Your Book is Just Words? Sorry, Chum, We're Rejecting It

Some ten years ago, in an article entitled Author? What's an Author? I asked, "How can you possibly call yourself an author if you can't process digitized full-motion video signals on your computer, accelerate your image-compression manager to thirty frames per second, and enhance your video with full stereo sound?"

The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works. As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century's definition of "author" will be as far from today's definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.

That day has come.

I didn't have a word for the medium I foresaw, but last spring someone coined it "vook", a hybrid (video + book = "vook") blending traditional books with audio, video and other digital media, a little like the centaur pictured here. The term is so new that if you google it you'll be asked "Do you mean book?".

Today's news brings tidings that Simon & Schuster "is working with a multimedia partner to release four 'vooks,' which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read — and viewed — online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch." Mokoto Rich, who covers the book scene (soon to be "vook scene"?) for the New York Times, describes it in Curling Up With Hybrid Books, Videos Included, which the newspaper's editors felt deserved front page status - front page, that is, of the entire newspaper. Rich quotes Judith Curr, publisher of S&S imprint Atria Books and a prime mover behind S&S's vook releases: “You can’t just be linear anymore with your text.”

For all who toil in the two dimensions of the printed word, that's a pretty depressing statement. The paradigm shift that seemed like a science fictioneer's fantasy not long ago is now upon us and what was a simple world of Me Author/You Publisher has become a white water rapids of identities in crisis, including those of literary agents. Agents get agita when they're not sure who's the seller and who's the buyer, and digital technology is dissolving the barrier between the two like battery acid.

Is the game over? Is it Death of the Book Time?

In my opinion? Not even close.

Let's keep a few things in perspective. The most important is the distinction between reading and watching. Intoxicated though publishers may be with this new and admittedly exciting hybrid world, in time they will come around to the immutable truth that books - plain old linear text printed on bound sheets of white paper - offer an immersive experience for which there is no substitute. When an amazon.com reviewer of a vook proclaims "“It really makes a story more real if you know what the characters look like,” we rise up in wrathful indignation. For nothing - nothing whatsoever - makes a story more real than what we imagine the characters to look like. Viewing a video of a book, or about a book, or with a book, may be entertaining. But it is not reading. It is simply, as I have written elsewhere, Watching Books.

Any reader who has been lost in a book would not dream of breaking the spell by clicking, searching, supplementing, accessing, googling, listening or viewing. Hell, any reader who has been lost in a book does not even want to break the spell by breathing. Maybe we'll be compelled to do some surfing and clicking when we finish reading, but just as likely we simply want to digest what we've read, or think about it, or reread it, or maybe talk to someone about it.

Nothing can or will take the place of books, and nothing ever will. Vooks are cool but they do not communicate ideas, transport us to magical worlds or immerse us in wonder. Watch a vook, play with it, interact with it. When you're finished, shut your computer down and settle in with a good book.

Richard Curtis