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Hello, children. I hope you're ready for the picture book. | 0:00:02 | 0:00:05 | |
In Norfolk, the Dersingham mobile library is on the move. | 0:00:15 | 0:00:20 | |
Every month, Andrew Stride | 0:00:20 | 0:00:23 | |
makes the 20-mile circuit via Wolferton, Sandringham | 0:00:23 | 0:00:27 | |
and Bawsey, with 2,000 books on board, | 0:00:27 | 0:00:30 | |
for his small but discerning clientele. | 0:00:30 | 0:00:32 | |
The library is one of those special places where people meet books. Physical books, that is. | 0:00:41 | 0:00:47 | |
The sort that sit on shelves waiting patiently to be found. | 0:00:47 | 0:00:52 | |
But even in Dersingham, things are changing. | 0:00:52 | 0:00:56 | |
A guy came on about nine months ago and he asked me | 0:00:56 | 0:01:02 | |
if he could have instructions to download free e-books | 0:01:02 | 0:01:06 | |
from the library system. He's about 85, I think he is. | 0:01:06 | 0:01:09 | |
I gave him the instructions. I haven't seen him since. | 0:01:09 | 0:01:14 | |
It was a wolf. Where's the wolf? | 0:01:19 | 0:01:21 | |
-Shall we make him bigger? -Yes. | 0:01:21 | 0:01:25 | |
This is the new screen age, | 0:01:25 | 0:01:27 | |
in which the app replaces the child's ABC, | 0:01:27 | 0:01:31 | |
and e-readers put e-books into the hands of millions. | 0:01:31 | 0:01:37 | |
When you can carry around a tower of books | 0:01:45 | 0:01:48 | |
on a device the size of a paperback, | 0:01:48 | 0:01:50 | |
you can't help wondering | 0:01:50 | 0:01:53 | |
what future is there for the books made of paper and ink? | 0:01:53 | 0:01:58 | |
There will always be people who fetishise printed books | 0:02:04 | 0:02:08 | |
and insist that it's a superior experience to flip through printed pages, | 0:02:08 | 0:02:12 | |
just as there are people who insist that LPs sound better than CDs. | 0:02:12 | 0:02:15 | |
But that doesn't make it so. | 0:02:15 | 0:02:18 | |
The essence of a book is not that it's ink on paper, | 0:02:18 | 0:02:21 | |
it's that it's a mechanism for transmitting ideas, | 0:02:21 | 0:02:25 | |
and so, if you get hung up on the object, you sort of can't go forward. | 0:02:25 | 0:02:29 | |
Disappear...is an excessively powerful word for what's going to happen. | 0:02:32 | 0:02:39 | |
But I do think that ten years from now, | 0:02:39 | 0:02:42 | |
when you walk on the aeroplane and everybody's reading, | 0:02:42 | 0:02:46 | |
out of 200 people on the plane, | 0:02:46 | 0:02:48 | |
there'll be four people who are reading a printed book. | 0:02:48 | 0:02:52 | |
You hear a lot of talk these days about the book of the future. | 0:02:56 | 0:03:00 | |
But what about a future without books - | 0:03:00 | 0:03:03 | |
could that really happen? | 0:03:03 | 0:03:06 | |
Will the page clicker replace the page turner? | 0:03:06 | 0:03:10 | |
Will libraries migrate to the internet? | 0:03:10 | 0:03:12 | |
Bookshops disappear? | 0:03:12 | 0:03:16 | |
And physical books become as outmoded as LPs? | 0:03:16 | 0:03:19 | |
Is this the final chapter in our long love affair with the book? | 0:03:21 | 0:03:26 | |
Do you remember what it felt like to do this? | 0:04:01 | 0:04:04 | |
NEEDLE CRACKLES | 0:04:07 | 0:04:10 | |
MUSIC: "The Man Who Sold The World" by David Bowie | 0:04:10 | 0:04:14 | |
SHUTTER CLICKS | 0:04:14 | 0:04:16 | |
And this? | 0:04:16 | 0:04:18 | |
And what about this? | 0:04:18 | 0:04:19 | |
And this? | 0:04:19 | 0:04:22 | |
# We passed upon... # | 0:04:22 | 0:04:25 | |
Technology expands the mind but shrinks the world, | 0:04:25 | 0:04:29 | |
making things that were once pleasurably different more or less the same. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:34 | |
Get the picture? | 0:04:34 | 0:04:36 | |
Well, now it looks as if the world is going to shrink still more | 0:04:36 | 0:04:40 | |
when books go digital. | 0:04:40 | 0:04:43 | |
A dozen little rites and rituals peculiar to book reading | 0:04:46 | 0:04:50 | |
are going to be consigned to the dustbin of history. | 0:04:50 | 0:04:55 | |
Make no mistake - | 0:05:05 | 0:05:08 | |
this is the most profound revolution in the book business | 0:05:08 | 0:05:12 | |
since Johannes Gutenberg started flogging printed Bibles in 1455. | 0:05:12 | 0:05:18 | |
In the 500 years since Gutenberg, | 0:05:18 | 0:05:20 | |
our relationship with books has deepened - | 0:05:20 | 0:05:23 | |
they've become woven into the very fabric of our lives, | 0:05:23 | 0:05:26 | |
reassuring, familiar, taken for granted. | 0:05:26 | 0:05:29 | |
Until now. | 0:05:29 | 0:05:31 | |
Those of you who've seen my book, | 0:05:31 | 0:05:34 | |
whatever you make think of its contents, | 0:05:34 | 0:05:37 | |
will probably agree that it is a beautiful object. | 0:05:37 | 0:05:42 | |
And if the physical book, | 0:05:42 | 0:05:44 | |
as we've come to call it, | 0:05:44 | 0:05:45 | |
is to resist the challenge of the e-book, | 0:05:45 | 0:05:47 | |
it has to look like something worth buying and worth keeping. | 0:05:47 | 0:05:51 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:05:51 | 0:05:54 | |
So where did our passionate | 0:05:59 | 0:06:01 | |
and enduring love affair with books begin? | 0:06:01 | 0:06:05 | |
To find the answer, I've popped into the library. | 0:06:05 | 0:06:08 | |
Not any old library, mind you - | 0:06:08 | 0:06:10 | |
I was visiting the Bodleian Library in Oxford. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:13 | |
I was there to see some of the library's treasures | 0:06:13 | 0:06:16 | |
and to hear how books first came to our lives. | 0:06:16 | 0:06:19 | |
As Richard Ovenden, Keeper of the Special Collection, explained, | 0:06:21 | 0:06:26 | |
before the book came the roll. | 0:06:26 | 0:06:28 | |
This one, running twice the length of a long table, | 0:06:28 | 0:06:32 | |
contains just one of the 24 books from Homer's epic poem, The Iliad. | 0:06:32 | 0:06:38 | |
Not exactly something you could just dip into. | 0:06:38 | 0:06:41 | |
You would have read it very much like this. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:45 | |
Rolling one side out | 0:06:45 | 0:06:48 | |
and picking up the text in the other side as you read through it. | 0:06:48 | 0:06:54 | |
-That's called scrolling, is it? -Yeah, absolutely. | 0:06:54 | 0:06:56 | |
And, of course, we've kept that terminology through the centuries | 0:06:56 | 0:07:02 | |
and we've used it in the microfilm era, | 0:07:02 | 0:07:05 | |
and that's been now translated into the digital world. | 0:07:05 | 0:07:07 | |
The interesting thing that we find is that, as the first millennium | 0:07:07 | 0:07:11 | |
moves forward, that there is this move | 0:07:11 | 0:07:15 | |
from the scroll to what we now call the book, | 0:07:15 | 0:07:19 | |
or the Latin word for it is codex. | 0:07:19 | 0:07:21 | |
And the interesting thing is it happens much more readily | 0:07:21 | 0:07:25 | |
in the Christian communities and with Christian texts | 0:07:25 | 0:07:29 | |
than it does in the non-Christian. | 0:07:29 | 0:07:31 | |
What we have here is one of the earliest Latin books | 0:07:31 | 0:07:37 | |
to survive in England. | 0:07:37 | 0:07:40 | |
This is a text of Eusebius' Chronicles | 0:07:40 | 0:07:43 | |
that survives from the 5th century AD - 1,500 or 1,600 years old. | 0:07:43 | 0:07:48 | |
It's in incredible condition. | 0:07:48 | 0:07:50 | |
It's been kept together by the codex form very well. | 0:07:50 | 0:07:55 | |
Despite it's great, great age, | 0:07:55 | 0:07:58 | |
you can see how the technology works, you can move through the text. | 0:07:58 | 0:08:01 | |
I can hear it as well, I can hear the crackle. | 0:08:01 | 0:08:03 | |
The sound is wonderful, it's fabulous, | 0:08:03 | 0:08:06 | |
and you think that somebody reading this book in the 5th century | 0:08:06 | 0:08:11 | |
in southern Italy probably would have heard the same crackle. | 0:08:11 | 0:08:13 | |
As I look at this, | 0:08:13 | 0:08:15 | |
it's very recognisably a book. | 0:08:15 | 0:08:18 | |
If I took this and showed it to anyone, they'd say, "That's a book." | 0:08:18 | 0:08:21 | |
This could be 50 years old, 30 years old. It's actually 1,500 years old. | 0:08:21 | 0:08:25 | |
So this design, both form and function, | 0:08:25 | 0:08:31 | |
obviously having worked...worked for a very, very long time. | 0:08:31 | 0:08:34 | |
It's successful technology. | 0:08:34 | 0:08:36 | |
So the codex form begins to become dominate, because it works. | 0:08:36 | 0:08:42 | |
It's very convenient to move between different parts of a text, | 0:08:42 | 0:08:45 | |
much more rapidly than you can with the action of scrolling. | 0:08:45 | 0:08:49 | |
It's fascinating what you said, | 0:08:49 | 0:08:52 | |
because in an incredibly short time, | 0:08:52 | 0:08:54 | |
