The

Cult Future of Books, Presented to the Friends of the Library, University of Colorado, October, 2010 Johanna Drucker Im walking down the street in Westwood, on my way to a movie, and I get a call on my cellphone. Its a character from the film Im about to see, letting me know she is in trouble, asking for my help. Can I please just log on to the net, track a piece of information for her, look into the surveillance camera record that the police have taken into custody though the file from that machine will free her of charges and she has to have the evidence in hand or -- ! The call breaks off, and I am left with the dilemma of intervening or not, and by the time I get to the cinema the consequences of my decision will have determined the course of a narrative that will unfold in real time as the other viewers engage, as I will, in a multi-player fiction that is scripted to change as we enter into its actions. The story I was reading this morning on my screen has morphed into vivid graphics, and the news feed that told me of a natural disaster is being folded into the background scenes as a journalist character in the film tale is sent to pursue an account of the catastrophe that is occurring. Real events, fictional characters, actual reportage, and the intervention of role playing participants are all integrated across the platforms of phone, screens, clouds, and displays. The line between fiction and mediated reality is blurry, at best, and the fantasy life of my time has taken over the full spectrum of media devices that coordinate among each other to produce a web of narrative lines constantly unfolding in associations and morphed remixes I am consuming and producing in an endless feedback loop. Ever since the character Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, stood in front of a mesh of wireframe data sites in Minority Report, and manipulated information rapidly with his hands. His motions were swift, his mind working in overdrive to process the trails of associations that appear in front of him as a set of abstractions. Echoes of The Glass Bead Game are realized in this schematic vision, where a logic of relations is expressed as lines and nodes of light, seemingly liberated from the dross of mere matter. Entranced by the elegant patterns of illuminated tracery we hardly pause to consider the elaborate apparatus that exists to produce these effects circuits, hardware, infrastructure, the messy tangles of wires and copper coils, silicon and enamel, lasers and other heavily engineered equipment. The illusion of information as pure light has a fantasmatic allure, as if this were the ultimate condition to which human expression might aspire, a state of sublime illumination that hovers in the ether, tangible, but disembodied. In such a future, books with their boards, cloth, and paper, have the rough-hewn feel of rustic objects, something crude and clunky belonging to a race of vanished tribes whose culture relied upon hewing and carving, sewing and binding, leather thongs and animal skins, vegetable matter and oily inks. The information spaces of Minority Report distance us from our present by casting it into an image of a past from which we seek only to evolve, as if in tacit acknowledgement of the superiority of a less material world. The mythologies in this opening gambit are many. Electronic instruments are no less material in their operation and embodiment than print objects, and rely, as I

have just suggested, on an elaborate infrastructure. But in the gap between fantasy and reality the book has dropped out of sight, become an obsolete object and so we have to wonder if the collective mind has already let go of the familiar codex and decided to relegate it to the realm of ritual, as antiquated and venerated as a wine chalice or goblet used for the richness of associations in a ceremonial context. Has the book already become a cult object? A symbolic remnant of a once functional and essential thing? If it has, then what is the future of reading? And of shared and consensual understanding of experience? Do these, too, vanish as discarded features of a culture whose communal touchstones triggered memory and insight through common references? Shall we switch to a condition of fully mediated and always linked in hyper-comunication in which we are no longer able to grasp figures of speech or knowledge but rather register our significance according to the rate of transmissions pulsing through our devices as our selves? Can the book of the future be saved from cult status as a fetishized icon? Or shall we resign ourselves to its disappearance as anything but a mere convenience, a form of trashy print on demand output to be used and discarded, or recycled, and reused. What, beyond nostalgia, prompts a commitment to books in the futre? The image of book futures is inextricably bound to the marketing of devices in our times. E-books and readers compete for a share of attention and consumer interest. Kindles and iPads and other platforms for reading appear daily, with alluring ads of young bodies curled around their slim light forms with an intimacy that speaks volumes. The machines are as capable of connection as a book, say the iPad ads, their view of a lap in a casual pose directing our view to the screen as if we are sharing this intimate experience