The Brain on Reading

Just as drugs temporarily change brain functioning, so does reading. But reading changes our brain in positive ways.

A group of Stanford neurobiologists, led by Michigan State's Natalie Phillips, put a slew of subjects into MRI machines and told them to read passages from Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park.

Naturally (and validating what book lovers everywhere already know), the researchers found that blood flow increased as the study participants read. It didn't matter whether the participants were reading leisurely or critically, blood flow increased beyond "just work and play." Reading, once again going above and beyond for its devotees. Blood flow really amped up when people read critically, reaching levels and areas used for problem-solving.

Brain activity ramped up across the whole brain, backing up assertions that have been made for thousands of years (the Ancient Romans knew a good deal about the topic) that study of the liberal arts has important benefits for the cognitive abilities of an individual.

While it is always nice to have scientific research to reference back to, this should not be new news. The kids walking around their house bumping into walls because they can't be bothered to look up from the book they are reading, the kids who get in trouble at school because they have unsuccessfully hidden their book inside a larger textbook, the kids who miss their bus stop at the end of the day because they are too absorbed in the world created by the pages they are reading...these are always the kids that grow into successful, logical, well-rounded adults.

Here are a couple of links with snippets about the study findings:
www.insidehighered.com/audio/2013/05/03/brain-and-reading
www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/14/reading-good-for-brain-_n_1884054.html


Immediate takeaway? We can all justify reading during our finals--it will help overall brain functioning and problem-solving abilities.

Bedtime Stories When We're Parents?

I found this little video clip on YouTube. I can't tell if it is a joke or serious--which shows just how plausible it is.

Is this the future of bedtime stories?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Dn7IhFswv90

Publishee to Publisher: Neil Gaiman's Take

I recently ran across this article about a speech Neil Gaiman gave at the London Book Fair about the future of publishing. I think Gaiman is absolutely correct when he talks about how the worst thing the book industry can do is to refuse "to understand that the world is changing."

Gaiman wants the industry to get experimental, get creative, and even to screw up--all to learn what will work. I love this. Isn't this what learning is all about? Trial and error until something rings true? That, at least, is the lesson I've taken away from all the books I've read so far in my life.

What do you think of Gaiman's ideas? Solid and logical, or irresponsible and brash?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/16/neil-gaiman-urges-publishers-make-mistakes

Interview with Entrepreneur Michael Sherrod (Part One)

Rachel Talley: What has been your experience with publishing specifically? We went through your career and all that, but how has it specifically been with publishing?

Michael Sherrod: Well, when I got out of graduate school, and I went to the University of Columbia for my degree in journalism, which I picked because I wanted my job to be different every day. I wanted something new and different to happen every single day. I did not want to have the same year of experience over and over for forty years. I figured journalism was the best shot at that. But while I was in journalism school I realized I didn’t want to be a journalist, I wanted to be a publisher. I wanted to be the guy who figured out what the publication was about and guide the philosophy of the publication, guide the editorial tone of the publication. One of the reasons for that was because I loved typesetting, I loved working with designers and the only way to do that was to run the publication. Then you got to do everything, got to be involved in everything. I got to hire people smarter than me and got to let them do all the good work. So right out of grad school I started my first company, which was publishing a magazine. I needed to make money on my first issue or I would be bankrupt. I didn’t realize then, but it normally takes five years for a magazine to become profitable. It’s probably good I didn’t realize that because I was scared enough as it was. But we managed. The first day I went out and sold ads. I sold 12 one-year contracts. That felt good. And I was lucky, I was in a place where there was a lot of money, there were a lot of people with money who were interested in something new, a new publication attempt. I had done enough research to know, or I knew enough to know that there was a lot of wealthy people in the area. So the magazine was essentially about them. It was a Town and Country for West Texas, called The Odessa. We made money right off the first issue and just kept going. Before the first year was out I had started another company, which was a graphics company. There was a need for somebody to do typesetting--for the school system and for other groups in the city that didn’t have those capabilities. Then I started an ad agency with offices in Midland and Houston to service the oil industry because it was booming, much like it is now. I was about to close on a printing company when I got hit by a car. That put me in the hospital for a really long time. While I was in the hospital I got an offer for the company and I sold it. After selling a company, you have non-competes. So I couldn’t really stay in Odessa--I mean I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t sell advertising, I couldn’t publish anything. Oh! And I started a fashion magazine. That was the other magazine I started. That was the single most successful publication, in terms of dollars to produce it and dollars earned on advertising. It was 85:1.