people are saying, "Will be have these in 100 years' time?" | 0:08:54 | 0:08:58 | |
And yet there's so much about this object, the feel of it, | 0:08:58 | 0:09:02 | |
the touch of it, the smell of it, | 0:09:02 | 0:09:05 | |
which immediately represents something to us, | 0:09:05 | 0:09:10 | |
in terms of our memory. | 0:09:10 | 0:09:12 | |
Books are alive with the meanings of their makers. | 0:09:12 | 0:09:15 | |
And you can tell so much about the text itself, | 0:09:15 | 0:09:20 | |
but why it was written, who it was written for, | 0:09:20 | 0:09:23 | |
how it was meant to be understood, | 0:09:23 | 0:09:25 | |
from the form. | 0:09:25 | 0:09:27 | |
And that's something which is much harder to manage in a digital world. | 0:09:27 | 0:09:33 | |
The history of the book is a story of incremental technological advances - | 0:09:35 | 0:09:41 | |
most dramatically of all, from handwritten to printed books, | 0:09:41 | 0:09:45 | |
a revolutionary innovation | 0:09:45 | 0:09:46 | |
introduced into this country by William Caxton. | 0:09:46 | 0:09:50 | |
Tell us what this is. | 0:09:50 | 0:09:52 | |
This is the first book printed in the English language, | 0:09:52 | 0:09:55 | |
which was printed by William Caxton, | 0:09:55 | 0:09:56 | |
and he's using a typeface that is designed | 0:09:56 | 0:10:02 | |
to mimic the handwritten manuscripts of the same period. | 0:10:02 | 0:10:06 | |
That we can see here. | 0:10:06 | 0:10:08 | |
You can see the similarities in the letter forms in both, | 0:10:08 | 0:10:12 | |
and because the form of this book is so convincingly similar | 0:10:12 | 0:10:17 | |
to the manuscript that everyone was familiar with | 0:10:17 | 0:10:21 | |
is that he has to insert a preface at the start of the book | 0:10:21 | 0:10:24 | |
to make it absolutely clear that this was printed, | 0:10:24 | 0:10:27 | |
this was produced by this new technology called printing, | 0:10:27 | 0:10:30 | |
and it is not the same as the manuscript era, | 0:10:30 | 0:10:34 | |
and that every copy is the same. | 0:10:34 | 0:10:36 | |
Therefore I have practised and learned at my great charge and dispense | 0:10:40 | 0:10:46 | |
to ordain this said book in print | 0:10:46 | 0:10:49 | |
and it not written with pen and ink, as other books have been. | 0:10:49 | 0:10:52 | |
All the books of this story thus emprinted | 0:10:52 | 0:10:55 | |
as you see here | 0:10:55 | 0:10:57 | |
were begun in one day and also finished in one day. | 0:10:57 | 0:11:01 | |
William Caxton. | 0:11:01 | 0:11:04 | |
In the centuries after Gutenberg and Caxton, | 0:11:07 | 0:11:10 | |
the book business quickly evolved | 0:11:10 | 0:11:12 | |
to become one of the first truly modern manufacturing processes. | 0:11:12 | 0:11:15 | |
More and more books were produced more and more cheaply, | 0:11:17 | 0:11:22 | |
and the radical ideas they carried were spread ever more widely. | 0:11:22 | 0:11:27 | |
Finally, the mechanisation of printing | 0:11:28 | 0:11:32 | |
and the literacy that books had helped bring about | 0:11:32 | 0:11:35 | |
combined to create the mass-market book business that we know today. | 0:11:35 | 0:11:40 | |
But books have done far more than create a business. | 0:11:43 | 0:11:47 | |
They've helped to shape our world. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:49 | |
We made the books, and then the books made us. | 0:11:49 | 0:11:54 | |
Just ask Her Majesty the Queen, | 0:11:54 | 0:11:59 | |
as imagined by Alan Bennett in his recent bestseller, | 0:11:59 | 0:12:02 | |
The Uncommon Reader. | 0:12:02 | 0:12:04 | |
If you don't know the book, | 0:12:04 | 0:12:05 | |
it's the Queen, by accident, | 0:12:05 | 0:12:09 | |
strays into a mobile library, | 0:12:09 | 0:12:12 | |
which she finds parked at the back of Buckingham Palace, | 0:12:12 | 0:12:16 | |
and out of politeness, really, | 0:12:16 | 0:12:18 | |
she takes out a book and she gradually | 0:12:18 | 0:12:22 | |
begins to read, and as she reads, | 0:12:22 | 0:12:26 | |
her whole attitude to life changes. | 0:12:26 | 0:12:29 | |
"The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference. | 0:12:30 | 0:12:35 | |
"There was something lofty about literature. | 0:12:35 | 0:12:39 | |
"Books did not care who was reading them | 0:12:39 | 0:12:42 | |
"or whether one read them or not. | 0:12:42 | 0:12:44 | |
"All readers were equal, herself included. | 0:12:44 | 0:12:47 | |
"Literature, she thought, is a Commonwealth, letters a Republic. | 0:12:47 | 0:12:54 | |
"Once she got into her stride, it ceased to seem strange to her | 0:12:54 | 0:12:58 | |
"that she wanted to read, | 0:12:58 | 0:12:59 | |
"and books, to which she had taken so cautiously, | 0:12:59 | 0:13:03 | |
"gradually came to be her element." | 0:13:03 | 0:13:06 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:13:06 | 0:13:08 | |
But for all their links to the high-flown and the abstract, | 0:13:18 | 0:13:23 | |
there's something about books that remains reassuringly down-to-earth. | 0:13:23 | 0:13:27 | |
They've never lost their connection to the physical world from which they sprung. | 0:13:27 | 0:13:31 | |
When you see the industrial alchemy | 0:13:34 | 0:13:37 | |
that turns trees into paper, for example, | 0:13:37 | 0:13:41 | |
you begin to appreciate the sheer scale of operations that are required | 0:13:41 | 0:13:44 | |
to put physical books into the hands of readers. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:47 | |
MACHINE WHIRRS LOUDLY | 0:13:49 | 0:13:53 | |
MACHINE DROWNS OUT SPEECH | 0:14:06 | 0:14:09 | |
So books are inescapable, physical objects. | 0:14:09 | 0:14:13 | |
But they're also organic, just like their readers. | 0:14:13 | 0:14:17 | |
They might not live and breathe as we do, | 0:14:17 | 0:14:19 | |
but they can certainly smell like us. | 0:14:19 | 0:14:22 | |
Take a deep breath and meet someone with a nose for a good book. | 0:14:27 | 0:14:32 | |
-Is this what you do for a living, Rachel, smelling books? -Um, yes. | 0:14:51 | 0:14:55 | |
'Rachel Morrison's official job is as a librarian | 0:14:55 | 0:14:59 | |
'at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. | 0:14:59 | 0:15:02 | |
'But she spends much of her time | 0:15:02 | 0:15:04 | |
'smelling the books in the MoMA library, all 300,000 of them, | 0:15:04 | 0:15:10 | |
'and carefully noting the olfactory essence of each.' | 0:15:10 | 0:15:14 | |
"1967-'68, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Reports. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:21 | |
"Smoky wool. | 0:15:21 | 0:15:24 | |
"1968, Directory Of Fellows. Sweet flowers. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:28 | |
"1994, The Order Of Things. | 0:15:28 | 0:15:31 | |
"Burnt tortilla. | 0:15:31 | 0:15:34 | |
"1951, Report. Perfume paper. | 0:15:34 | 0:15:38 | |
"1977, Two Philosophical Experiments. | 0:15:38 | 0:15:43 | |
"A hug with an elderly relative." | 0:15:43 | 0:15:46 | |
Where did that come from? | 0:15:46 | 0:15:48 | |
Um, well, when I hug my grandparents, they're usually wearing wool, | 0:15:48 | 0:15:52 | |
and my grandfather smokes, so I think it had this, like, | 0:15:52 | 0:15:56 | |
woolly, smoky smell, the way that smoke sort of sticks to wool. | 0:15:56 | 0:16:02 | |
"Cigars. | 0:16:06 | 0:16:09 | |
"Moss. Woody and wet. | 0:16:09 | 0:16:13 | |
"Campfire. | 0:16:14 | 0:16:17 | |
"Vacuum cleaner. | 0:16:17 | 0:16:19 | |
"Silly Putty. | 0:16:19 | 0:16:22 | |
"Play-Doh. | 0:16:22 | 0:16:24 | |
"Campfire..." | 0:16:24 | 0:16:25 | |
So do you think we actually really will miss the smell of books? | 0:16:25 | 0:16:30 | |
I think people will. I know that I will and that I do miss the smell. | 0:16:30 | 0:16:35 | |
There's something intimate about having a smell of a book, | 0:16:35 | 0:16:40 | |
and when you're reading something off a screen, | 0:16:40 | 0:16:44 | |
there's no intimacy. | 0:16:44 | 0:16:47 | |
Can you imagine, though... You know what's going to happen - | 0:16:47 | 0:16:51 | |
some smart person will think, "I've got all that right. | 0:16:51 | 0:16:54 | |
"Now I have to have to have a smell. | 0:16:54 | 0:16:55 | |
And they're going to... With every book you get, | 0:16:55 | 0:16:57 | |
there's probably going to be a special customised smell. | 0:16:57 | 0:17:01 | |
-That would be interesting. -Yeah, it'll be a special new app. | 0:17:01 | 0:17:05 | |
-Yeah. -You can have a smell app. -Yeah, yeah. | 0:17:05 | 0:17:08 | |
Ah, yes - the "app". | 0:17:10 | 0:17:13 | |
One of those bland little words, like "tweet" or "blog" or "search" | 0:17:13 | 0:17:17 | |
that are quietly changing our world. | 0:17:17 | 0:17:21 | |
If you're wondering what could ever replace those wonderful | 0:17:21 | 0:17:25 | |
smelly old books, here's part of the answer. | 0:17:25 | 0:17:28 | |