with the person holding the device. Little matters like obsolescence, the shelf-life and battery-life of these objects, their destiny to be useless within a few years, glossed over by the sleek design with its oh so contemporary lines. The pretty machines obscure other aspects of their identity, their stealth relationship to networks, to the mother ship that monitors downloads and use to promote related objects and suck information back from the transactions of users into the mega-cloud of networked consumer culture. Details, mere details, the convenience of portability, flexibility, increasingly able to contain marks of reading, search trails and tags, the whole thought mesh of our processing trumps any paranoia or concern about mere privacy or property, especially for a younger generation living their lives in networked display of their personal lives. Their sense of self and other is without distinctions, they are made in the web of constant exchange, texts, tweets, messaging, talk, unbounded and nodal rather than autonomous and contained. So the information spaces they are comfortable inhabiting have the same quality, unbounded and rhizomatic. The notion of a defined space delimited and shaped is itself becoming obsolete. Not just books as objects but book-ness as a trope of composition is rapidly being superceded by alternative modes of production for information, entertainment, play, and professional life. Knowledge, distraction, pleasure, advancement these are all areas of our lives in which books play a role. In addition to considering the science fiction futures promised by the change of platform, the new raft of devices and their special effects, we might well consider the social fictions of the future. The activities that depend on

books will change, even as our sense of self, family, community, relationships, democracy, faith, news, and every other category of social life are changing, have changed. Stories, narratives, texts and telling, the shape of form and the craft of art will remain, expressed in pages and bound books sometimes and at others created in the very warp and woof of networked tissues of exchange. Ill come back to these points in a moment, but first, we might reflect on the transformations in the physical objects, delivery devices that are emulating extending or replacing the book. The language of revolutionary innovation that accompanies this is not unlike that which has been used to talk about the coming of the book itself, in particular, with the invention of print in the 15th century. Books, after all, were once novel objects. The codex we take for granted only developed in the early centuries of the common era, and was initially used for and thus associated with Christian texts. The differentiation from classical authors was marked by a distinction between scroll and bound codex, though this divide did not last long and was neither legislated nor policed. As a technology, the codex afforded many advantages, particularly the support of discontinuous reading. As the medieval book industry advanced from monastic to scholarly practices, and travelling clerics wished to organized their performance of a service by moving through sections of liturgy appropriate to the time of year or circumstance, the paratextual apparatus, as we call it, began to emerge from the blocks of undifferentiated text. Word spacing, section headings, punctuation, marginalia, headers, footers, notes and commentary, indices, canon tables, and then tables of contents all have their history in the late middle ages through the early Renaissance. The codex book became an organized information space as a result of new demands put on it by users determined to find their place in a mass of text and be able to cross reference their reading of one passage with another. The work of early Christian textual scholars, the great editing accomplishments of Origin, Eusebius, Jerome, could only be accomplished with the creation of new scholarly forms. Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams trace this process in their book, showing that the side by side comparison of textual witnesses, versions of sacred texts, was essential for critical editing and the establishment of an authoritative biblical scripture. We forget all this history, if we ever knew it, finding our way through the common book as if it were a habit born of nature rather than a skill built through the exigencies of culture. Complex books, books of elaborate commentary that evidenced a community engaged in study, controversy, contentious debate and conversation exist long before Gutenberg was able to imagine a variably sized mold for the production of those tiny square cast bits of metal that are the basis of letterpress printing. Sacred texts, legal texts, equally important for the stakeholders of outcomes of interpretation, are heavily glossed in the middle ages. The organization of these pages became the basis of print designs, though some early printers, like the entrepreneurial Aldus, decided to drop the glossed on the Greek and Latin authors whose work he was bringing back into being in order to lighten the load that would have to be carried by the small format pages of the early pocket books he produced in such abundance. The book format we are so keen (or some of us) to leave behind in the name of a new age of information and interactive interface has a history whose particulars