RT: Isn’t that the one you went to the other places and got their pictures or something?

MS: Yeah, I went to Women’s Wear Daily, yeah.

Allana Wooley: What was the name of that magazine?

MS: Women’s Wear Daily?

AW: The fashion magazine.

MS: It was called Fashion West. It was one of those true entrepreneurial opportunities where the retailers, the advertisers, had a real need to tell people what they had. The audience did not know they had it. I had the audience and I had the advertisers. All I had to do was bring them together in a publication. It was a slam-dunk from day one. I was going to actually take that all across the state of Texas. I was going to go to every college town in the state. You know--Austin, San Antonio, Lubbock--I was going to go everywhere with that. It was going to be that thing that really took my company to the next level. I only got to do one before I got hit by the truck. So, sold the company, moved here (since I couldn’t do anything out there anymore). Worked in an ad agency, to kind of learn the marketplace. Then I became a publisher of a Dallas newspaper called the Dallas Business Courier. I did that for a few years, started that from scratch. That was sold to the Dallas Business Journal, I mean to a business journal corporation that owns the Dallas Business Journal now. Then came over to the Fort Worth Star Telegram and sold advertising. Instead of being a publisher I became national advertising manager, or Vice President of National Advertising. What that was, I don’t know if you understand how newspapers work--big newspapers--but they have two rates. They have a local rate and a national rate. The national rate is much higher than the local rate. National advertising had a big hold. We competed with the Dallas Morning News for those advertising dollars. They had a much larger market than we did, but we charged three-quarters of the price they did. We were still enormously profitable. I did a couple of innovative things there that allowed me to sell more ads than anybody had up to that point in the national category. I was the first person to ever sell Southwest Airlines a schedule in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. That was because I went to talk to Herb Keller [sic]. Nobody ever thought he would meet with you. But he was the nicest man. He came down the stairs from his office to get me, we walked back up the stairs, he got me a coke, we sat down and his office was tiny. It was completely cluttered. On one chair over here was a moose head that was huge. We were kind of stuffed in. There was one chair available and him. We chatted for a while and he could not have been nicer; he was absolutely just a great gentlemen.

RT: Did you have a way in the door with him or did you just email/call and say ‘Can I meet with you?’

MS: I called his ad agency and I told them I wanted to meet with him. They were very reluctant to do that. They just don’t want you messing with the client. But I said we were really pushing for this. So they said okay and they gave me a number to call and he was “Sure! Come on in! Let’s talk!” He was just unbelievably friendly and awesome and relaxed and we chatted for a while and he was like ‘Yeah, I’ll take care of it.’ And they called and said ‘We’ll take a year’s contract.” It was like 9,000 inches. It was a huge contract. That was a big day. I also created a program--one of the problems we had when I’d go to ad agencies, and one of the great things about this job was I got to go to New York and California and Chicago and Seattle, anywhere there were big agencies and basically sell them. One of the things they always said was ‘Wait. We’re on the Dallas side of the market. Why do we need you?’ ‘Well, the Dallas Morning News only has 100 subscribers in Tarrant County.” And that was true. 100. And the Star-Telegram had none in Dallas. There was a dividing line in Arlington that was like a wall. So you’re missing, literally missing half the marketplace. Well, not quite half, but you’re missing this whole group of people. We had a lot of circulation. So they were like ‘Yeah, well, okay, I’ll think about it.’ So what I did, and back then, when cable was just beginning to get started, cable TV. The ads were unbelievably cheap. I went and made deals with the cable companies that we would buy advertising from them. For every national advertiser we sold we would get a TV ad from them. It cost like $12 for a 30 second ad. I mean, seriously. It was ridiculously--some of them were $5--ridiculously inexpensive. So I was able to go back to the advertisers and say, ‘Not only will you get an ad in the Star-Telegram, but you’ll also get cable on the Dallas side of the market. So actually, the Star-Telegram was the only paper that could get you on both sides of the market.’ They were like ‘Awesome!’ We just wrote contracts at every agency we went to. That was sort of an example of being an intrapreneur--working as an entrepreneur inside a company. I’ve done a lot of that. That’s why, I believe, entrepreneurship is not just starting a company, it’s about thinking like an entrepreneur. It’s about looking at the assets that you have, or that are available to you, and deciding how can I put those assets together in a way that is going to create revenue, save costs, do something better for our customers, whatever it may be, something to help the company grow and make money. That’s basically all I did. I looked around, looked at all the assets that were available, and said, ‘What can I do to make this a better package? To make this better for our customers and, ultimately, better for our readers?’ So, about 1986, the beginning of 1986. Star-Telegram had a thing called Star Text, which was a virtual private network. A virtual private network, what that meant was, you could have a set of computers in your building, and people who had the right pass code could access the content that was on those computers. It was pre-internet. So it was just a bunch of--they were called backs [sic]--that’s what they called those computers. They were huge--six feet tall, three feet wide. You plug in all these things to it and you could then have people come on with an account, just like you would at AOL or something like that. We had about 4,000 people who paid $10 a month to be on Star Text. What they could get was reading print on a black screen that was classifieds and news stories and sports stories. That’s it, that’s all it was. But people thought it was the coolest thing. You had to access it with a 200 gb modem [sic]--I know you don’t know what that is. In the old days you had a desk top, which would be huge. If you were lucky you had a laptop. But laptops cost from $8000 to $10000 back then. You plug in your network to the modem and you plug the modem into your computer. You would dial in a code and you would hear this ‘Whee-Shhh-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding.’ Then it would go quiet and you would know you were connected. That was called dial-up. You used the telephone system.