The Elements, once a glossy coffee-table book, | 0:17:28 | 0:17:31 | |
now transformed into a content-rich, multimedia, | 0:17:31 | 0:17:36 | |
fully-interactive book app. | 0:17:36 | 0:17:40 | |
Since its launch 18 months ago, | 0:17:40 | 0:17:42 | |
more than a 250,000 copies of The Elements have been sold. | 0:17:42 | 0:17:46 | |
There's nothing to smell here. | 0:17:46 | 0:17:48 | |
Except the sweet smell of success. | 0:17:48 | 0:17:53 | |
The Elements was produced by Touch Press, | 0:17:53 | 0:17:56 | |
set up by former TV producer Max Whitby and Theo Gray, | 0:17:56 | 0:18:01 | |
a scientist and science writer. | 0:18:01 | 0:18:04 | |
Here they are in a teleconference | 0:18:04 | 0:18:08 | |
with writer Simon Winchester, discussing a new app, Skulls. | 0:18:08 | 0:18:12 | |
..will be spinning slowly to give you a visual prompt. | 0:18:12 | 0:18:15 | |
The photos of the skulls are fully interactive. | 0:18:15 | 0:18:19 | |
Landscape we see more as the coffee-table reading mode | 0:18:19 | 0:18:23 | |
for the app, and the portrait is the book text reading mode. | 0:18:23 | 0:18:25 | |
-(OVER COMPUTER) -I must say I'm enormously impressed | 0:18:25 | 0:18:30 | |
and pleased with it. There are so many choices, | 0:18:30 | 0:18:34 | |
and I feel somewhat all at sea but at the same time rather excited | 0:18:34 | 0:18:39 | |
and stimulated by it. | 0:18:39 | 0:18:42 | |
We are absolutely publishers, yeah. We think of ourselves as publishers | 0:18:42 | 0:18:45 | |
first and foremost. | 0:18:45 | 0:18:46 | |
We happen to use software as the kind of ink we print with, | 0:18:46 | 0:18:50 | |
but we are making books written by authors with a story to tell, | 0:18:50 | 0:18:55 | |
and I think our electronic books are very much | 0:18:55 | 0:18:57 | |
beautiful, leather-bound, carefully printed books. | 0:18:57 | 0:19:01 | |
The Elements didn't start as a blank sheet of paper - | 0:19:01 | 0:19:05 | |
there was already a successful physical book - | 0:19:05 | 0:19:08 | |
but for its author, this had always lacked a certain...magic. | 0:19:08 | 0:19:14 | |
What I thought is suppose Harry Potter had this book - it would be a much better book, | 0:19:14 | 0:19:20 | |
because if he got it out of the Hogwarts library and opened it up, | 0:19:20 | 0:19:23 | |
these objects would pop up off the page | 0:19:23 | 0:19:26 | |
and they would turn or he could look at... | 0:19:26 | 0:19:29 | |
They would somehow be much more physical, much more present, | 0:19:29 | 0:19:32 | |
than they are in the print form. | 0:19:32 | 0:19:35 | |
And one of the design goals for The Elements was to see, | 0:19:35 | 0:19:38 | |
"How close can we come to the Harry Potter version of this book?" | 0:19:38 | 0:19:41 | |
When you're trying to imagine the new kinds of books | 0:19:41 | 0:19:44 | |
that go onto these devices, you need to think what the device can do | 0:19:44 | 0:19:50 | |
that really goes beyond the printed page. | 0:19:50 | 0:19:53 | |
VOICE FROM DEVICE: 'Unreal City | 0:19:55 | 0:19:59 | |
'Under the brown fog of a winter dawn | 0:19:59 | 0:20:02 | |
'A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many | 0:20:02 | 0:20:06 | |
'I had not thought death had undone so many...' | 0:20:06 | 0:20:10 | |
There will always be people who fetishise printed books, | 0:20:10 | 0:20:15 | |
insist it's a superior experience to flip through printed pages, | 0:20:15 | 0:20:19 | |
just as there are people who insist that LPs sound better than CDs, | 0:20:19 | 0:20:22 | |
but that doesn't make it so. | 0:20:22 | 0:20:24 | |
It's kind of annoying to have to hold a book open, | 0:20:24 | 0:20:27 | |
and if you slip, the pages flip, and if you're trying to read in bed, | 0:20:27 | 0:20:31 | |
lying on your side, it's very stressful, | 0:20:31 | 0:20:34 | |
and you might become attached to it in the same way | 0:20:34 | 0:20:37 | |
that you become attached to the scratchy, noisy sound of an LP, | 0:20:37 | 0:20:42 | |
but for the most part, most people, | 0:20:42 | 0:20:44 | |
when given what is objectively speaking | 0:20:44 | 0:20:47 | |
a better reading experience, you'll get over it. | 0:20:47 | 0:20:51 | |
For the traditional book business, | 0:21:00 | 0:21:02 | |
"getting over it" is proving difficult. | 0:21:02 | 0:21:04 | |
An enormous spanner has been tossed into some very complex works. | 0:21:04 | 0:21:09 | |
The physicality of books, the fact that, till now, | 0:21:09 | 0:21:13 | |
they've had to be manufactured, warehoused, distributed | 0:21:13 | 0:21:17 | |
and sold over the counter | 0:21:17 | 0:21:19 | |
has shaped the publishing industry. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:22 | |
The costly infrastructure, from the printing plants | 0:21:23 | 0:21:27 | |
to distribution centres like this one, | 0:21:27 | 0:21:29 | |
the tangled economics, from authors' advances and royalty payments | 0:21:29 | 0:21:33 | |
to the sale or return of books from book shops. | 0:21:33 | 0:21:37 | |
Even, you might argue, | 0:21:37 | 0:21:39 | |
the philosophy of the book business itself | 0:21:39 | 0:21:41 | |
as a cultural as well as commercial enterprise. | 0:21:41 | 0:21:44 | |
All of these can be traced back to the fact that books are things. | 0:21:44 | 0:21:49 | |
But the book has been dematerialised and, with it, | 0:21:49 | 0:21:53 | |
most of the assumptions upon which the book business was founded. | 0:21:53 | 0:21:58 | |
Publishers are really built around one fundamental capability, | 0:21:59 | 0:22:04 | |
which is their ability to put books on book store shelves. | 0:22:04 | 0:22:08 | |
Everything revolves around the physical entity of the book, | 0:22:08 | 0:22:12 | |
rather than what's in the book, | 0:22:12 | 0:22:15 | |
in the way that most of the publishing business is organised. | 0:22:15 | 0:22:19 | |
They are perfectly all right putting a memoir, travel book, cook book, | 0:22:19 | 0:22:22 | |
a piece of fiction all in the same box. | 0:22:22 | 0:22:25 | |
Go to the same place, and when it got to that place, | 0:22:25 | 0:22:28 | |
the person at the other end would put it on the right shelf, | 0:22:28 | 0:22:31 | |
so that the consumer could find it. | 0:22:31 | 0:22:33 | |
Given all this, it's not surprising that the branch of the book business | 0:22:33 | 0:22:37 | |
that's been shaken by the chilliest winds has been the book shop, | 0:22:37 | 0:22:42 | |
from the smallest local independent to the mightiest chain. | 0:22:42 | 0:22:46 | |
Borders, which once boasted 1,200 stores worldwide, | 0:22:46 | 0:22:50 | |
closed the last of them just a few months ago. | 0:22:50 | 0:22:54 | |
Five years from now, if a book sells a lot of copies, | 0:22:54 | 0:22:58 | |
the chances are overwhelming that it will sell most of them online. | 0:22:58 | 0:23:02 | |
Online can be print or digital - | 0:23:02 | 0:23:04 | |
it doesn't mean they all have to be e-books - | 0:23:04 | 0:23:06 | |
but that shift from purchasing in stores, | 0:23:06 | 0:23:10 | |
of which there are thousands that need to be covered, | 0:23:10 | 0:23:13 | |
to purchasing online, at which there are... | 0:23:13 | 0:23:17 | |
you know, a dozen touch points that basically get you to everything, | 0:23:17 | 0:23:23 | |
is the huge change in the industry | 0:23:23 | 0:23:25 | |
and the big challenge to the biggest publishers. | 0:23:25 | 0:23:28 | |
I don't mean to suggest there will be no book stores ten years from now. | 0:23:28 | 0:23:32 | |
There'll be some book stores, but it won't be enough book stores to build a business on. | 0:23:32 | 0:23:37 | |
It will be an ancillary part of the market, not the core of the market, | 0:23:37 | 0:23:41 | |
and that's all part of what drives the fear. | 0:23:41 | 0:23:43 | |
So here they are, then - representatives of what, until about five minutes ago, | 0:23:45 | 0:23:50 | |
was the book business. | 0:23:50 | 0:23:53 | |
A publisher, Gail Rebuck of Random House, | 0:23:53 | 0:23:56 | |
an agent, Ed Victor, | 0:23:56 | 0:23:57 | |
and a writer, Ewan Morrison. | 0:23:57 | 0:24:02 | |
These are the people of the book in their natural habitat, | 0:24:02 | 0:24:06 | |
thinking aloud about an uncertain future. | 0:24:06 | 0:24:10 | |
We have to change. How can we not? | 0:24:10 | 0:24:11 | |
I changed very early, because I represented | 0:24:11 | 0:24:15 | |
the late, great Douglas Adams, | 0:24:15 | 0:24:17 | |
who was talking about this in the 1980s. | 0:24:17 | 0:24:20 | |
He would say to me, "Ed, the business you're in is obsolete. | 0:24:20 | 0:24:24 | |
"We're no longer going to manufacture physical books, | 0:24:24 | 0:24:28 | |
"hunks of molecules," he said. | 0:24:28 | 0:24:31 | |
The one thing that hasn't changed is the essence of what we do | 0:24:31 | 0:24:35 | |
