How do we read books online?

This is such a wonderfully interesting article. I opened it as a link from a trusted Tweeter, thinking I’d just scan the headline, and ended up spending ten minutes reading it over my sandwich!

Martin asks a very sensible question. In the ‘hoop-la’ over electronic delivery devices, we have got a little tied up with the question of how we find information. Of course that’s a very useful and important question to ask. But, as he says, wouldn’t it be worth us taking a step back and asking how we read information. Or, rather, how we are likely to read in the future. The way he teases out the implications of that approach are extremely apposite.

Martin’s article is mainly about reading journal content. But it is certainly relevant to those of us concerned with the future of the book. In fact, this gets to the heart of one of my bug-bears about this wonderful electronic future we are facing in the books industry: will it be at the cost of the integrity of the very thing we are looking to advance? I’ve written about such things here. And I probably will again.

Anyway, I would heartily recommend Martin’s article. He looks at all the formats through which we have consumed (journal) content since its invention, including paper, photocopy, printed, PDF, PDF-on-a-computer, mobiles, e-readers, and webpages (oft-forgotten!), and, looking forward, to a tablet-orientated future.

One comment from me is this: let’s not forget the origins of the www! What do I mean? Well, the more we extract content from the web (that is, from the inter-related, inter-operable web of html as originally envisaged by the founders of the Internet) onto a device (even if that device has some kind of search or store or retrieval function of its own), could it not be that we are impoverishing the reading experience? For it’s the world-wide web as a whole that can supply the depth and breadth of knowledge required: not objects-in-themselves, whether that be a paper, a journal, a book, or whatever. It’s understandable that we’ll need to (in some way) extract the mass of content onto a non-inter-operable platform, but we shouldn’t work that way to the exclusion of serving the Internet itself. For the Internet is the starting-point for real value in the reading experience.

Anyway, have a look and see what you think.