RT: Oh! I had a dial-up.

AW: Yeah!

MS: It was pretty slow. You just do text. You want a picture, you go to bed and you wake up in the morning and it might be done. That’s all we did, but I sold an ad on there, to AT&T, that became the most successful ad I think I’ve ever sold, in terms of response. The response was unbelievable. AT&T had said, if you sell an ad and we get 25 responses to our offer we’ll consider it a huge success. What the offer was, was $10 coupon for free long-distance, or a 20% discount on a fax machine. You had to fill out a form, it took about 10 minutes, it was a really long form, to get the gift. We thought nobody was going to do it. We didn’t even know how many people had computers. We knew 4,000 did--who were signed up for Star Text--but that’s all we knew. So we put an ad in the business section and said, ‘Go to Star Text, free call to Star Text. Get this great offer from AT&T.’ Well, we thought, if five people did it we were going to consider that awesome. We didn’t ever think we’d get 25. By the end of the week 2200 people had looked at the ad and 635 had filled out the form. Nobody could believe it-nobody. AT&T was pissed. They only had a budget for 25 of these gifts. So we ended up actually paying AT&T to cover the cost of all of the other 650 gifts because we were so thrilled this was such a huge thing. This meant that we had opened up this whole new area of potentially, incredibly responsive, advertising. Phil Meek [sic] heard that. Phil Meek, at that time, he had been the publisher of the Star-Telegram, but he had been promoted in Cap Cities ABC body to New York to run all new publications. He heard about it and he called me up to New York to tell the world, we have this new thing, it’s awesome. When I stepped up in front of all these advertising managers from all these publications, I didn’t even get to finish the presentation and they were ready to throw me out the window. They were furious. What they saw was this new thing, this new electronic thing, that was going to cannibalize their ability to sell print ads and cut into their potential revenues. They hated it.

RT: Sounds familiar to the eBooks/Books fiasco.

AW: Right.

