Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Earlier in the week Ben Vershbow from the Future of the Book Institute blogged about LiveInk, a company that provides “an alternative approach to presenting texts in screen environments, arranging them in series of cascading phrases to increase readability.” What LiveInk does is offer software that interprets/translates prose into short bursts of information that is then displayed on a screen in a staggered layout. The reason for this is “to promote the dynamic perception of word groups in a sentence, and to augment comprehension with multidimensional syntactic cueing patterns.” What this means to the reader is that blocks of words and clusters of sentences — all of which used to form paragraphs — become instead splintered into idea-trees that are more fractal than formal (the screenshot above is the first couple of lines of Moby Dick, as presented by the LiveInk technology).

I think this is a really great application, and would be a boon to not only adoption of electronic reading on small screens, but it would also boost comprehension of electronic reading (not to mention reading in general). Of course, since LiveInk is in essence distilling a writer’s words into a new form, erasing in the process the original construction, this will probably rub many authors and critics the wrong way. And yet, while certain writers indeed sculpt the shape of their paragraphs and sentences with the same care as an artist who works in marble or clay — not to mention that concrete poets use precise word placement on a page as not only an aesthetic element but also to convey something of the nature of what they’re writing about — for most writers paragraph and sentence construction is simply a means to an end; the size or length of these literary constructs mean no more to them than the shade or texture of the page they’re printed on.

In fact, I think LiveInk ends up doing something really amazing to prose; it turns it into poetry. Much of the writing in Thomas Wolfe’s novels was so poetic in rhythm and spirit that later editors boiled down passages of his books into poems, breaking down his long, unruly sentences into something new. LiveInk’s algorithm does something similar, and does it in a much easier way. Hidden in a lot of prose is the germ of poetry, the same way that a cynic could say that poetry is just prose with more line breaks. For instance, imagine the much anthologized poem “This is Just to Say” rendered in reverse LiveInk technology (one that turns poetry into prose); it’d come out like this: “I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold.” Instead, I can only imagine what the writing of Proust, Fitzgerald, Updike and Capote would look like rendered in the LiveInk technology. Where William Carlos Williams had the wind sucked out of him, these writers of lyrical prose would shine in new and unexpected ways.

And anyway, this already happens — to a degree — in audio books, where readers listen to a flow of words and never see the form or construction the writer used in his initial composition. In this case the actor reading the words — based on the clues found in the punctuation — performs his own algorithm in his head in terms of inserting pauses and dramatic effects. LiveInk will simply do the same thing, but utilizing technology to do so. And I think, if adapted, it could be a really wonderful thing that would end up promoting literature, and not hurting it. As Joseph Brodsky once said in terms of poetry, “The rhyme is smarter than the poet.” Maybe writers fear LiveInk’s algorithim will be smarter than them. But as long as someone is reading their words, there’s nothing to be afraid of.