothing intrinsically inferior about spreading knowledge on a screen rather than on a printed page, and plagiarism is an ethical issue, not a material one. Words may look better in print, and a book may feel better in your hands than a Kindle or an iPad, but the words are the same.
The real difference—the real reason that academe has been slow to embrace digitization—is cultural, not material: an attitude rooted in the belief that the printed book is intrinsic to scholarship. Ink is permanent; pixels are impermanent, or so the argument goes. This perspective is not an ontological or metaphysical one: People who believe that books are permanent do not believe that books can't be destroyed. Rather, they believe that the comfortable manner in which readers approach a paper-and-ink object is fundamentally different from the attitude they bring to a digital copy. These attitudes are the products of cultural conditioning and habit.
We need to change—to resignify—the semiotics of academic culture. The idea of the book as a printed artifact is no more or less natural than its digital (and nonprinted) counterpart. Until academe, in particular the humanities, lets go of the myth of the book—the notion that printed books are the gold standard of academic achievement—academe will forever be caught between its digital destiny and its printed purgatory.
The book is the most readily identifiable and powerful sign in academic life, at least in the humanities. Books carry great meaning and value: They line our offices and fill our CV's. Students still bring books to class along with their laptops. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a college campus or a Modern Language Association convention without books.
And yet, despite the pervasiveness of books, the belief that they are more integral than their digital counterparts is a myth. As the semiotician and cultural critic Roland Barthes once put it, "Myth consists in turning culture into nature, or at least turning the social, the cultural, the ideological, the historical into the 'natural.'" The paper-and-ink book is the key signifier of academe because the ideology of academe has made it that way. There is no compelling reason for scholars to produce bound volumes rather than digital files, or for students to go to brick-and-mortar libraries to access books rather than download them. Those beliefs will persist until we change the ideology of the book.
But is the decline of the book evidence of the decline of close reading? Won't the ease with which electronic texts can be scanned, searched, cut, pasted, and deleted lead to the sort of superficial comprehension that is at odds with academic inquiry? Stuffed library shelves are evidence of the value and volume of academic output, as well as evidence of our sensibilities; accessing and storing the same information on a laptop feels like a smaller act. When we lose the weight of the bound book, will our words lose weight as well? And in a shifting economic climate, how will we be compensated for our labor? Will the copyright protections common in print production carry over to the world of digital production? Or will our only compensation be the praise of our peers and the circulation of our ideas?
Right now most works can be made available in both print and digital versions. However, there will soon come a time when a new literature will emerge that is possible only in digital formats. When that happens, the myth of the book will be overcome.
For a peek into this future, consider Steve Tomasula's recent novel, TOC (FC2, 2009). It is a strictly digital creation—a DVD that, as the author puts it, "takes advantage of things a computer can do to help tell its story." TOC is a multimedia meditation on the nature of time ("tic, toc") that contains text, film, music, photography, spoken word, animation, and painting. The novel was composed by Tomasula with a team of collaborators.
Electronic literature dates back to the days of floppy disks, but media-rich works like Tomasula's are breaking new ground. In her fine book, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), N. Katherine Hayles writes that e-lit is "generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized," and "is by contrast 'digital born,' a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer."
On the research side of academe's digital destiny, the wiki format is particularly promising because of the way it layers evolving creative contributions. This is the future of electronic scholarship. Moreover, multimedia scholarly monographs, in which digital "clips" can be viewed as part of the text, seem more like a disciplinary necessity than a futuristic possibility in disciplines like film studies.
In his recent book, Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, 2010), Mark C. Taylor writes about technological innovations that are not only "forging different relations among people" but also "transforming traditional academic disciplines in ways that we are just beginning to understand." A prime example of this trend is the growth of digital scholarship and literature. When Hayles wrote Electronic Literature, she had a dual appointment at the University of California at Los Angeles in the departments of English and design media arts—two disciplines that are rarely affiliated with one professor. In the future, rather than just bring together different disciplines, e-lit academics might form their own.