as publishers, and that's curators - | 0:24:35 | 0:24:38 | |
it's selecting, it's choosing the books we want to publish, | 0:24:38 | 0:24:43 | |
it's the editor working in close collaboration with the author, | 0:24:43 | 0:24:48 | |
shaping the book, developing the book and then, ultimately, | 0:24:48 | 0:24:51 | |
bringing it to its public. | 0:24:51 | 0:24:54 | |
We don't really mind how we deliver books, in whatever form. | 0:24:54 | 0:24:58 | |
What is a book really? Is it its body or its soul? | 0:24:58 | 0:25:01 | |
We're in the business of the soul of books. | 0:25:01 | 0:25:04 | |
But what happens when a book's soul is transformed into a data stream? | 0:25:04 | 0:25:10 | |
Digitised, downloadable and never more than a click away | 0:25:12 | 0:25:16 | |
from the infinite possibility of the internet? | 0:25:16 | 0:25:18 | |
It's almost at the point where we can't really talk | 0:25:18 | 0:25:21 | |
about books any more as a separate entity, because, really, | 0:25:21 | 0:25:24 | |
what is a book? What is a piece of music? It's an MP4, | 0:25:24 | 0:25:29 | |
or you can upload it on different formats in about 10 to 15 seconds. | 0:25:29 | 0:25:33 | |
As soon as books go digital, they become | 0:25:33 | 0:25:35 | |
another piece of digital content. | 0:25:35 | 0:25:37 | |
Therefore, if we lose that respect and reverence | 0:25:37 | 0:25:42 | |
for the book and the book just becomes like an MP4 | 0:25:42 | 0:25:44 | |
or a QuickTime movie, then that will be the end of the book, basically. | 0:25:44 | 0:25:47 | |
Ultimately, I think the point is that if we get it right, | 0:25:47 | 0:25:52 | |
and physical books remain a part of the market, | 0:25:52 | 0:25:55 | |
and I haven't got a crystal ball - | 0:25:55 | 0:25:56 | |
I don't know whether they'll be 50% of the market or 20% or whatever. | 0:25:56 | 0:26:01 | |
But actually, the opportunity for getting more people to read books, | 0:26:01 | 0:26:05 | |
if they're available both digitally, widely available | 0:26:05 | 0:26:08 | |
and discoverable, and in physical form, | 0:26:08 | 0:26:12 | |
I think it's very exciting. | 0:26:12 | 0:26:14 | |
What concerns me is Generation Y, who are the same size as the baby boomers, | 0:26:14 | 0:26:17 | |
they're really the next market, and Gen Y consume | 0:26:17 | 0:26:20 | |
about 78% of all textual material already online. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:24 | |
So I can't... | 0:26:24 | 0:26:26 | |
You know, within a generation, it's going to be the same for books, | 0:26:26 | 0:26:30 | |
I'm afraid. There's no way that you can instil in them the need to start using books | 0:26:30 | 0:26:34 | |
if they've never had that experience. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:38 | |
Along with concerns about how the book-reading public is changing | 0:26:38 | 0:26:42 | |
are anxieties about powerful new players | 0:26:42 | 0:26:46 | |
who've appeared in the book market. | 0:26:46 | 0:26:48 | |
I think we're at a crucial juncture just now, | 0:26:48 | 0:26:51 | |
where the publishers have to get together again, | 0:26:51 | 0:26:54 | |
because there are forecasts going on in Silicon Valley just now | 0:26:54 | 0:26:56 | |
about who the three main publishers are going to be in ten years' time. | 0:26:56 | 0:26:59 | |
-Google, Amazon... -Google and Apple. | 0:26:59 | 0:27:02 | |
-Amazon and Apple. -These are the three companies | 0:27:02 | 0:27:05 | |
that are going to rule our industry. They do now. | 0:27:05 | 0:27:08 | |
Amazon, Apple and Google are these monoliths, | 0:27:08 | 0:27:11 | |
international monoliths, and we are, you know, | 0:27:11 | 0:27:15 | |
we're not exactly tiny, but we're not big in the publishing industry, | 0:27:15 | 0:27:20 | |
and what we're doing, what they rely on us to do, | 0:27:20 | 0:27:22 | |
-is to provide them with content. And we do. -For free, as well. | 0:27:22 | 0:27:25 | |
Well, the big issue for me is about discovery, | 0:27:25 | 0:27:28 | |
because it's all very well... We might discover | 0:27:28 | 0:27:30 | |
all these wonderful new writers, | 0:27:30 | 0:27:32 | |
but how's the public meant to discover them? Because, actually, | 0:27:32 | 0:27:36 | |
discovering online is a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. | 0:27:36 | 0:27:41 | |
So book shops are absolutely essential to us. | 0:27:41 | 0:27:44 | |
They are essential, you know, to the culture of this country. | 0:27:44 | 0:27:48 | |
I mean, we are becoming a bit of a book desert. The independents | 0:27:48 | 0:27:50 | |
who give a lot of the soul and the individuality to choice | 0:27:50 | 0:27:55 | |
are being knocked off on literally a weekly basis. | 0:27:55 | 0:28:00 | |
And with libraries closing, | 0:28:00 | 0:28:02 | |
I think this point of discovery is a real issue. | 0:28:02 | 0:28:05 | |
The spectre at this feast | 0:28:08 | 0:28:09 | |
is what used to be called the record industry, | 0:28:09 | 0:28:13 | |
brought to its knees by the side-effects of digitisation - | 0:28:13 | 0:28:16 | |
piracy, file-sharing and the assumption among consumers | 0:28:16 | 0:28:22 | |
that if it's digital, then it ought to be cheap | 0:28:22 | 0:28:25 | |
or, preferably, free. | 0:28:25 | 0:28:28 | |
I really think we should be fighting for a really strong copyright law. | 0:28:28 | 0:28:32 | |
This is one of the reasons authors have to stick with publishers, | 0:28:32 | 0:28:36 | |
-actually, and not run off. -And agents. -And agents, yes. Yes! | 0:28:36 | 0:28:40 | |
-It's because... -We fight for you. -It's because there is a common battle | 0:28:40 | 0:28:43 | |
against the draining away of copyright law | 0:28:43 | 0:28:46 | |
and copyright protection. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:48 | |
I think people should be paid for what they do. | 0:28:48 | 0:28:50 | |
-It takes a year to write a book. -True. -It takes a year. | 0:28:50 | 0:28:54 | |
-You're preaching to the converted. -Exactly, but I'm just really worried | 0:28:54 | 0:28:57 | |
that we are all going to be out of a job in about ten years' time, | 0:28:57 | 0:29:01 | |
so you can look at us as three coffins that are sitting here, | 0:29:01 | 0:29:04 | |
and we've missed this great opportunity... | 0:29:04 | 0:29:07 | |
I want to talk about William Goldman. | 0:29:07 | 0:29:10 | |
William Goldman wrote a famous book | 0:29:10 | 0:29:12 | |
called Adventures In The Screen Trade, | 0:29:12 | 0:29:14 | |
but it could be any media trade, and he said, "The most important thing | 0:29:14 | 0:29:19 | |
"to remember about Hollywood executives is this - | 0:29:19 | 0:29:22 | |
"nobody knows anything. And just in case you didn't get that..." | 0:29:22 | 0:29:26 | |
and he puts it in huge type... "Nobody knows anything." | 0:29:26 | 0:29:29 | |
So I submit to all of you that we don't know anything. | 0:29:29 | 0:29:33 | |
Maybe William Goldman was right, but that won't stop us | 0:29:36 | 0:29:39 | |
trying to make sense of these strange days we're in, | 0:29:39 | 0:29:43 | |
when, as Karl Marx put it, | 0:29:43 | 0:29:44 | |
"All that was once solid seems to be melting into air." | 0:29:44 | 0:29:50 | |
'Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, for example, describes | 0:30:00 | 0:30:06 | |
'a near future in which America has collapsed into political anarchy. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:11 | |
'The Chinese are running the global economy, | 0:30:11 | 0:30:13 | |
'and everyone is addicted to their apparats, | 0:30:13 | 0:30:17 | |
'seductive mobile devices that plug them directly into the wired world, | 0:30:17 | 0:30:21 | |
'trading 24/7 global connectivity in exchange for their privacy, | 0:30:21 | 0:30:28 | |
'their individuality and, ultimately, their humanity. | 0:30:28 | 0:30:32 | |
'Only hapless hero Lenny struggles to resist, thanks to his books.' | 0:30:32 | 0:30:38 | |
"I celebrated my wall of books. | 0:30:40 | 0:30:42 | |
"I counted the volumes on my 20-foot-long modernist bookshelf | 0:30:42 | 0:30:46 | |
"to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my sub-tenant. | 0:30:46 | 0:30:51 | |
" 'You're my sacred ones,' I told the books. | 0:30:51 | 0:30:54 | |
" 'No-one but me still cares about you, | 0:30:54 | 0:30:56 | |
" 'but I'm going to keep you with me for ever, | 0:30:56 | 0:30:58 | |
" 'and one day, I'll make you important again.' " | 0:30:58 | 0:31:01 | |
'Tracking down this prophet of the book-less future wasn't easy. | 0:31:05 | 0:31:10 | |
'Gary was somewhere in upstate New York, working on a new novel, | 0:31:10 | 0:31:15 | |
'far from the tweeting crowd.' | 0:31:15 | 0:31:17 | |
HE KNOCKS ON DOOR | 0:31:30 | 0:31:32 | |
-Gary, I presume. -I'm Gary, yeah. -And you're for sale. | 0:31:34 | 0:31:38 | |
