Prosaix

I

Before we have a processed book, however, we must have a traditional book, a primal book, an utterance that precedes or has escaped the bureaucratization and systematization of the modern world. The primal book is a curiously romantic myth that a number of otherwise skeptical and dispassionate people (mostly authors) cling to unreflectively. The primal book is usually written by a single author, someone who has Something to Say. The author's job is to get it out, to get it on paper. It is a serious task. It requires a serious person. To assert the seriousness of the effort, the author may rent a garret and embrace poverty; even more reckless souls may teach at a university. It is a spiritual mission. It is hoped that the author's creation will ultimately be wrapped in the appropriate robes of ritual: a stiff hardcover binding with a glossy dust jacket, acid-free paper, perhaps a colophon page, with extra points for deckle edge. The most important aspect of the primal book, however, is its air of authenticity. The author, the creator, has made the book in his image. Such a book is a bit of the inner life of the author brought into the world for all to admire.

The notion of authenticity is insidious and, apparently, resistant to all attempts to stamp it out. Perhaps one could identify a young acolyte by the expression of an early interest in the poetry of Wordsworth and drag the reprobate to the woodshed for improvement; or the ungrateful cur could be presented with the complete works of Kerouac and admonished: Do you see now? Do you see where this could lead? It is to no avail. The author has Something to Say and the book is Where It Is Said. This myth can emerge unexpectedly. So, for example, I am drafting this essay in the wake of a well-publicized plagiarism scandal. The crime of plagiarism is an assault on the church of authenticity. It threatens to undo the primal book.

People familiar with the book industry, especially those few who pay attention to the numbers, are aware that the primal book is a myth. For starters, many books are not created by a single author or even a dynamic duo but by teams of writers, who may be writing to scripts created by someone else. This is virtually always the case with reference books and for many textbooks and is often true of paperback series publishing, where legions of writers (we probably should not call them authors) "fill in" the details of plot and character that have been outlined by a project head. Then there are all the books that only pretend to be books to get bookstore distribution. (The late Hayward Cirker, founder of Dover Publications, used to publish juvenile titles that he called "toys within covers.") And there are books that are compilations of the works of others, sometimes of people whose identity is unknown (e.g., The Darwin Awards). Celebrity books represent a particularly cynical attack on authenticity. Such a book has a prominent personality "tell" his or her story with the assistance of a ghost writer; and in a twist that almost seems like postmodern wish-fulfillment, often the "ghost" is no longer invisible but is cited on the dust jacket right below the name of the celebrity, whose true role is that of marketing lightning rod. But the myth of the primal book is too potent to be troubled by the facts. Books are what authors write. Books express authors' ideas. Books have a certain integrity born of the fact that they are the authentic manifestations of the serious men and women who create them.

I offer this caricature of the traditional book in order to more easily contrast it with the evolving forms of electronic publishing, where the author's authentic voice is buried within a network of references and interpretations. This is the world of the processed book, the book where the primal utterance of the author gives rise to hyperlinks and paralinks and neural networks and whatever other kinds of connections and cross-connections computer scientists come up with. Do a Google search on "computational linguistics" and you will never again think of books in the same way. A processed book is processed in two senses: the original utterance undergoes a series of transformations before the end-point is reached, and it is micro-processed, that is, it uses the astounding capabilities of computers to augment the original text.

The current crop of electronic books is often criticized as being dressed up with bells and whistles (to which a programmer might say: Whistles! Why didn't I think of that!?). Well, you ain't seen nothing yet. The list of features differs from format to format (you can do more with an etext on a personal computer than you can with the relatively weaker processing power of a handheld reader), but generally includes such worthwhile things as bookmarking, highlighting, perhaps hyperlinks, and the integration of a mediocre dictionary. We are often told of the wonders of not having to carry six heavy books on a plane when you can put that much and more into a handheld reader's memory. This is perhaps not as wonderful a feature as some (nonreaders) might suppose, as virtually no one would dream of carrying six books on a plane (you can't even finish a novel in the time it takes to fly from San Francisco to New York and there are hardcopy bookstores everywhere). Despite these added features, though, all the current ebooks brag that they preserve the text and spirit of the original, the printed book; one device even looks like a classy leather-bound book! Now, when in the last century has anyone routinely read a leather-bound book? The trap that the ebook publishers and the device manufacturers have fallen into is the myth of the primal book. The ebook is supposed to have the same aura as a tony printed book. To my mind, this is an insult to the digital medium.

The processed book is not boundless, but it is vast. It is not limited to dedicated handheld devices but can be displayed on any computer screen. Indeed, some of the most interesting examples of the processed book are difficult to use except on a personal computer, as they require a large screen for display and insist on being read with a Web browser (see, for example, the outstanding search engine and links of the Reed Elsevier collection of scientific, technical, and medical journals). But as we project into the future, we assuredly will see a multitude of computing devices, some that sit on desks, some that slip into our pockets, some that are combined with wireless phones, and perhaps some that are surgically implanted at the base of our skulls. And the good news is: they will all display books. These books will be everything books have always been in the past and more. By "everything" from the past, I mean just that. If you want the smell of a leather binding, it can be programmed in. If you want the complete text of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Little Dorrit, you can have it. You can have the text of Crime and Punishment in Russian and English; for that matter, you could see an exact copy of the manuscript displayed in a small window. Critical commentary? Pack it in. Full text of footnoted sources? Included. It does not matter where some of this data resides physically, whether it sits in the memory of the reading device or must be instantly retrieved from a remote outpost on the Internet. The processed book collapses time and space and makes all the civilization's documents available in the palm of your hand. The processed book is thus an assault on the natural rhythm of things; it occupies a deracinated world of ideas. We have exchanged the garret for the microprocessor.

When placed into the context of the processed book, the primal book doesn't disappear; rather, it is stripped of its air of being a vital expression of a human being and is reduced to its text. If this is beginning to sound like some abstruse critical theories of literature and texts, this is because aspects of those theories have proved to be predictive. This is painful to behold for someone who prayed earnestly that Isabel Archer would not return to Osmond, but words are symbols and are ideally suited for the manipulations of the symbolic logic of computers. The processed book takes Isabel Archer and shows her to be the collection of words that she is. She then can be processed.