Page 14 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

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user chooses, thereby affecting the length of the text? Amazon has introduced percentage paging: electronic books show the percentage of the text read; it’s a solution, though it may not prove to be the definitive one.
Books in reality don’t reside in our devices but in the intelligent mesh we are connected to.
In fact, where they reside is immaterial; what matters is that we have easy and quick access to them. That a cultural object like the book, given the importance it has had for civilization, should be disappearing in the physical form it has had for the past five hundred years, is a revolution that will necessarily bring changes in the ways we make and consume them.
The concept of the book is changing with the emergence of hypertext and hypermedia.
The distribution of electronic books has also undergone a Copernican change as, firstly, there is so much competition in leisure activities (the same device that allows us to read books allows us to watch films) and secondly, it gives access to an almost unlimited number of titles in any language 24 hours a day. Bookshops the world over are reinventing themselves as cafés-cum- bookshops with the sale of food and drink com- pensating for decreasing book sales. Meanwhile, new businesses such as secondhand bookshops that have their store digitalized, have been able to sell remotely in a way they could never have imagined before. The sale is of physical objects but the shop window and means of payment
is digitalized. And while the books are being physically sent, the Internet is used to inform the customer of the exact location – almost to the minute – of the expected package.
But if the changes in the physical object are important, they are also becoming so in the virtual ‘object’. The concept of the book is changing with the emergence of hypertext and hypermedia. As technology has developed, books have incorporated new facets; illustrations and photos were added first, the quality of text and
image was increased, then, with the arrival of video and sound and hypertext, the book began to form part of the mesh and links allowed a connection to other virtual spaces and websites while Internet tools and search engines accom- modated these new objects.
Dictionaries arranged in alphabetical order began to disappear as people were no longer focusing on the first letter to find a word, but went instead to the required word.
At times, the book begins to be a work with different ‘versions’ in different channels and with different formats. An important body of text can exist as a base but when interaction is required (even a simple search mechanism) the old con- cept is substantially modified and the worldwide web is ushered in – a web to which the object belongs, however isolated we believe it to be, and however much we feel a sense of ownership, displayed as it is on device we have bought.
As many authors predicted, we have gone from the solid and atomic to the liquid and digital. This not only means the texts are laid out automatically to adapt to the size of the screen as the book is being read or that that the condi- tions of legibility are modified, it also means that the reading conditions are changed by the new supports and that the way we read modifies our understanding as a reader.
There are already studies that confirm that we retain less while reading more on electronic devices. Perhaps – though there is little scientific evidence to back this theory – it is related to
the disposability of the content on the eBook or screen. Reading on paper is strongly associated with a number of elements related to form, typography, space, and even the margins which, as they disappear in digital format, change the reading experience.
The modification of the text with the collective highlighting also alters our focus on certain aspects. If I see a text that is highlighted by
THE NEW CONNECTED CITIES AND CULTURE · MARIO TASCÓN
Digital Trends in Culture