Now that press baron Rupert Murdoch is officially courting digital technology, we can expect to see a lot more attention paid to e-books in Murdoch-owned media. A good example is Steven Johnson’s How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write, published in the Wall Street Journal. Though the piece has a slightly Johnny-come-lately feeling to it, expressing gee-whizzes that tech and media bloggers have been gee-whizzing for decades. Johnson makes some very significant points and even a few memorable bon mots. Alluding to Kindle’s portability, he says, “The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go.” And this:

Think of [the reading experience] as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

One truly cogent passage was not so much conjecture about the future as commentary on something that is happening today – the kindlification of “that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.”

Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article — sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.

This echoes observations we made in an essay entitled Watching Books : “Thanks to television, the Internet, video games and computers, we have come to expect color, interactivity, instant gratification and a complete immersion of the senses from our screens…The fundamental appeal of books is their ability to transport us to the author’s world. The best books immerse us so deeply in that world that we become almost immune to distraction. But screens are breeders of distraction from the sort of commitment to thinking, reflecting, and imagining that books demand.”

Johnson goes on to speculate not just about how books will be read but how they will be written. For all those Johnny-come-latelies who haven’t been plugged into the revolutionary paradigm of digital publishing for the last decade, the Wall Street Journal‘s piece is well worth your time.

RC