Well, actually, it's completely false. | 0:31:38 | 0:31:41 | |
There's no honey for sale here. | 0:31:41 | 0:31:43 | |
'100 years ago, | 0:31:46 | 0:31:47 | |
'the novelist EM Forster challenged his readers to only connect. | 0:31:47 | 0:31:53 | |
'The challenge these days, according to Gary, is only disconnect.' | 0:31:53 | 0:31:57 | |
This place, to me, is the ultimate privilege. | 0:31:59 | 0:32:03 | |
Because there is no broadband signal, there's the wood behind me, | 0:32:03 | 0:32:08 | |
you know, that's technology where I am right now. | 0:32:08 | 0:32:11 | |
And I pay for this quite a lot, not in terms of the rent, | 0:32:11 | 0:32:15 | |
but in terms of being disengaged from society. | 0:32:15 | 0:32:17 | |
It almost takes a kind of religious conviction to say no to it. | 0:32:17 | 0:32:21 | |
Because everyone's at the party. | 0:32:21 | 0:32:24 | |
You're sitting in this cabin... | 0:32:24 | 0:32:25 | |
down there somewhere there's a big party, | 0:32:25 | 0:32:28 | |
and everyone's screaming for your attention. | 0:32:28 | 0:32:30 | |
And you're saying, "No, I'm going to stay here with my book." | 0:32:30 | 0:32:33 | |
And I remember as a child, this was me as well. | 0:32:33 | 0:32:36 | |
Everyone was saying, "Come on down, Gary, let's play," | 0:32:36 | 0:32:39 | |
and I'd say, "Hold on, I just want to finish this book." | 0:32:39 | 0:32:42 | |
And that's what it's like now as well, | 0:32:42 | 0:32:44 | |
except the party's everywhere, because the party's in your pocket. | 0:32:44 | 0:32:47 | |
It's pinging and blinging and clinging and singing and dinging. | 0:32:47 | 0:32:52 | |
It just wants you to say, "You know, I'm going to put this down, | 0:32:52 | 0:32:55 | |
"because this letter from my cell phone provider is very interesting. | 0:32:55 | 0:33:00 | |
"Save 49 on a new iPhone GS39 - that's pretty important." | 0:33:00 | 0:33:05 | |
'He's an extreme case, as he'd be the first to admit. | 0:33:07 | 0:33:11 | |
'As a child, growing up Jewish in the dying days of the Soviet Union, | 0:33:11 | 0:33:16 | |
'books were more than just something you picked up to pass the time.' | 0:33:16 | 0:33:20 | |
I grew up, obviously, in a household where books were... | 0:33:20 | 0:33:23 | |
The most important thing that you could do with your life | 0:33:23 | 0:33:26 | |
is just to read a book. My parents had a very clear idea that you start with Chekhov, | 0:33:26 | 0:33:30 | |
then you move on to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky | 0:33:30 | 0:33:32 | |
in your teens, you know, so... | 0:33:32 | 0:33:34 | |
I remember my father going to a parents-teachers conference, | 0:33:36 | 0:33:40 | |
and the teacher said, "We hear your son is reading Tolstoy," | 0:33:40 | 0:33:45 | |
and my father said, "No, he's just on Chekhov!" | 0:33:45 | 0:33:47 | |
And I remember the first books I got as a five-year-old, | 0:33:47 | 0:33:51 | |
four-year-old, five-year-old. | 0:33:51 | 0:33:54 | |
They were... I mean, they were so beautiful. | 0:33:54 | 0:33:58 | |
They were made out of cheap Soviet crap, | 0:33:58 | 0:34:01 | |
but I remember buying masking tape | 0:34:01 | 0:34:04 | |
so I could bind them up when they were falling apart. | 0:34:04 | 0:34:06 | |
So the book itself... you treasured the object? | 0:34:06 | 0:34:09 | |
I took them with me to America, you know, | 0:34:09 | 0:34:12 | |
and continued to bind them up as they continued to fall apart. | 0:34:12 | 0:34:15 | |
Their spines were made out of straw or I don't know what. | 0:34:15 | 0:34:18 | |
But they meant so much. | 0:34:18 | 0:34:19 | |
Books get older, you know - | 0:34:19 | 0:34:22 | |
unlike text files, they yellow and fray. | 0:34:22 | 0:34:24 | |
Books are... They stand against youth, in a sense. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:29 | |
And we live in a culture where youth is the only thing that's important. | 0:34:29 | 0:34:34 | |
So books remind us of mortality, in a sense, | 0:34:34 | 0:34:37 | |
because they also get old and die, and the body also gets old and dies. | 0:34:37 | 0:34:42 | |
So of course I'm scared for books. | 0:34:42 | 0:34:46 | |
"What kind of freaked me out was that I saw Len reading a book. | 0:34:46 | 0:34:50 | |
"No, it didn't smell, he uses Pine-Sol on them. | 0:34:50 | 0:34:53 | |
"And I don't mean scanning a text like we did in Euro classics | 0:34:53 | 0:34:56 | |
"with that Chatterhouse Of Parma, I mean seriously reading. | 0:34:56 | 0:35:00 | |
"He had this ruler out and he was moving it down the page very slowly, | 0:35:00 | 0:35:04 | |
"and just, like, whispering little things to himself, | 0:35:04 | 0:35:07 | |
"like trying to understand every little part of it. | 0:35:07 | 0:35:10 | |
"I was going to Ting my sister, but I was so embarrassed | 0:35:10 | 0:35:13 | |
"I just stood there and watched him read, which lasted like half an hour, | 0:35:13 | 0:35:17 | |
"and finally he put the book down, and I pretended like nothing happened. | 0:35:17 | 0:35:21 | |
"And then I snuck a peek, | 0:35:21 | 0:35:22 | |
"and it was that Russian guy Tolsoy he was reading. | 0:35:22 | 0:35:25 | |
"I guess it figures, cos Lenny's parents are like from Russia. | 0:35:25 | 0:35:28 | |
"But this Tolsoy was a 1,000 page-long book, not a stream, | 0:35:28 | 0:35:34 | |
"and Lenny was like on page 930, like almost finished." | 0:35:34 | 0:35:37 | |
One of the inciting incidents for this novel | 0:35:37 | 0:35:41 | |
was that a television repair man came to my apartment, | 0:35:41 | 0:35:44 | |
he was in his early 20s, and he said, | 0:35:44 | 0:35:47 | |
"Oh, man, why do you have all these books?" | 0:35:47 | 0:35:49 | |
He was disgusted by them. Truly disgusted. | 0:35:49 | 0:35:52 | |
And then he looked at my television, which was maybe 25 inches long, | 0:35:52 | 0:35:55 | |
and he said, "Such a small TV." | 0:35:55 | 0:35:59 | |
I'm not against change, progress, I'm not against technology. | 0:35:59 | 0:36:03 | |
But this happened so quickly that, in terms of maintaining | 0:36:03 | 0:36:07 | |
one's humanity, remembering what it was like to be a human being, | 0:36:07 | 0:36:11 | |
remembering all the analogue physical qualities that make us so, | 0:36:11 | 0:36:14 | |
it just happened too fast for some of us. | 0:36:14 | 0:36:17 | |
What do you have there? | 0:36:19 | 0:36:21 | |
It's a book. | 0:36:23 | 0:36:24 | |
Do you scroll down? | 0:36:24 | 0:36:26 | |
No. I turn the page. It's a book. | 0:36:26 | 0:36:29 | |
-Can you blog with it? -No. | 0:36:29 | 0:36:31 | |
It's a book. | 0:36:31 | 0:36:34 | |
Well, can it tweet? | 0:36:34 | 0:36:35 | |
No. | 0:36:35 | 0:36:37 | |
Can it text? Can it wi-fi? Does it need a password? | 0:36:38 | 0:36:42 | |
No. | 0:36:42 | 0:36:44 | |
-Can it do this? -ALARM BLARES | 0:36:44 | 0:36:46 | |
No. It's a book. | 0:36:46 | 0:36:51 | |
'For those at the forefront of the revolution, | 0:36:55 | 0:36:58 | |
'mourning the passing of a physical book | 0:36:58 | 0:37:01 | |
'seems self-indulgent and sentimental. | 0:37:01 | 0:37:04 | |
'The future is already here. It's time to embrace its possibilities.' | 0:37:04 | 0:37:08 | |
I think the future of the book as we know it | 0:37:11 | 0:37:13 | |
really sort of goes into directions. | 0:37:13 | 0:37:16 | |
There's a... | 0:37:16 | 0:37:17 | |
In terms of the physical object, it's going to be an art object, | 0:37:17 | 0:37:22 | |
it's going to be something that's very expensive and only for the rich. | 0:37:22 | 0:37:25 | |
Most of us are going to get our information | 0:37:25 | 0:37:28 | |
from electronic documents. | 0:37:28 | 0:37:29 | |
I have no sentimentality about the physical book at all. | 0:37:29 | 0:37:32 | |
And I grew up... | 0:37:32 | 0:37:34 | |
My dad was in the business, I grew up in a house loaded with books. | 0:37:34 | 0:37:38 | |
I still live in a house loaded with books, they're great furniture, | 0:37:38 | 0:37:41 | |
I'm delighted to have them around, but I don't find them | 0:37:41 | 0:37:45 | |
particularly useful for narrative text reading compared to the iPhone. | 0:37:45 | 0:37:48 | |
The essence of a book is not that it's ink on paper, | 0:37:48 | 0:37:52 | |
it's that it's a mechanism for transmitting ideas, | 0:37:52 | 0:37:56 | |
and so if you get hung up on the object, you sort of can't go forward. | 0:37:56 | 0:38:01 | |
But if you sort of grasp what books are really for, | 0:38:01 | 0:38:04 | |
then you start to get excited about the different forms they can take. | 0:38:04 | 0:38:07 | |
I don't understand the resistance to it. | 0:38:07 | 0:38:11 | |
I mean, the value of having not just A book | 0:38:11 | 0:38:17 | |
but all the books you want on your person all the time, I mean, how... | 0:38:17 | 0:38:23 | |