For now, novels like Tomasula's are still more novelty than norm, wikis are still distrusted as sources of information, and multimedia scholarly books on film are still to be developed. (Without the protections of fair use, copyright law makes such projects expensive propositions.) The story of electronic literature and scholarship has yet to be written in full, but before long the growth in digital content will put an end to the myth of the book in higher education. Perhaps Barthes was right when he wrote that the goal is not to "reverse (or to correct) the mythic message ... but to change the object itself, to engender a new object, point of departure for a new science." This new object—the scholarly contribution that is possible only digitally—is now emerging. When it does, and only then, we will come to realize that printed books are no more or less inherent to academe than posting them online—and that our true challenge is to learn how to read in a digital age.
Comments
1. tpul2014 - September 26, 2010 at 11:27 am
I would add that the advantages of the multimedia digital format goes beyond the ability of including video clips. Fixed blocks of text make for a very rigid medium of communication. They necessitate that the author "makes an argument" that is fairly linear and that fits into a single narrative. With the more flexible multimedia means of communication, the complexity of any given situation can be much more easily accommodated and represented. Think of the ambiguity that runs through the best films. Capturing and rendering that in scholarly work will be possible in the digital format. Just as the book allowed for more prolonged arguments, the multimedia form will allow for more complex expression, and will enhance the nature of intellectual thought just as the book did. It might even facilitate a more subtle and less combative form of politics.
2. osholes - September 27, 2010 at 06:04 am
Can one add marginal notes, underlining, marking pages and so forth to make the book one's own? I've heard some readers can, others cannot. Unless and until that is easy to do, then there is indeed an advantage for print.
As for all the links and electronic wizardry in e-books, that's fine if it is designed by people who know something. How often is that the case?
3. b89fxstc - September 27, 2010 at 07:05 am
The move to electronic books and documents alarms archivists because there is no good way to preserve electronic documents. Untold files have already died, email vanished into electrons, items locked in formats, floppy disks and hard drives which cannot be access any longer. If we do not preserve knowledge and wisdom in physical form, our culture will be as documented as ancient Greece and Rome.
4. byronbrown - September 27, 2010 at 09:15 am
You're right that the move to digital content can only occur when works are created that have no paper counterpart. Right now publishers are offering digital content at wildly inflated prices, even though cheaper than NEW printed versions.
It's been more than 15 years since the appearance of the PDF file. But PDFs (and similar technologies) are still the dominant way of producing digital copies. The publishing companies have done something between nothing and very little to create truly new works that take advantage of the smooth integration of text, audio, video, and true interactivity that is possible with original digital content. Shame on them!
5. robertswh - September 27, 2010 at 09:28 am
That DVD version will be great--until the "next generation" of video recording makes DVDs obsolete.
Seen a 5-1/4" floppy recently? Or even a 3-1/2" floppy? Tried to read notes you took in WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS?
B89 makes an excellent point!
6. tribblek - September 27, 2010 at 11:17 am
I agree with you, b89fxstc. However, untold manuscripts have also rotted and crumbled and burned on paper. I am inclined to believe that storing things on CD are just as physical (and FAR eaiser to duplicate for separate storage) as books and papers.
7. 22113683 - September 27, 2010 at 11:24 am
A hearty concurrence with comments 2, 3, & 5 above. Some of us who are beyond fifty-something also find reading a screenful of pixels rapidly wearies the eyes and puts a kink in the neck. A physical book can be adjusted, carried to better light, or whatever. And I haven't figured out how to take my desktop to the bathroom.
8. 11893310 - September 27, 2010 at 11:36 am
Before dismissing books, I'd suggest watching the video that was played during the Notre Dame/Stanford football game debacle, this past Saturday.
http://fightingfor.nd.edu/literacy/
Books are worth fighting for. The "digital," is becoming a quasi-religious cult. Negroponte may hand out his cheap laptops to every kid in the third-world. I'll stick with the books (and paper and pencils and real teachers). As Wendell Berry has observed, and I concur, a true Luddite is not against technology so much as he is for community, and I would add as did the Luddites, justice and good work.