MS: And to this day newspapers have never figured it out. That was in 1986, they still haven’t figured out how to do the web right. With the exception, maybe, of The New York Times and The Guardian. That was a really big blow in our community for newspapers. They could have all been using...but anyway. I was disappointed; I had thought this was my ticket to the big time, to New York City. Once this thing took off, I would be running. I thought it was going to be a big career boost. It turned out to be not so much. So I was really disappointed. They cancelled the advertising program. But, the people at AMR Information Service heard about it. They were, AMR was the holding company of North America Allies [sic], and the Saber Travel Network, and a bunch of other stuff. They were starting this division called AMR information services that was going to do insurance, insurance services, back up calling, do private labeling of the Saber system for airlines around the world, and do ____ management for railroads in France. They were working on this thing called Easy Saver. They asked me to help them sell ads. They had never heard of anybody sell a digital ad before. They were like, okay, ‘Can you do that on Saver?’ Okay. Let’s figure it out. So we figured it out, and that’s now called Travelocity, but at the time it was Easy Saver. I did that for a few years and worked as Vice President of AMR Information Services and then left there in 1991 to start my own company. That was the NRRV [sic] system that I talked about. It stood for N___ Reader Response Vehicle. It was a vertical magazine. Essentially, in the old days, when you had a vertical magazine, that could be something like Labs Quarterly or Petroleum Engineer or something very specific. So a very vertical magazine. They had a thing called a bingo card in it. This was a blown in card that had a list of every advertiser in the magazine. If you wanted more information, you checked the box, tore out the card, and sent it back in to the publisher. Eight to ten weeks later you would get a packet of information that you had forgotten by then. You know, ‘Why am I getting information from XYZ company?’ Because you had forgotten you had filled out information on an airplane and sent it in. So what I did was create a website that did that for them. The vertical trade publishers would hire me and I would load all of the information onto my website and you could just download them, specifically. That worked pretty well. I sold that company to AOL in 1994. Through selling that company, I met a guy named Bob Smith, who wanted to start a local guide company called Digital City. I became one of the cofounders of that. We started it, actually started it, in 1996. Grew that to be about a 100 million dollar business in about three years and sold that to AOL. Then I went to work at AOL as part of that sell. So publishing is all part of this. I became a publisher of a local city guide, essentially, except it was on the web. That’s what I was doing, was publishing advertising for other advertisers and sort of warehouse, if you well. Everything I’ve done has had to do with publishing in one way or another, either print or electronic. Then from there I went to help create AOL local and worked in their, I ran their worldwide social media for three years. That was more about publishing tools. We were creating things like blogs and journals and message boards and member directories so people could talk to each other. We actually created a version of Facebook long before Facebook. Unfortunately, did not have the vision at the time to take it outside the pay wall. I couldn’t convince anybody that the community piece, the social media piece, of AOL was the most valuable piece of the company. They just didn’t believe me. But that’s where 90% of the subscribers to AOL spent their time. 90 percent. They [The bosses] thought it was useless, cheap. They knew it was a foundation but they could not think of anything advertisably viable would come out of it because there was all kinds of hate speech in parts of it, it was unregulated, it was the wild west kind of thing. You never knew what you were going to find. They just didn’t think brands would ever want their brands to be beside that kind of stuff.

AW: Hindsight.

MS: Yeah, twenty-twenty. I had a conversation with John Miller [sic] about that when he became CEO of AOL actually. I made a report to him about that. He just couldn’t see it. I said, ‘John, think about it. 90%, 90% of all the time spent behind the pay wall in AOL buyers and subscribers is in our community providers and services. Nine percent is spent over here in these content channels we have like health, personal finance, travel, all that kind of stuff. You guys think that’s where the value is? That’s not where the value is. It’s here.’ If Steve Casin [sic] had actually listened to that, we might not have had the TimeWarner debacle. Because instead of going by content that was essentially mirroring where nine percent of our users went, instead of 90%, we made a huge mistake.

RT: That’s interesting to me also, what it shows in terms of study versus talent in that area. Because those people you’re trying to convince in that area are obviously very studied and they probably had an education or had a career that really led up to that area. But this college kid just says ‘hey!’ and he just goes and he--

AW: Except he didn’t create it thinking about money, he created it for his friends for fun and then it turned into something that could be money.

MS: AOL?

AW: No. Facebook.

MS: Facebook? Yeah.

RT: It’s just interesting.

MS: Well, yeah. [Mark Zuckerberg] was interested in solving his own problem, not on making money. John Miller, Steve Casin, all those guys were focused on making money for their shareholders. The only place they were making money right then was not in community, they weren’t making any money in community. They were making all their money in this other place [content], so they made the judgement that we’re going to make more money doing the same thing! And it didn’t work out that way. They didn’t really listen to consumers. I don’t know that even if they had, that they would have had the guts to do it. They would have made one hell of a risky call. Really risky call.

RT: Yeah, definitely.

MS: So when you think, I mean, you probably don’t remember, you were probably a baby, but back in that period of time social media was nothing. It was nowhere. I remember I was interviewed by The New York Times about AOL’s community services and stuff and I was trying to explain to this guy how it was really an important part of AOL and blahdyblahdyblah. He was just dismissive. No. Forget it. Not gonna happen. And it wouldn’t have happened at AOL behind the pay wall. We already had that. Until we made the decision to go outside of it, it wouldn’t have worked. We would have had to make that decision to go outside of it. They didn’t do that until 2004.

RT: That’s interesting. We’ve heard a lot of the changes just through what you’ve said and what you’ve seen, just all the innovations you’ve been able to make, what do you think--Do you have any forecasts for the future? What do you think is coming? A lot of these things have changed just in the past [couple of] years.

This is Part One of the interview. For Part Two, see Rachel Talley's blog.

Earlier today I  found myself thinking about why we refer to books as an old technology and therefore lacking in their capacity to attract younger, hipper, tech-savvy readers.

