By Steven Johnson
Published: December 27 2010 22:09 | Last updated: December 27 2010 22:09
In 1467, Peter Schöffer and Johann Fust published a translation of St Augustine’s The Art Of Preaching. They were old colleagues of Johannes Gutenberg, the pioneer of modern printing. But their true claim to fame is that they were the first commercially successful printers, and this success stemmed in part from their relentless innovation with the world’s newest communications technology: the book.
One such innovation appeared in the 1467 edition, which was the first printed book to include an alphabetical index. Schöffer and Fust were not only competing by releasing new titles. They were changing what it meant to use and read a book.
Some of the first book advertisements – and indeed some of the first modern adverts anywhere – talked up their “better arranged indexes” as a selling point. The publishers of the The Art of Preaching claimed that their indexes, along with other new cross-referencing features, were “alone worth the whole price, because they make it much easier to use”.
The phrase sounds like it could be from an advert for some 21st-century gadget: “Our books aren’t just informative. They’re also user-friendly!” The echo of today’s marketing language is no accident. Thanks to a series of interrelated technologies – but especially the web, the Kindle and the iPad – we are living through a radical reinvention of the tools and techniques of reading.
One of the most thrilling digital developments of 2010 was the arms race between e-book readers. The Kindle grew amazingly small and cheap; Barnes & Noble’s Nook was rolled out on Google’s Android mobile operating system; the iBooks and Kindle apps for the iPad added dozens of features after they were released in April; just a few weeks ago, Google launched a multiplatform e-book reader that allows you to browse and buy the millions of books the company has scanned in the past few years.
Of all these innovations, though, Apple’s iPad itself stands out as the most significant breakthrough, not just because it may be the fastest-selling new technology product in history but also because it does more than any device before to consolidate book reading and web browsing. I remember sitting down with the iPad when it arrived this spring, and thinking that for the past 15 years we had been surfing the web on the wrong kind of machine. Pointing and clicking on a screen seemed suddenly unnatural when you could sit back on the couch and hold the web in your hands.
The difference between our time and Gutenberg’s is, of course, the rate of change. It took almost half a century for the alphabetical index to become a standard; Arabic page numbers were not adopted until the 1500s. There were feature wars in the new platform of the book, but salvos were fired only every 20 years.
It may have taken a long time, but when all those features coalesced into the system of citation, indices, page numbers, footnotes, bibliographies and cross-references that we now take for granted, they helped usher in the scientific revolutions of the modern age. Entire ways of interacting with information became possible because we had agreed on how to describe where the information lived and how to point people towards it.
This is a story with a direct connection to our current situation. This year is the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web specification. The defining property of that standard was this: it established a way to describe where information lives and how to point people to it. The extraordinary run of innovation seen on the web starts with the breakthrough of web addresses and links.
For two decades, this new universe of linkable data expanded faster than any other form of information. But this year, for the first time in my adult life, unlinkable information began growing at a meaningful clip. This is part of a wider problem in the age of the iPad, captured in a much-discussed article this summer by Chris Anderson, Wired magazine editor-in-chief, entitled simply: “The web is dead”. The piece focused on the rise of “walled gardens” such as Facebook or apps created for the iPhone or Android. To give only the latest example, Rupert Murdoch is allegedly planning an app-only daily newspaper.
Of course, the overwhelming majority of apps do not contain much information that would benefit from being linked to other things on the internet. If we do not figure out a way to link directly to one level of the Angry Birds game, we will probably survive as a culture. But the danger lies in a region of the digital information landscape barely mentioned by Mr Anderson: books. Where links abound, a rich ecosystem of commentary, archiving, social sharing and scholarship usually develops because links make it far easier to build on and connect ideas from around the web. But right now, books exist outside this universe. There is no standardised way to link to a page of a digital book.
Books contain the most carefully crafted and edited text that we have – truly the richest source of information in the world – and yet all that information remains unlinkable. Google works as well as it does because people find interesting information on the web and link to it; Google then prioritises pages that attract a disproportionate number of inbound links. But if you find a fascinating passage in a novel or a book of history, there is no standardised way to link to it, which means that the rest of the web cannot benefit from your discovery.
Fortunately, a solution to this problem exists, one that merely involves a commitment to use technology that already exists. Call it the mirror web. If you create digital information in any form, make a parallel version of that information that lives on the web. A magazine publisher creating an iPad app should ensure that each article has clear links to a mirror version of each article on the web. Then, if anyone wants to cite, tweet, blog or e-mail a reference to that article, it is always one tap away. The web version can be behind a pay wall or some other kind of barrier if the publisher chooses; what matters is that there is an address you can point to.
This is already happening in an informal way – many apps for news and magazines contain links to their equivalent web pages – but this technique needs to become a new convention. When publishers create apps without web mirroring, we should be quick to condemn them, because stripping valuable information of links limits the range of its potential influence. Writing articles in unlinkable environments in 2010 is like publishing a scholarly book in 1800 and refusing to allow it to appear in any library or bibliography anywhere in the world.
The most radical premise behind this idea of web mirroring, however, is that it should apply to digital books as well. In future, every page of every book should have a shadow version of itself that lives on the web. Imagine the possibilities for readers in this environment: you are halfway through Middlemarch on your iPad and you stumble across a link to Raymond Williams’ magisterial work of literary criticism, The Country and the City, which in turn connects you to an online reading group of George Eliot fans, where someone points you to a passage in Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radical that inspires you to read the whole book from the start.
Today there is a real danger that this art of linking to things – an art that dates back to Schöffer and Fust and beyond – will grow less and less relevant in an unconnected world of apps and e-books. But there is also an opportunity here. We could choose to become better at making connections, bringing together in a new way the two most transformative textual platforms of the modern age: the book and the web.
The writer is the author, most recently, of ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’, and co-creator of Findings.com. This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco
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