The Future of Reading Mini-Investigation

I read an article called 'Onward and Upward with the Arts: Future Reading' by Anthony Grafton, published by The New Yorker in 2007. A lot has changed in the reading world in the five and a half years since this article was published--ereaders are even more popular and ubiquitous devices, self publishing has taken off, and new technology has made it even easier for people to read on the go--downloading straight to their phones. (Some countries, i.e. Japan, even have books that are published nowhere but on cell phones. These serial books (published and sent to smart phones in small sections)  are both reminiscent of and astoundingly different from books such as The Three Musketeers which was also originally published in serial form, but through the medium of newspapers.)

Much of what Grafton had to say about the subject of future reading is still very relevant and worth thinking about. Discussing the long history of information recording and storage, Grafton posited that digitalizing literature (and other readables) was merely the next step in cataloging technology. The ultimate goal, and where the digital age can take us, is to make more books available to more people. We would have greater access to books published in other countries and cultural arenas. The article even went so far as to claim that it would become easier for writers and readers in remote places with less access to available books prior to digitization to read and publish their own work. We could avoid the erasure of books that has been seen in the past where the most popular and prevailing works are preserved and republished while others are forgotten about entirely. Digitalization of books would make research and cross-referencing far easier and more comprehensive. A lot of good will be made possible.

What the article was less clear about, and where the real interest in future reading lies, is the issue of how readers will actually approach reading and not just how they might potentially approach reading. The social life of information is the idea that the "form in which you encounter a text can have a huge impact on how you use it." The feel of the pages, the ease of the ereader--these are going to be the types of salient things that dictate the reality of future reading. Digitization of written word is happening, regardless of how we feel about it. I hope that Grafton was right when he wrote that data will "illuminate rather than eliminate" physical texts.