what particular added value comes from the printed page | 0:38:23 | 0:38:27 | |
that can substitute for that? I just don't see it. | 0:38:27 | 0:38:31 | |
The first assumption to be overturned is that reading | 0:38:34 | 0:38:37 | |
is a solitary activity, a private liaison | 0:38:37 | 0:38:40 | |
between you and the writer, | 0:38:40 | 0:38:42 | |
conducted between the covers of a book. | 0:38:42 | 0:38:44 | |
Digital makes the private public. | 0:38:44 | 0:38:49 | |
We all grew up thinking that reading was something we did by ourselves. | 0:38:49 | 0:38:53 | |
But reading, really up until the mid-19th century, was something | 0:38:53 | 0:38:59 | |
that people mostly did in groups. | 0:38:59 | 0:39:01 | |
Really, silent reading by yourself is something that really has only | 0:39:01 | 0:39:06 | |
come of age in the last, you know, 150 years or so. | 0:39:06 | 0:39:10 | |
And so it's perfectly natural that we think that's the way to do it, | 0:39:10 | 0:39:15 | |
but there are other ways, and I think that we're now realising that | 0:39:15 | 0:39:19 | |
one of the fantastic things about putting books online, | 0:39:19 | 0:39:23 | |
if you format them properly, | 0:39:23 | 0:39:25 | |
is that readers can start to write notes in the margin. | 0:39:25 | 0:39:29 | |
You and I could read a book together, you in London, me in New York, | 0:39:29 | 0:39:32 | |
and we can engage in a conversation that's quite deep. | 0:39:32 | 0:39:34 | |
Bookmarks, highlights and notes can already be shared online, | 0:39:37 | 0:39:42 | |
and often are, whether you realise it or not. | 0:39:42 | 0:39:47 | |
Every time you highlight a passage on your Kindle, for example, | 0:39:47 | 0:39:52 | |
it's added automatically to Amazon's database of popular highlights. | 0:39:52 | 0:39:56 | |
Though unlike Winston Smith in 1984, you are able to opt out. | 0:39:56 | 0:40:02 | |
And every time you buy a book online, | 0:40:02 | 0:40:07 | |
it adds more details to your digital profile. | 0:40:07 | 0:40:10 | |
You've always been able to tell a lot about someone | 0:40:10 | 0:40:13 | |
by browsing their bookshelves. | 0:40:13 | 0:40:15 | |
Now online retailers can tell a lot about you by browsing yours. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:20 | |
For writers, too, all this interconnectivity means big changes. | 0:40:20 | 0:40:26 | |
So my sense is that, as we go forward, that the value of content | 0:40:26 | 0:40:31 | |
is heading towards zero, and so the question remains, | 0:40:31 | 0:40:35 | |
"So what are people going to pay for?" | 0:40:35 | 0:40:37 | |
And our sense is that people will pay for context and community, | 0:40:37 | 0:40:41 | |
they'll pay to know something about the text that they're reading | 0:40:41 | 0:40:45 | |
or watching, or they will pay for community, | 0:40:45 | 0:40:49 | |
they'll pay for the opportunity | 0:40:49 | 0:40:51 | |
to see what other people are thinking about the same text. | 0:40:51 | 0:40:55 | |
Right now, the way it works is I am a publisher. | 0:40:55 | 0:40:59 | |
I give an advance to an author, they deliver a manuscript to me, | 0:40:59 | 0:41:03 | |
they go away. | 0:41:03 | 0:41:05 | |
Well, suppose we did it a little differently. | 0:41:05 | 0:41:07 | |
Suppose the author starts to learn what musicians have learned, | 0:41:07 | 0:41:11 | |
that they get paid to show up, and that in fact, | 0:41:11 | 0:41:15 | |
they get an advance to some extent, | 0:41:15 | 0:41:18 | |
but then people start subscribing to an author's work, and the author | 0:41:18 | 0:41:23 | |
actually shows up on the pages, the author is part of the process, | 0:41:23 | 0:41:27 | |
and people subscribe to this work as long as it's interesting to them. | 0:41:27 | 0:41:30 | |
Digital visionaries see themselves as the natural successors | 0:41:32 | 0:41:35 | |
of Gutenberg and Caxton, the masters of a disruptive technology. | 0:41:35 | 0:41:41 | |
If you buy McLuhan's sort of thesis, | 0:41:42 | 0:41:44 | |
which was that print changed everything for humanity, | 0:41:44 | 0:41:48 | |
it gave rise to the Enlightenment, to our understanding | 0:41:48 | 0:41:51 | |
of what an individual is, to capitalism, to the nation state, | 0:41:51 | 0:41:54 | |
then none of those things would have happened if we hadn't had print. | 0:41:54 | 0:41:57 | |
Well, arguably, digital technology is even a bigger, | 0:41:57 | 0:42:03 | |
more profound invention than print. | 0:42:03 | 0:42:05 | |
SHIP'S HORN BLARES | 0:42:05 | 0:42:08 | |
'Marshall McLuhan. | 0:42:14 | 0:42:16 | |
'Now, there's a name to conjure with in these digital days.' | 0:42:16 | 0:42:20 | |
More than half a century ago, | 0:42:22 | 0:42:24 | |
McLuhan argued that, just as the invention of print | 0:42:24 | 0:42:27 | |
had changed the way we understand the world and our place in it, | 0:42:27 | 0:42:31 | |
so the new electronic medium of television | 0:42:31 | 0:42:34 | |
would change us in equally profound ways. | 0:42:34 | 0:42:38 | |
According to McLuhan, the book was an extension of the eye, | 0:42:38 | 0:42:42 | |
but television was an extension of our nervous systems. | 0:42:42 | 0:42:47 | |
The distinction, he said, was critical, far more important | 0:42:53 | 0:42:56 | |
than the actual content of the book or the television programme. | 0:42:56 | 0:42:59 | |
The medium, as he put it, is the message. | 0:42:59 | 0:43:03 | |
The TV viewer is being X-rayed at every moment. | 0:43:05 | 0:43:09 | |
The light is coming through the screen at him | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
and penetrating him completely, as in an X-ray. | 0:43:12 | 0:43:15 | |
And people go inside texts, they get involved, | 0:43:15 | 0:43:20 | |
and they go inside themselves. The electric age is one of X-ray. | 0:43:20 | 0:43:23 | |
'According to McLuhan, print had fostered a visual culture, | 0:43:29 | 0:43:32 | |
'by which he meant analytical, objective, | 0:43:32 | 0:43:35 | |
'rational, individualistic. | 0:43:35 | 0:43:38 | |
'Electronic media, he believed, create an oral culture, | 0:43:42 | 0:43:47 | |
'emotional, subjective, irrational and collective.' | 0:43:47 | 0:43:52 | |
When you surround people with electric information, | 0:43:52 | 0:43:54 | |
the overload of information becomes fantastic. | 0:43:54 | 0:43:58 | |
The only way in which people can conduct their lives | 0:44:02 | 0:44:05 | |
is by recognising the structural patterns of that around them, | 0:44:05 | 0:44:08 | |
instead of trying to classify information. | 0:44:08 | 0:44:11 | |
'In the centenary of his birth, | 0:44:13 | 0:44:15 | |
'as Gutenberg man morphs into digital man, | 0:44:15 | 0:44:18 | |
'McLuhan's ideas, often obscure, sometimes contradictory, | 0:44:18 | 0:44:23 | |
'suddenly seem to make more sense. | 0:44:23 | 0:44:26 | |
'I've come to Vancouver to meet someone | 0:44:26 | 0:44:29 | |
'who's made a close study of McLuhan for a new biography. | 0:44:29 | 0:44:34 | |
'The biographer is writer and artist Douglas Copeland, | 0:44:34 | 0:44:37 | |
'author of Generation X and a dozen other novels | 0:44:37 | 0:44:40 | |
'that have successfully trawled the waters of the digital ocean.' | 0:44:40 | 0:44:44 | |
This is someone who knows all about what goes into a book - | 0:44:54 | 0:44:57 | |
and I don't just mean the writing of one. | 0:44:57 | 0:45:02 | |
So, Douglas, you must know something about the physicality of books, | 0:45:02 | 0:45:04 | |
because you have actually eaten a novel, you've chewed it. | 0:45:04 | 0:45:08 | |
-That is your novel. -That is actually Generation X, my first novel. | 0:45:08 | 0:45:13 | |
-What made you chew it? -Er, at the time, it was just sheer instinct. | 0:45:13 | 0:45:18 | |
That was back about ten years ago, and at that point, | 0:45:18 | 0:45:24 | |
I'd been writing novels for a decade. | 0:45:24 | 0:45:27 | |
I'd also been using the internet for a decade | 0:45:27 | 0:45:29 | |
and I honestly felt that my brain was changing. | 0:45:29 | 0:45:33 | |
You take the book, you soak it in water | 0:45:33 | 0:45:36 | |
and then you sit down and you watch television | 0:45:36 | 0:45:39 | |
and while you're watching TV, | 0:45:39 | 0:45:41 | |
you sort of chew the book up, you pulp it | 0:45:41 | 0:45:44 | |
into these little, tiny pellets that end up being about that big per page, | 0:45:44 | 0:45:47 | |
then you let the pellets dry for about four days | 0:45:47 | 0:45:51 | |
and then watch television again and while you watch TV, | 0:45:51 | 0:45:53 | |
you unravel the pellets, | 0:45:53 | 0:45:56 | |
so they're about as chewed-up as you can get them | 0:45:56 | 0:46:00 | |
and still have them be intact, and the ink, apparently - | 0:46:00 | 0:46:05 | |
my doctor told me after the fact - is cyanidic, | 0:46:05 | 0:46:08 | |