Art galleries, theater productions, orchestra concerts...all of these are old art forms that still appeal to wide masses today. Although many aspects of how they are created and presented to the public have been jazzed up to fit with the style and preferences of culture today, art shows, concerts, and plays still manage to attract an audience. Even those who aren't huge fans or experts in the respective fields these art forms represent attend and enjoy public shows. We don't claim that art is ineffective today just because it is created with the same old paints and on the same old canvases that have been used for centuries.

Why is that?

I think one answer might be the magnitude and capacity for interaction with these shows. What if libraries became book meccas? What if libraries were places that had books and quiet spaces to read, but also focused on reading groups, cross-media engagement with texts, hosting public readings, offering writing workshops, and idea sharing.

I wonder (and this is a big 'I wonder,' as I may be totally off base) what would happen to libraries if they transformed into places it was an event to go to. Libraries could intermingle performance (public readings and open mic nights) with history (having visuals to walk through the process of making a book/how books came to look like books), practice (writing workshops and reading groups), with intake (quiet spaces stuffed with books for reading and meditating, and rooms with music and movies and art already labeled and connected to specific books).

I imagine this would be an incredibly unfeasible task. There are many flaws with this idea. But I also imagine that such a library would be a beautiful place to be. I think we should make a bigger deal out of reading than we do. Too often, I think, we grow complacent in the knowledge that books are all around us; we make assumptions that books are always the same, will always be the same, and that the main point of learning to read is to become capable at life basics (such as reading the how-to guide for one's new 60" plasma screen TV) and well-studied in other academic areas.

What would happen to reading if we had sustained, well-publicized access to dynamic reading events?

Our Job

In class we are continuously talking about the future of the industry. The vast majority of us want to one day work with the printed word, be it in book, newspaper, magazine, or web formatting. It’s only natural that we are so highly invested in what happens to publishing. Not only are we interested in pursuing this as a career path, but it also involves some of the things we love the most. Books! Most, if not all, of us live to read and can’t fathom a world where books aren’t ubiquitous and freely/cheaply available. And our generation, consumers of these products of publishing and educated about the system itself, will one day hold the positions of power that make decisions about the future of books.

Class guest and entrepreneur Michael Sherrod said some really interesting things when we were interviewing him. One of these was that we have to think beyond what we know to what is new and innovative, but we can’t present the general public with a concept or product that they aren’t ready for yet. He had this issue with AOL’s social media component. It was the most trafficked part of the entire website (attracting 90% of page visitors) but it was only available to users who owned a computer, had internet access, and had paid AOL to get behind their paywall. That was enough for AOL to turn a profit, but it wasn’t enough to mean immediate success if expanded. So Sherrod’s idea of advertising on this social website (one of the very first) wouldn’t have worked unless AOL was willing to take a huge risk and open the unregulated site to those who weren’t behind the paywall. Sherrod wasn’t able to sell his idea to AOL executives anyway! They wouldn’t listen to him, stuck in their old, traditional ways of doing things that always worked and so couldn’t see the potential right before their faces.

Knowing that we will be creating the business of words in the future, in some form or fashion, we can take a lot of valuable lessons from Sherrod’s experience. First, we can’t be like the jaded AOL executives. We have to let go of some of our traditional ways of thinking about the publishing industry or we will be bypassed by something fresher, newer, and way more exciting, leaving us a deteriorating relic of what once was. Gomez said it in Print is Dead: we cannot be complacent in success, and we cannot just fall back on solutions from the past.

There is a reason why books published today don’t read like any of Shakespeare’s plays or Dumas’ epic adventures. Those styles wouldn’t be relatable to where the world is today. The content details (although story arcs are story arcs however you slice them), style of writing, formatting, marketing strategy, and basically everything else has radically changed in the past few centuries. We can still read and enjoy classics of the past because we know that they are classics of the past. We know that when we finish reading we will slide the volume back onto our bookshelf (or send it back to our virtual bookshelf) right next to a Harry Potter or John Green or Markus Zusak or Barbara Kingsolver or whoever else novel. Editors have kept an eye to culture and demand; it’s time the entire publishing company did that as well. Editors are already (and need to amp up the creativity and innovation) interested in what the general public wants to read and how they want to read it. Designers need to focus on how people want to consume a product. Marketing experts need to look at what people are craving, getting into the things people don’t even know that they want yet. The best way to do this, in my opinion, is to get the buyers and consumers and readers of words involved. Doritos has a really successful product because they do just this--fans can submit their own potential Superbowl commercials and suggest new products. What if books were the same way? Let us ask the people what they want, use our liberal arts molded brains to analyze and synthesize those responses to come up with what people want. This is how to ensure the publishing industry stays alive and strong for years to come.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is something to be said for catering to hard core book fans who don’t want change. I feel confident that this marketing and publishing target will continue; we will still be able to buy the paper books and crack spines and read traditionally presented text. But we are among the remnant few who would be reading anyway. Most of the ideas I am suggesting, in terms of positive changes for publishing, are simply ways to keep the public reading after they have graduated high school or college and to entice new generations to grow up reading and loving books, occasionally putting down their video games to pick up a book. Whatever a book might look and act like in the future, anyway.