9. jfetter - September 27, 2010 at 12:08 pm
One matter that is being entirely ignored in this discussion is the far greater accessibility of digital media to those with disabilities that preclude them from reading print. Believe it or not, such people are even allowed into the academy these days. As a blind academic, I am perpetualy forced to play catch-up by scanning printed materials, even though Google has several million digital books in its library. Technologies such as the Kindle and IPad are for the first time allowing me and people in similar situations to attain books in as timely a manner as their colleagues without print disabilities. I have absolutely no problem with maintaining, and fighting for, the book format in terms of presentation of argument, rigor of standards of citation, and the like. I do not see how using pretty pictures and film clips could aid our interpretation of Aristotle, for instance. I do, however, deem it long since necessary to do away with the prejudice against digital format as the equal, and eventually the replacement, for printed texts, assuming we can settle upon a digital format that allows people to own their books outright, to add marginal notes as they see fit, to guarantee that their files will not be lost because of a glitch on a server or a computer crash, and to allow those who read visually to continue doing so without eye strain. We are already almost there. Amazon stores Kindle purchases on its servers, though it can also remove books from a user's Kindle without justification or warning. Ironically, it did so with 1984 because of a dispute with a publisher. It also turns off the text to speech feature on a large number of books for sale, because authors conflate a flat computer voice with human narration. By the way, there is the small matter of cost. In case people haven't noticed, state legislatures are cutting education budgets whenever and however they can, and we all know that athletic programs, fancy dorms, and flower maintenance are not feeling the brunt of these cuts. If it came down to cutting staff and freezing hiring--oh wait, that has already happened--or saving money by going digital, the latter seems slightly more attractive to me.
10. kra1186 - September 27, 2010 at 12:26 pm
@osholes: "Can one add marginal notes, underlining, marking pages and so forth to make the book one's own? I've heard some readers can, others cannot. Unless and until that is easy to do, then there is indeed an advantage for print."
My thoughts exactly. As both a student and researcher (and soon to be teacher), I personally insist on printing even my electronic documents BECAUSE I insist on being able to make margin notes that are in my handwriting rather than a blurb of typed text (especially when I need to draw a diagram or table). I would for sure use a purely electronic method, though, if I knew I'd have access to those functions and also didn't have to fear losing my work when my computer or whatever crashes. Obviously, there are ways to back up your work, but I think the average undergrad doesn't really do that nor has the average undergrad been taught good ways to back up work. It's kind of something I wound up only learning "the hard way" when I wrote (and lost) 20 pages because my back up method led me to accidentally overwrite new work with an old version of it.
11. miller14 - September 27, 2010 at 12:38 pm
The idea that moving words exclusively to digital format is more environmentally sound is untrue. If you think it is difficult to recycle paper (it is not and is being done routinely all over the world), what happens to all the ipods, computers, digital readers, laptops once they are discarded? The heavy metals and other toxic compounds which comprise these objects end up in waterways. Think again, buddy, and quit doing the work of the large corporations that benefit from your point of view.
12. tpul2014 - September 27, 2010 at 02:16 pm
Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Hamlet, 2. 2
13. oldcommprof - September 27, 2010 at 03:25 pm
It is indeed heartening to see so many eloquent defenses of the printed word -- and grounded in the important justifications of archival storage and environmental soundness, to name my own top two. I also am deeply suspicious of the quasi-religious (thanks, 11893310)devotion of those who are so in love with their new shovel that they've forgotten why they need to dig the hole.
14. kra1186 - September 27, 2010 at 07:20 pm
@miller14: Good points.