it's poison, so it's not a pleasant experience. | 0:46:08 | 0:46:12 | |
Doug's offbeat biography of McLuhan was published last year, | 0:46:14 | 0:46:18 | |
complete with MapQuest directions, Wikipedia entries | 0:46:18 | 0:46:23 | |
and YouTube reviews, making him part of the new media age | 0:46:23 | 0:46:26 | |
to which his insights already seemed to belong. | 0:46:26 | 0:46:30 | |
If the medium is the message, then of course | 0:46:30 | 0:46:33 | |
the medium of the book, the physical book, | 0:46:33 | 0:46:36 | |
is a completely different message | 0:46:36 | 0:46:39 | |
to the medium of the electronic book, isn't it? | 0:46:39 | 0:46:42 | |
Oh, it's a completely different experience. | 0:46:42 | 0:46:43 | |
In terms of the way you take in the book in your brain | 0:46:43 | 0:46:47 | |
and your experience of the book, I had this phone call with my agent, | 0:46:47 | 0:46:52 | |
Eric, he's in New York, and we were both reading the new - | 0:46:52 | 0:46:55 | |
well, then-new - Keith Richards biography, and I said, | 0:46:55 | 0:46:58 | |
"Well, how far along are you?" | 0:46:58 | 0:46:59 | |
and he's like, "11%." | 0:46:59 | 0:47:02 | |
And it was like, "Ooh!" Just one of those chilling moments that defines an era for you. | 0:47:02 | 0:47:08 | |
I was on PAGE 20-something - I felt like a real loser, actually, | 0:47:08 | 0:47:13 | |
for not having a percentage. | 0:47:13 | 0:47:15 | |
For Doug, McLuhan provides a perspective | 0:47:17 | 0:47:20 | |
from which to understand what's happening today. | 0:47:20 | 0:47:24 | |
I'm really finding with McLuhan that everything he wrote | 0:47:24 | 0:47:28 | |
that seemed crazy or opaque or scary or, "What the hell?" | 0:47:28 | 0:47:33 | |
if you look at it now is chillingly prescient. He really got it right. | 0:47:33 | 0:47:39 | |
There's this scientific law, it's called Hebb's law, | 0:47:41 | 0:47:45 | |
which is that neurons that fire together wire together | 0:47:45 | 0:47:49 | |
and that any technology you encounter, whether it's a book | 0:47:49 | 0:47:52 | |
or a screen or, you know, hopscotch, if you do it a lot, | 0:47:52 | 0:47:58 | |
your neurons are going to fire in a certain way | 0:47:58 | 0:48:01 | |
and then your brain says, "Oh, let's build a strong connection there." | 0:48:01 | 0:48:05 | |
And when he was saying that the medium is the message, | 0:48:05 | 0:48:08 | |
what he was anticipating, whether poetically or unwittingly, | 0:48:08 | 0:48:12 | |
is what we're now learning through neuroscience, | 0:48:12 | 0:48:17 | |
which is that a medium does literally make you the message. | 0:48:17 | 0:48:22 | |
One McLuhan quote - "First we shape our tools | 0:48:22 | 0:48:25 | |
"and then our tools shape us" - | 0:48:25 | 0:48:27 | |
it feels very, very true and very prescient | 0:48:27 | 0:48:30 | |
about this world we're all inhabiting now, doesn't it? | 0:48:30 | 0:48:34 | |
-The world of technology. -Oh, I think so. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:36 | |
I think, to be honest, the human attention span | 0:48:36 | 0:48:39 | |
is about the length of one Beatles song, | 0:48:39 | 0:48:41 | |
and after doing two-and-a-half minutes of anything, | 0:48:41 | 0:48:45 | |
your brain naturally wants to go do that or do something | 0:48:45 | 0:48:48 | |
or if you're online, check for e-mail | 0:48:48 | 0:48:51 | |
or all the million things we do online, and in a world of text only, | 0:48:51 | 0:48:56 | |
in a world only with the book, you may have that instinct but you don't act on it. | 0:48:56 | 0:49:00 | |
I think that, you know, life has sort of become a series of blips | 0:49:00 | 0:49:05 | |
and beeps and sequentialised tasks - | 0:49:05 | 0:49:08 | |
and I'm not going to put judgment about that, | 0:49:08 | 0:49:10 | |
because it's what's happening, you can't change it one way or the other. | 0:49:10 | 0:49:13 | |
Because of this reliance on technology, | 0:49:13 | 0:49:17 | |
this increasing reliance on these machines, is the next step just, | 0:49:17 | 0:49:22 | |
you know, stick the chip, you know, in your wrist, | 0:49:22 | 0:49:25 | |
take it out of the computer | 0:49:25 | 0:49:27 | |
and you won't need to bother any more sitting in front of the computer, | 0:49:27 | 0:49:29 | |
you can have it with you all the time? | 0:49:29 | 0:49:31 | |
McLuhan seemed to predict that that was what would happen, | 0:49:31 | 0:49:35 | |
that our brain will be displaced. | 0:49:35 | 0:49:38 | |
Technically, we've actually already done that, | 0:49:38 | 0:49:41 | |
we've already inserted the chip. | 0:49:41 | 0:49:43 | |
Basically, all the memories that you have occur on the screen | 0:49:43 | 0:49:48 | |
and somewhere else in the database inside the cloud, | 0:49:48 | 0:49:51 | |
so it's an artificial memory, but as you have no memories of your own, | 0:49:51 | 0:49:55 | |
you effectively become artificial intelligence, | 0:49:55 | 0:49:58 | |
and we've always been wondering, | 0:49:58 | 0:49:59 | |
"When's AI going to really, really happen?" | 0:49:59 | 0:50:02 | |
And I do think we have to think, | 0:50:02 | 0:50:03 | |
it's actually already here, it's us, | 0:50:03 | 0:50:05 | |
we're the artificial intelligence | 0:50:05 | 0:50:07 | |
and we have become the medium and the message. | 0:50:07 | 0:50:09 | |
It's not just the book that's under assault, | 0:50:09 | 0:50:13 | |
I think that the seemingly doomed nature of the printed book on paper, | 0:50:13 | 0:50:18 | |
it's the canary in the coal mine. | 0:50:18 | 0:50:20 | |
I think there's something else being lost as well. | 0:50:20 | 0:50:23 | |
MUSIC: "Are 'Friends' Electric?" by Gary Numan | 0:50:38 | 0:50:41 | |
Marshall McLuhan was a bit of a cultural pessimist. | 0:50:49 | 0:50:53 | |
He thought television was the enemy | 0:50:53 | 0:50:55 | |
back when there were only a handful of channels | 0:50:55 | 0:50:58 | |
transmitting in black and white. | 0:50:58 | 0:51:01 | |
Maybe the digital champions are right - | 0:51:01 | 0:51:03 | |
we project anxieties about the future | 0:51:03 | 0:51:06 | |
onto whatever the latest technology happens to be. | 0:51:06 | 0:51:09 | |
Televisions, microwave ovens, mobile phones and now e-books. | 0:51:09 | 0:51:14 | |
A stone age McLuhan would probably have bitched about the invention of the wheel. | 0:51:14 | 0:51:20 | |
I've come to San Francisco for an injection of West Coast optimism. | 0:51:32 | 0:51:36 | |
I'm here to meet an entrepreneur and inventor who's made fortunes | 0:51:36 | 0:51:41 | |
several times over from the internet boom and the digital revolution. | 0:51:41 | 0:51:46 | |
This is someone who firmly believes that friends ARE electric. | 0:51:46 | 0:51:50 | |
Brewster Kahle is the founder and self-styled "digital librarian" | 0:51:56 | 0:52:01 | |
of the Internet Archive, | 0:52:01 | 0:52:03 | |
a not-for-profit organisation that's embarked on an ambitious programme | 0:52:03 | 0:52:07 | |
to scan and digitise every book in the world | 0:52:07 | 0:52:11 | |
and to make them available on the internet to all comers for free - | 0:52:11 | 0:52:15 | |
subject, of course, to the objections of copyright holders. | 0:52:15 | 0:52:19 | |
But the thing that sets this apart from similar projects, | 0:52:19 | 0:52:24 | |
like Google's, for example, is that the Internet Archive doesn't just turn books into data - | 0:52:24 | 0:52:30 | |
it also preserves them in their physical form. | 0:52:30 | 0:52:34 | |
The Archive's stated aim is to get a copy of every book ever published, | 0:52:34 | 0:52:40 | |
an ink-on-paper cede-back, | 0:52:40 | 0:52:43 | |
just in case. | 0:52:43 | 0:52:44 | |
'So what do you get for the librarian who wants everything? | 0:52:47 | 0:52:51 | |
'Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 could be a good choice, | 0:52:54 | 0:52:58 | |
'a novel about a society in which books are banned | 0:52:58 | 0:53:00 | |
'and burned by the authorities while rebels in the underground | 0:53:00 | 0:53:05 | |
'learn them off by heart to preserve them. | 0:53:05 | 0:53:08 | |
'Yes, that sounds about right.' | 0:53:08 | 0:53:11 | |
Now, people can understand the kind of digital aspect to this, | 0:53:13 | 0:53:16 | |
this digital...the Internet Archive, | 0:53:16 | 0:53:18 | |
but the fact is you're as passionate about physical books | 0:53:18 | 0:53:21 | |
as you are about digital books, so every digital version you have, you have the physical book. | 0:53:21 | 0:53:25 | |
We wanted to make sure that that copy was not lost, | 0:53:25 | 0:53:30 | |
because in some sense, it's like the specimen of a butterfly | 0:53:30 | 0:53:34 | |
or an ant that defines a species, | 0:53:34 | 0:53:36 | |
this might be the book that defines the digital version | 0:53:36 | 0:53:40 | |