Listening to what people actually want, will buy, and read will require a lot of work and constant evolving for the industry. I think we are past a stage where we can have an innovation last a century or more. The world is changing at a much faster rate than it used to, and so must the publishing industry.

We have to think outside of the box. And thank goodness we (our class and the many classes like it around the world) truly love books. Exposure to books, past and present, expands our repertoire of knowledge, innovation, and imagination. Reading the words and ideas of others helps us generate words and ideas of our own. Passion breeds sustainability.

Endangered Species

We’ve talked so much about the future of books that it got me thinking about the future of another book-related item currently ubiquitous in our population: bookcases. With the decline in book sales and the move to digital storage of books, what will happen to this piece of furniture? Originally, it must have developed to fit the book mold and demand for a way to hold and display the new commodity, the book, that everybody was suddenly able to get their hands on.

I love bookcases. Granted, I love bookcases because I love books and bookcases are servants to their book masters. Still, I do not want to see bookcases go the way of coat racks, china cabinets, and typewriting desks. I want bookcases to continue to prosper and survive forever. They aren’t as easily digitalized as books are (though both the Kindle and Nook have tried) and so more concrete, implementable and physical uses must be thought up as digitalization spreads.

Here are a few of my own ideas:

-Boats: Bookcases can be flipped up to form perfect sitting nooks for passengers on the modified raft. Hard book covers can even be used for oars.

-Baby cradles: Having multiples is hard enough. Why waste extra expense buying three separate baby cribs when you can just flip a small bookcase over and be all set?

-Feeding troughs: Those multiples are going to grow up and need to eat real food. And boy, will they be messy! Plop some food in the bookcase and let the little tikes chow to their heart’s desire. Afterwards, just spray the case down. No muss, no fuss.

-Planters: So you want to grow zucchini, carrots, and squash? But you’re OCD and terrified of inter-vegetable root tangling? Get a bookcase! Each shelf can be earmarked for a different plant!

This threat of extinction goes far beyond bookshelves. What about the future of bookmarks? The longevity of book lights? What remaining life can be expected for bookends? These are just a few tragic examples of all of the species lined up and awaiting their sad demise in the face of digital takeover.

I have been reading for well over a decade and have accumulated quite a few of these book accessories, accessories I store on top of the beautiful, simple cedar bookcase that (barely) houses and protects my personal library. This bookcase is one of my very favorite things in my room. Besides my bed, my bookcase is also the most dominating item in my room, taking up a whole half a wall plus a dome of floor space in front for insured ease of book access. When digital becomes an even more omnipresent force than it is now, what will people do with this extra space in their living and bedrooms? Will they get even bigger beds? Even larger TV screens? Or will the space still be devoted to reading--perhaps with a comfy chair perfect for curling up in a ball to peruse the digitalized text that will represent our only physical manifestation of books (A temporary manifestation lasting only as long as it takes our eyes to scan over a page and our fingers to flip to the next screen.)?

I don’t think we all need to run out to Half-Price Books and stock up on the spines we can balance between our hands and chins just yet: the book apocalypse will not occur for quite some time--and in fact may never occur. It is something to consider though. If literary-providing powerhouses such as Barnes & Noble’s are having serious financial issues, it can be assumed that time will only lead to more and more Borders-like shutdowns. We, current readers, still resist digitalization to some degree because we have known something else. We grew up ingrained with the knowledge of what the feel of a page rubbed between two fingers is like. That physical connection is a huge part of what books mean to us, but this will not be the case for our children and their children. Change is coming for future generations. I guarantee it.

Books are great; both in physical and pixellated formats. Digitalization isn’t all bad. But I think it is a worthwhile endeavor to try and picture what the future might look like. If we don’t like what we see we need to start thinking of ideas NOW for how to change this projected image. Now, before it is too late and physical books have officially moved from the threatened, to the endangered, and finally to the extinct list.

What do you think the future of books will look like?