I’ve been on a McLuhan binge of late. Every day on my train ride into work I read one of the twenty pamphlets that comprise the collection McLuhan Unbound from Gingko Press. I won’t trouble you with the specifics of that – I only bring it up to set the stage for what follows.

After getting to work, while sifting through my morning news feeds, I came across this article – The Digital Future of Books by L. Gordon Crovits – in the 5/19 Wall Street Journal (actually I found it through Jeff Gomez’ blog for his book Print is Dead). Needless to say, with McLuhan on the brain and McLuhan mentioned in the piece, I jumped into response mode. I would have left a comment on the WSJ site but the only options were to hit the forum or send an email – so I wrote the following up in an email. Not satisfied with the uncertainty of email I decided to post it here as well.

If anything comes of the WSJ email (writer response, etc.) I’ll update here.

UPDATE: I’ve posted this to the Journal’s Opinion Forum as well.

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Mr. Crovitz
I don’t think the McLuhan quote you use in the concluding paragraph of your piece “The Digital Future of Books” is inherently pessimistic. McLuhan was simply stating the fact as he saw it. If anything your reading of that statement as such betrays your (our) stubborn affinity to visual, individualistic print culture (as McLuhan would refer to it).

It’s that affinity, that need to dress the emerging technology in the clothes of the preceding technology, which spurs the development of things like the Kindle. Still, as you point out, the real question isn’t how long it will be before the inconvenience of the printed page yields to the convenience of the screen, but whether or not we are undergoing a transformation, both cultural and cognitive, that will lead us back to orality. The real question is whether or not “we’re giving up on words.”

No matter how much we may want it to the Kindle (and devices like it) won’t save – and I might argue don’t need to save – the book. If anything its very nature as a digital device helps to push us further down the rabbit hole. It’s that very immediacy and simultaneity of information, those 100,000 books that can be delivered wirelessly in a minute, that hold the knife to the throat of the long form book. That we will have, as Jeff Gomez indicates, “the ability to read a passage from practically any book that exists, at any time that you want to, as well as the ability to click on hyperlinks, experience multimedia, and add notes and share passages with others” will only hasten the fragmentation, heighten the simultaneity, and further open the traditionally closed experience of reading printed material. The strictly controlled flow of information inherent in the traditional author/reader relationship begins to leak and the reader inevitably becomes part of a community of readers. Perspective is opened. Information is shared, communal, challenged, aggregated. The more we use the device the more we trend toward participatory, de-specialized modes of thought. Ultimately it is our use of the digital device that transforms our relationship to information and compels us to adopt the core characteristics of orality.

So the main question: Whither the book? That depends on how complete the transformation (or relapse) into orality is. If we revert completely into orality, if the characteristics of orality come to dominate the cognitive repertoire, then the book is dead. The human animal just won’t be interested in investing time and energy into one person’s perspective in the way that the book format demands. Don’t worry though, we won’t even notice the difference… we’ll most likely be dead and gone with the book by the time that kind of change is complete.

Personally I see something more along the lines of Walter Ong’s secondary orality emerging (“essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print”). A multi-sensual hybrid of literacy and orality where both digital and printed information share/fight for cognitive space in a kind of yin/yang dance – each informing and transforming the other. In that scenario long form books still have a place – though primarily in the less distracting medium of print. Those who are able to tap into both the literal and oral cognitive spaces (those people who both read books and engage digital information) will be the ones best outfitted for intellectual battle in the hybrid world. In short: the book lives pretty much as it always has – printed. Not dominant, but alive.

As you might have guessed, this leaves little space for the digital book. It’s a nice, reactionary idea, but if anything will kill the book format, you can rest assured it will be the digital book. So my advice to you is simple… if you want to save the book, don’t by a Kindle – get a library card.