reveal communities invested in the conventions we take so much for granted. When printed books came into being, they appeared in a late medieval world in which book publishing was a well-established part of university towns and secular life, where collectors and patrons read for pleasure as well as piety, and where the investment in cultural legacy was only slightly partisan by contrast to what it would become. The printed book brought new complications to the social life of texts, and the impulse to control content became a battle over elements of form in particular in the religious struggles of the 16th century. If the coming of print culture to use Elizabeth Eisensteins much debated phrase brought with it a relative stability of texts, cost benefits, and a new industry of specialized skilled craftspeople it also promoted the creation of extensive virtual communities forged by passionate beliefs in the realms of science, politics, and religious belief. We will come back to the business of stability and fluidity of texts, but for the moment, let me address the ways innovations in print do and do not merit the hyperbolic language they have sometimes generated. Technological innovations do not determine social change, but are born of it and participate opportunistically in existing trends. Printed books did not immediately change patterns of use. They made something affordable and available that had been relatively scarce and expensive. Overproduction soon followed the invention of printing, and the late 15th century is littered with the unwanted volumes of a great remainder sale. Medieval romances, the works of Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Boccacio, Erasmus and other great humanistic writers of the late middle ages, had already put literary work into the vernacular tongue. But the translation of the bible, new testament and old, into languages easily read and commonly spoken, turned books and their pages into objects and scenes of contestation. When William Tyndale, the first printer to translate the Bible into English, put the text into print, his flight to foreign lands was not enough to protect him from furious Catholics bent on punishing him for heresy. Strangled, burnt at the stake, Tyndale became a martyr to his faith and to book culture, to the belief in the power of a text to speak itself directly to believers without intervention from the mediating offices and officers of the Church. The role of marginalia and glosses in guiding a reading became an object of intense controversy. The book was a site of debate, an embodiment of struggles expressed on its pages. The stakes were high life and death, the threat of the Inquisition, the torments meted out to heretics in this life whatever they met if there was a life hereafter. Books were not merely passive expressions of belief, not only texts to be read within communities or used for observation of religious service, they are active instruments in a political battle for control of souls and resources, allegiances and alignments of power and money and faith. The wrong version of a text or the unsanctioned use of a commentary could land a printer in prison, a reader in chains or worse. The notion that a text, on a page, might speak directly to the eye and mind, without the aid of expert interpretation, was the opening move in a political gambit supported by the specific format of a books presentation of a text. This is a complex and mind-boggling notion. But we can look to other traditions of textual transmission for similarly ritualized approaches. In Jewish tradition the Torah must be copied precisely, with passage beginning in the place in each column of a scroll from one copy to the next. Any error in the copying renders

the work invalid, and condemns the parchment to the Geniza, a storage cellar for corrupted copies. The Torah, however, is always meant to be read within a community of interpretation. The text serves to provoke discussion and reflection, to be shared and refracted through multiple voices and learned consideration. The glosses on printed Talmudic texts, such as the highly orchestrated placement of the commentary of the 11th century Rabbi known as Rashi, a print convention initated by Daniel Bomberg in the 15th century in Venice, are graphical expressions of a community of discourse preserved and passed on as a living testament. The appearance of the Talmud is highly formulaic, and like all three of the Abramic religions, Jews revere their texts as The Book, a term that applies to the Christian gospels and Revelation as well as to the Islamic Quran. Sacred texts are fundamental to most religions, and political faiths as well the Book of Mormon, the Confucian texts, Hindic Vedas, and Buddhist sutras, Maos red book, and Thomas Paines Common Sense. The symbolic function of the book as the Book is incontrovertible. Will this change in the fluid networks of the web? What changes are wrought in the social media siting of sacred texts? My point is that the forms and formats of the codex were fully integrated into social practices. The invention of print changed availability, and increased struggles for control. The power of the press was shocking to those entrenched in controlling