Another thought: I think the assumption that digital saves money for EVERYONE is not necessarily true. I own a netbook and a lot of people are using netbooks as their ONLY computing device lately because of how affordable they are; needless to say, I NEVER read articles anything for long periods on my netbook because it kills my eyes. The accessibility/affordability of it may actually be restricted to those who can afford devices that have reasonably sized screens or have the note-taking functions that have already been mentioned. I see the benefit to having BOTH print and electronic versions available, but I really don't see why it's necessary to ditch paper completely.
15. educationfrontlines - September 28, 2010 at 11:55 am
The Cult of Electronics is dead wrong on the "save a tree" argument. E-books along with other forms of electronic communications are not environmentally friendly.
According to a report by the orgnization "Climate Group," e-readers, computers and related electronic equipment are emitting 830 million tons of carbon dioxide, equal to all the world's aviation-generated CO2.
And it makes sense. The person reading a book on an e-reader is constantly drawing electrical power. But reading a paper book uses no electrical energy at all. About one-fourth of the energy consumed by electronic devices is in their manufacture; about three-fourths is spent in use over their short lifetime.
Pollution and environmental costs include the materials to make the medium as well as the ongoing energy-use. Electronics loses on both counts. Print is far cheaper to produce and acid-free paper can last for centuries. Printed books are ofen sold and re-sold as used books, serving many readers before the paper is ultimately recycled. But one downloaded "book" on an e-reader is stuck on that one machine, not transferable to others in any significant way nor available for second sale, and the e-reader will soon be obsolete, the e-book unreadable.
Paper is a renewable resource originating in fast-growing cloned trees grown for the pulp industry. In 2008, 57% of paper in the U.S. was recycled. But very little of the metal-and-plastic e-readers, mobile phones, computers, and ancillary equipment is in any way "renewable."
The average US citizen uses 440 pounds of paper a year, produced by 500 kilowatt-hours. One computer will use 500 kilowatt-hours in just five-months, over twice the energy consumption, and we are not including the printers, servers, cell phones and e-readers.
And lifespan? Computer hardware and software turns over in 5-6 years as several commenters have already noted. Many kids are upgrading their electronics several times a year! The Kindles, Nooks, and other current models of e-readers will likely, similar to 8-tracks and cassettes and VHS and beta and CDs, be obsolete technology by 2015 as electronic devices evolve and perhaps converge on a single one-size-fits-all device. These obsolete electronics are mostly not recycled, and contain some of the world's most problematic andtoxic wastes.
Climate Group estimates that electronic emissions will increase about 6 percent per year through 2020 as more people ownc omputers and hand-held electronics. Remember the biology lesson on photosynthesis? Plants are mostly made of carbon dioxide and water. So roughly half of the paper in our bookcases is sequestered carbon dioxide. In the new cap-and-trade jargon, our paper books are helping offset their larger and growing electric carbon footprint. Paper is helping atone for electronics' environmental sins.
John Richard Schrock
16. alexsim - September 29, 2010 at 09:19 am
22113683: Well, the Kindle app for the iPod Phone/Touch and/or Android certainly helps.
I believe that having both books and an e-reader are both good options depending on the circumstances. I'm a librarian in a large academic library, so I have to make decisions about subject selections in print and e-book format. For the Humanities, print is usually preferable; for Social Sciences, many of my faculty and students prefer e-books.
I do worry about the constant changes in technology. I mentioned VHS the other day and my colleagues laughed at me.
17. sand6432 - October 11, 2010 at 05:54 pm
I'm all for using the new technology to create "books" that can have no counterpart in the physical print world, but the assumption that this kind of publishing will be cheaper is incorrect. I'll wager that the novel Di Leo uses as an example here was a lot more expensive to publish than a traditional print novel. He gives no evidence of cost savings. The one systematic study done so far, about the Gutenberg-e Project, demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that publishing sophisticated e-books (not just PDFs) is way more costly than publishing regular monographs. So, let's all think creatively about the brave new world we're entering, but not under any illusions that this is going to save us a lot of money (or be more environmentally friendly).---Sandy Thatcher