that lives on for ever, | 0:53:40 | 0:53:42 | |
so the idea is to preserve those physical books, | 0:53:42 | 0:53:45 | |
so we've now figured out a mechanism, a technology, | 0:53:45 | 0:53:50 | |
for basically storing these in temperature and humidity controls | 0:53:50 | 0:53:53 | |
-very inexpensively for the long term. -And you love, obviously, looking at your library, | 0:53:53 | 0:53:59 | |
you love the way that books look, the way they feel and in a way, | 0:53:59 | 0:54:03 | |
what you've got done and how you've gone about it is to retain | 0:54:03 | 0:54:06 | |
that sense of the particularity of each book that you're reading | 0:54:06 | 0:54:10 | |
and its moment in time. | 0:54:10 | 0:54:12 | |
Oh, yes, it's for the love of books. | 0:54:12 | 0:54:14 | |
I mean, what treasures they are. | 0:54:14 | 0:54:18 | |
So many people have spent so many years not just writing the words | 0:54:18 | 0:54:23 | |
but also making the physical artefact, and about how it's laid out, | 0:54:23 | 0:54:26 | |
and so if we're going to go and try and offer these books | 0:54:26 | 0:54:30 | |
with the same gusto that we grew up with | 0:54:30 | 0:54:32 | |
to the next generation, let's do it as well as possible. | 0:54:32 | 0:54:36 | |
We may go and use them in new and different ways and take them apart | 0:54:36 | 0:54:39 | |
and fly them into virtual-reality worlds - | 0:54:39 | 0:54:43 | |
great, but let's not lose | 0:54:43 | 0:54:45 | |
the treasures that are the physical books | 0:54:45 | 0:54:48 | |
that our society has grown on for a few centuries. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:52 | |
We get ten million downloads a month of these old books. Ten million! | 0:54:52 | 0:54:58 | |
That's pretty good! | 0:54:58 | 0:54:59 | |
And the idea of a worldwide population diving into materials | 0:54:59 | 0:55:06 | |
that are decades, centuries old, I think is quite encouraging. | 0:55:06 | 0:55:09 | |
I've brought you a gift, Brewster, for the library. | 0:55:09 | 0:55:14 | |
This is Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. | 0:55:14 | 0:55:17 | |
I've chosen it rather selectively, | 0:55:17 | 0:55:21 | |
because this is a rather important book for your library, I think. | 0:55:21 | 0:55:24 | |
Oh, I think this is a fantastic book, of course, but you know, | 0:55:24 | 0:55:28 | |
I think he was somewhat wrong. | 0:55:28 | 0:55:31 | |
The idea that there's people going out and burning books, | 0:55:31 | 0:55:35 | |
actually, I'm not sure is the real problem. | 0:55:35 | 0:55:37 | |
It's that it's getting flooded, | 0:55:37 | 0:55:39 | |
that there's just so much information, | 0:55:39 | 0:55:41 | |
so surfacing great books like this is the right thing to do, | 0:55:41 | 0:55:45 | |
but I think this does add a good compendium at the end, | 0:55:45 | 0:55:49 | |
which is, people become books. | 0:55:49 | 0:55:51 | |
They incorporate, they read a book so much that they become the book | 0:55:51 | 0:55:55 | |
and they can recite the book, so it asks us, "Which book are we?" | 0:55:55 | 0:56:00 | |
And I think everyone that's read one of these can say, | 0:56:00 | 0:56:03 | |
"OK, if I were walking around in the woods, what book would I be?" | 0:56:03 | 0:56:07 | |
And I think I would be either Euclid's Elements, | 0:56:07 | 0:56:11 | |
that was written at the Library of Alexandria, | 0:56:11 | 0:56:14 | |
or Ben Franklin's autobiography. | 0:56:14 | 0:56:15 | |
-What book would you be? -That's a very interesting one. | 0:56:15 | 0:56:18 | |
Only because it was an important book to me, | 0:56:18 | 0:56:21 | |
I would be Candide by Voltaire, you know that book? | 0:56:21 | 0:56:24 | |
Ah, good one! Yes. That's not just a book, it's a style of life. | 0:56:24 | 0:56:28 | |
It's terrific. | 0:56:28 | 0:56:30 | |
'To end the tour, Brewster took me to the Archive's inner sanctum.' | 0:56:34 | 0:56:38 | |
This is pretty extraordinary. Explain this! | 0:56:38 | 0:56:41 | |
-Welcome to the Internet Archive. -Who are they? | 0:56:41 | 0:56:45 | |
These are terracotta archivists. These are us. | 0:56:45 | 0:56:48 | |
These are the people that are building the archive. | 0:56:48 | 0:56:51 | |
'Originally a Christian Scientist temple, | 0:56:52 | 0:56:55 | |
'the building remains a temple of a sort. | 0:56:55 | 0:56:59 | |
'Anyone who works here for five years is immortalised in clay, | 0:56:59 | 0:57:04 | |
'just like the warriors and foot soldiers of ancient China.' | 0:57:04 | 0:57:08 | |
We see ourselves as a step in a long tradition. | 0:57:08 | 0:57:12 | |
Yes, people think, "Oh, the digital world, everything's new again, | 0:57:12 | 0:57:16 | |
"we can reinvent everything, we don't have to read history." | 0:57:16 | 0:57:19 | |
Um, we don't think that's true in the least. | 0:57:19 | 0:57:22 | |
-So let me show you something else. -Yeah. | 0:57:22 | 0:57:24 | |
There's the actual servers, the stacks, | 0:57:24 | 0:57:28 | |
the materials that actually are serving the public, | 0:57:28 | 0:57:32 | |
are here in this space as well. | 0:57:32 | 0:57:36 | |
These are the actual computer systems that store books, music and video. | 0:57:36 | 0:57:42 | |
Every light that's blinking | 0:57:42 | 0:57:44 | |
is either somebody uploading or downloading something. | 0:57:44 | 0:57:48 | |
Those are people all over the world accessing millions of books. | 0:57:48 | 0:57:54 | |
The idea that every one of those lights represents somebody caring, | 0:57:54 | 0:57:58 | |
somebody using, somebody leveraging the library | 0:57:58 | 0:58:02 | |
sort of in some sense brings a physicality to a very digital world. | 0:58:02 | 0:58:09 | |
There are now millions of books up there, somewhere in the cloud, | 0:58:14 | 0:58:18 | |
that mist of invisible data that cloaks our world. | 0:58:18 | 0:58:22 | |
If things continue the way they are going, your book shelf, | 0:58:22 | 0:58:25 | |
your book shop and your library will be up there too before long, | 0:58:25 | 0:58:30 | |
along with your music, your photographs, your letters, | 0:58:30 | 0:58:33 | |
your diaries, your newspaper, your shopping lists, your memories, | 0:58:33 | 0:58:38 | |
your dreams and your secrets, | 0:58:38 | 0:58:40 | |
all the things that have made you who you are. | 0:58:40 | 0:58:45 | |
But meantime, back on terra firma, | 0:58:50 | 0:58:53 | |
real books and virtual books exist side by side. | 0:58:53 | 0:58:57 | |
This is, for now at least, the best of all possible worlds. | 0:58:59 | 0:59:04 | |
As it says in Candide, "You can browse the shelves in the old way | 0:59:04 | 0:59:09 | |
"or you can plug into the cloud and bring a digital book down to Earth." | 0:59:09 | 0:59:13 | |
-Good morning. -Good morning. -I'd like to buy a copy of Robinson Crusoe. | 0:59:13 | 0:59:18 | |
OK. Did you have a particular version in mind? | 0:59:18 | 0:59:21 | |
-Can you show me what you've got? -Yeah. | 0:59:21 | 0:59:23 | |
So through this machine, we have kind of newer versions, | 0:59:24 | 0:59:27 | |
with new covers and nice typeface. | 0:59:27 | 0:59:31 | |
We also have facsimiles of the old originals | 0:59:31 | 0:59:33 | |
that have been scanned from libraries. | 0:59:33 | 0:59:36 | |
There's versions from the late 1800s, early 1900s, | 0:59:36 | 0:59:40 | |
there's a Japanese version, | 0:59:40 | 0:59:41 | |
there's all sorts of things will show up on this database. | 0:59:41 | 0:59:44 | |
You can even find copies | 0:59:46 | 0:59:48 | |
with the stamps, stains and battle scars of real books, | 0:59:48 | 0:59:51 | |
and once you've made your choice, you can print a physical copy | 0:59:51 | 0:59:55 | |
of that book in the time it takes to make an espresso. | 0:59:55 | 0:59:59 | |
MUSIC: "Brazil" | 0:59:59 | 1:00:03 | |
It looks like a book. | 1:00:19 | 1:00:21 | |
It feels like a book. | 1:00:22 | 1:00:24 | |
It even smells like a book. | 1:00:27 | 1:00:29 | |
It IS a book, and it took five minutes. | 1:00:30 | 1:00:32 | |
-There you go, sir. -Thank you very much. | 1:00:34 | 1:00:37 | |
We can't really blame technology | 1:00:40 | 1:00:42 | |
for ending our long relationship with books. | 1:00:42 | 1:00:45 | |
All technology has done is to offer us a choice - | 1:00:45 | 1:00:49 | |
to stay on our desert island, | 1:00:49 | 1:00:52 | |
secure and separate with the books we love, | 1:00:52 | 1:00:55 | |
or to strike out into the unknown | 1:00:55 | 1:00:58 | |
and navigate the digital ocean. | 1:00:58 | 1:01:01 | |
And who's to say what strange and surprising adventures | 1:01:02 | 1:01:06 | |
await us there? | 1:01:06 | 1:01:08 | |
MUSIC: "Brazil" | 1:01:10 | 1:01:13 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 1:01:50 | 1:01:53 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 1:01:53 | 1:01:55 |