By Naomi Bock

If you don't love curling up with a good book, it's doubtful you'd be here in the Red Room. But just as digital literary endeavors like this one gain momentum, print reading is said to be losing its mass appeal, considered less a cherished pastime and more an activity of the past. What could be the future of the book?

The speculation could fill a library. Eye-friendly electronic ink displays, already used in e-book reading devices, could be integrated into popular multi-use gadgets, making smartphones even brainier. For those who miss the art of bookbinding, such devices could be beautifully encased in custom materials, with personalized embossing in lieu of any single title. People preferring hands-free portability might use high-tech visors, or even a projected screen hovering in their field of vision. The next step could even be implanting the gadgetry—digital tattoos via Bluetooth would offer dermal literature, poems cycling through their stanzas with shifting blood-based ink, or, for the ultimate in forward thinking, a wireless chip in the brain, making it possible to read novels as thoughts.

"Voices in my head?" snorts avid reader and former book publicist Alicia Schlag, in the midst of choosing the next shortlist for her book club while her toddler Sophia helpfully yanks titles off the shelf. "No thanks, I've got enough challenges to my sanity!"

New technology can often seem crazy at first glance, like the man seen talking to himself on the street before the little plastic thing on his ear comes into view. And although futurists can still be found buying their science fiction in paperback, much of print reading is undeniably giving way to digital delivery.

Jeff Gomez, author of the provocatively titled new book Print is Dead: Books in our Digital Age, doesn't want people to get the wrong idea—he loves books.

"I know in my heart that I am who I am because of books, because of the words of others that I discovered between the hardback and paperback covers of worn and dog-eared novels," he attests in the book's introduction. Gomez has devoted his career to promoting books, currently directing the online marketing efforts of Penguin USA. It's this work that convinced him the literary community needs to adapt to the digital culture to stay viable. He wanted to detail this message with Print is Dead and keep the conversation going with an active blog.

"The book is actually selling well, which is surprising ­since it's barely been reviewed. But people keep finding out about it—via Google, and links from other websites—so word is spreading," he says. "And in this regard, my thesis is correct because it used to be print reviews in magazines and newspapers that would make or break a book. Now, the internet is the way that people hear and learn about books."

Interestingly, he acknowledges that more people have been buying his book in print rather than e-reading it, and he himself hasn't yet made the switch either (although he does all his periodical reading online). He's "not a fan of existing eBook devices" and, like most, finds it too much of a strain reading long-form on a traditional computer screen. He recognizes the irony of this. He also devotes a chapter of the book to explaining the late ‘90s e-book revolution that wasn't, and why he thinks the time is finally ripe: Society wasn't as wired (and wireless) then as it is now. The digital music revolution and its ubiquitous devices have set the stage, and just as other arts are following suit, literature must also do or die. If the e-reader market has yet to offer a truly "great device" in his opinion, he expects to see it in the next two or three years.

"When it comes, I look forward to reading The Great Gatsby on a screen; I'm convinced it'll still be a great book."

Book collector Theo Armour just finished reading Robinson Crusoe on his new Kindle,Amazon's e-reading device.

"I loved it just as much as when I was twelve," he enthuses, concluding that books suffer little from losing their paper. He says his bound collection sits in storage while he carries a whole library in his pocket. "It's changing my life. I get to snatch reading moments here, there, everywhere."

The Kindle, like the rest of the current crop of devices such as the Sony Readerand the iRex iLiad,uses electronic ink display technology. Unlike backlit pixel displays, e-ink's grid of particle-filled capsules reflect light like paper, making it glare-free and easier on the eyes. So far, this is only offered in grayscale ("wet newspaper" is a common description), though flexible color e-paper prototypes have been showcased at technology fairs. Some consumers are holding out for the day e-ink displays come on their other portable devices, in the trend of cellphone-PDA-music players and the like. The first, the Readius "cellular book" is about to be released in Europe, though lacking a keypad or touch screen, its functions are limited.

But those waiting for Apple's iAnswer to the e-reader might not want to hold their breath. Apple CEO Steve Jobs caused an uproar by declaring book-reading passé when asked about the Kindle at the 2008 MacWorld conference. "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, people don't read books anymore," he told The New York Times. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year."

The survey he was likely referring to, even if he got the year wrong, was a 2004 National Endowment of the Arts report entitled "Reading At Risk," which tracked the roughly ten-point decline of reading from 1982 to 2002 (46 percent read a work of literary fiction in 2002, though 56.4 percent read "any book"). It noted the greatest drop amongst the under-45 age group, the demographic most likely to be entranced with digital pursuits.

Renowned author Ursula K. Le Guin discusses this survey in her February 2008 Harper's Magazine essay, "Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading." She found that a more recent report by the Associated Press in 2007, although slightly more cheering for its results (only twenty-seven percent polled hadn't read a book in a year), was also depressing for the "complacency" it revealed by assuming millions agree with one Dallas respondent's comment that book-reading makes him sleepy.

Le Guin's response is a pragmatic circling of the wagons, insisting books are "here to stay" for the few who appreciate the rewards of staying awake for them.

"Concentrating on the drowsy fellow in Dallas, perhaps we forget our own people, the hedonists who read because they want to. Were such people ever in the majority?" she writes.

She rallies against corporate publishers and their wrong-headed attempts to pander to these yawning lost causes with crass, disposable bestseller campaigns. She wishes they'd leave their literary sections alone to eke out an alert readership, cycling the modest profits back into cultivating new talent.

Since kids today are "seldom taught to read for pleasure and anyhow are distracted by electrons, the relative number of book-readers is unlikely to see any kind of useful increase and may well shrink further," she predicts.

But Gomez, in Print is Dead, believes bridging this "very real and widening gulf between bibliophiles and those who preach the new gospel of electronic change" is crucial, in order to "engage this new generation which is beginning to turn its back on books." He suggests writers not only get online and promote their (e-)books, but also explore what the digital age offers for the evolution of the book itself.

Novelists could use hypertext like online journalists and bloggers do, adding links and multimedia illustrations, as well as offering "remix" options to read out of order (or absconding with order altogether, books presented as non-linear narrative arrays).

Other new biblio-species include "keitai," text-message serials thumb-written by Japanese teenagers in 160-character novellas, and "networked novels," projects often created on collaborative writing sites that link layered stories like campfire story circles.

This growing e-lit culture is celebrated by the Institute for the Future of the Book, a "small think-and-do-tank" with offices in New York and London. They keep up with experimental e-lit art projects as well as more quotidian trends, such as nonfiction authors who blog their books-in-progress to get research tips and other feedback before publication.

"We've been talking about how to get across the message that the book has been through permanent change throughout its history, to knock on the head the simplistic argument of good old page v bad new screen," blogs co-director Chris Meade.

"Books are what a society carries its words in."

–Naomi Bock is a writer and filmmaker working on her first novel, which she plans as both a printed book and a web-based multimedia project.

Read "The Future of the Book Part 2."

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