the use as well as access to texts, and, to some degree, images. So how is the invention of the non-book, the future book, the electronic platform for reading, different in kind and character from this other invention on which we placed such importance? The power of books, like the power of digital media, lay in its ability to capture symbolic space and hold our spirits in sway. We believe because we read and we read along lines of belief, and the creation of a virtual espace, a space of understanding, was provoked by printed artifacts in ways specific to their form but defined by it. I spent so much time on describing the arrival of the book we are on the verge of wishing (or witnessing pass) out of existence (who? Not I, do not put me in the center of that we) because this event is so often exaggerated on the basis of its technical innovations and so little understood in the more nuanced continuum of the social life of texts and their transmission and use. This brings me back to the questions of use and their connection to the current state of innovation in networked digital environments. Early printed artifacts are relevant here, as well, since the first evidence we have of wood block images circulating in Europe seems to be of playing cards, those instruments of distraction and opportunities for vice. So despairing were church figures of the impact of cards on culture that St. Bernardin pleaded for the printers to replace the images of pips and suits with that of a sunflower containing the name of Christ. As if contemplation of such a sublime image might compensate for hours of addictive gambling. Good luck. No more likely than switching the World of Warcraft buff to the quiet contemplation of sacred texts in our time. Entertainment, knowledge, professional work, legislation, security, financial and economic practices all changing as a result of these devices. I research a trail of references, save the urls and metadata in my Zotero application in the browser. Compose my essay in fragments and post it through Thought-Mesh, tagging it as I

go, and seeking similar and related essays on Library Thing where my community of peers, known and unknown, contribute their own insights and references. I take these back to my Zotero search and am able to share my list of resources with a group working on a similar project or topic, and put this into the Cloud where a data mining program sorts and searches, producing any number of graphical displays that array the information according to parameters invisible to my eye in spite of the visual beauty of the image on the screen. Rapid mediation and remediation of information to image text to graphic and back again as I dive into and out of the close and distant views of unimaginably large corpora of data, information, texts, books. An enormous wall sized screen with multiple touch sensors lets me organize the display for an exhibit of interactive users whose engagement also tags and sorts and reorganizes the information into an event, a performance. Somewhere, I know, the deep history of what I am doing still resides in the printed artifacts and pages of an archive I refuse to abandon but go into for its treasures, mining that past and bringing it to the surface as part of the present field of resources in play. We can come back, here, at the end to reflect on the ways the symbolic force of the book as an icon is stamped in our collective mind, as the very image of authority, mystery, history. The book has become an alchemical symbol, a sign of esoteric knowledge and refined practices, while the web has become the scene of active social mediation and production of information. Binarisms are always suspect. The manuscript book of the late middle ages had much in common with its printed counterpart up through the 18th century. Industrialization changed book formats, introduced newspapers, tabloids, journals, posters and other printed means of social exchange in unprecedented numbers. The convenience of books and their availability will serve some purposes for a long time, but it is not just books, but reading practices that are changing. Where, how, when and what we read are changing too as we take in tiny chunks of text and image, as sound, video, music accessed by swiping the screen and following our whims. The future of the book will be integral to the future of narratives and the evolution of structured arguments into constellationary form, so that the array of evidence organized in clouds and arrangements of varying proximity offers navigational possibilities that extend the books indexes and random access to new dimensions. In conclusion: The physical future of forms and formats, new devices and platforms, means of access, use, combination, sequence, the multi-media and multi- modal cross-platform and trans-device production of a discursive field. The social futures of activities and effects, concepts and practices, in an unbounded and often unframed and non-delimitable tissue of associated links and trails. The symbolic future of communication and community, of making public and creating shared points of reference and understanding, collective memory in the lived experience of the noosphere. Books of the future, future of books how do we secure the place of humanity and human values at the core of a technophilic world?