New media generally don’t replace old media, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out. After TV we still have radio. After telephones we had telegrams for a good long while. So what about books? After we have networked digital books, we’ll still have and produce physical books. But will physical books be as ubiquitous and culturally important as radio? Or will they be as cherished but infrequently attended as live theater?

In my interview with Cory Doctorow, I wondered, in the midst of an overly-elaborate three-part question, whether ebooks will provide enough of what we value about physical books (pbooks) that pbooks will lose the historic significance Cory had pointed to.

We won’t know the answer until we invent the future. But, I’m going to hypothesize, predict, or stipulate (pick one) that at some point we will have ebooks (which may be distinct hardware or be software running in something other device we carry around), with paper-quality displays that are full-color and multimedia, that are fully on the Net, with software that lets us interact with the book and with other readers, that are a part of the standard outfitting of citizens, and within a physical environment that provides ubiquitous Net connectivity.

Those are a lot of assumptions, of course, and each and every one of them could be disrupted by some 17 year old at work in her parents’ basement. Nevertheless, if the future is something like that, then what of pbooks’ value will be left unreplaced by ebooks?

Readability. I’m assuming paper-quality displays, which may turn out to be unattainable without having to wheel around batteries the size of suitcases. But, even without that, the ability of ebooks to display text in various fonts and sizes should remove this advantage from pbooks.

Convenience. I am assuming that ebooks will be more convenient than pbooks: as good in sunlight as pbooks, at least as easy to hold and use, easier to use for those with certain disabilities, long enough battery life, possibly self-lit, etc. The biggest open question, I believe, is whether it will be as easy to annotate ebooks…

Annotatability. The current crop of ebooks make highlighting passages and making notes so difficult that you have to take a break from reading to do either of those things. But, that’s one big reason why the current crop of ebooks are pathetic. With a touchscreen and a usable keyboard (or handwriting recognition software), ebooks of the future should be as easy to annotate as a pbook is. And those annotations will then become more useful, since they will be searchable and sharable.

Affordability. The marginal cost of producing ebook content is tiny, which doesn’t mean prices will drop as dramatically as we might like. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine a world in which ebook content costs more than pbooks.

Social flags. You probably carefully choose which book you’re going to bring with you on a job interview, and which books get moved to the shelves in your living room. We use the books we own as tribal flags, as Cory points out. Ebooks can serve the same role when introduced into social networks, including social networks explicitly built around books, such as LibraryThing.com. They obviously don’t work in physical space that way; if you want to show off your books to people who visit your home, you’re going to have to get physical copies.

Aesthetic objects. Many of us love the feel and smell of books. While ebooks might be able to simulate that in some way — maybe their page displays could yellow over time — it’d still just be a simulation. While ebooks will undoubtedly develop their own aesthetics, so that we’ll call people over to see how beautiful this or that new ebook is, they can’t replace the particular aesthetics of pbooks. So, those who love pbooks will continue to cherish them.

Sentimental objects. For my bar mitzvah, some friend of my parents gave me a leatherbound copy of A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad” and other poems. It was a beautiful aesthetic object, but I also understood that it had a personal meaning to the giver. I doubt that that particular copy did — I don’t think it came from his own collection — but the physicality of the book was itself a marker for the personal meaning it had for the giver. As Cory says, the books your father read — the very copies that were in his hands — probably have special meaning to you. It’s hard to see how ebooks could have the same sentimental value, except perhaps if you are reading the highlights and notes left by your father, and even then, it’s not the same.

Historic objects. Likewise, knowing that you’re looking at the very copy that was read by Thomas Jefferson gives a book an historic value that ebook content just can’t have. It’s hard to see how an author could autograph an ebook in any meaningful way.

Historical objects. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have pointed out, as has Anthony Grafton, books as physical objects collect metadata that can be useful to historians, e.g., the smell of vinegar that indicates the book came from a town visited by cholera. Ebooks, however, accumulate and generate far more metadata. So, we will lose some types of metadata but gain much more…maybe more than our current norms of privacy are comfortable with.

Specialized objects. It will take somewhere between an improbably long time and forever for all collections of pbooks to be digitized. Thus, books in special collections are likely to be required well after we can take the presence of ebooks for granted.

Possessions. We are headed towards a model that grants us licenses to read books, but not outright ownership. (This is Cory’s main topic in the interview.) If we lose ownership of ebooks, then they won’t have the sentimental value, they will lose some of their economic value to readers (because we won’t be able to resell them or buy them cheaper used), and we won’t be as invested in them culturally. Whether ebooks will be ownable, and whether that will be the default of the exception, is unresolved.

Single-mindedness. Books are the exemplar in our culture of thinking. We write our best thoughts in books. We engage with the best thoughts of others by reading books. Books encourage and enable long-form thinking. Ebooks, because they are (ex hypothesis) on the Net, are distracting. They string together associated chunks and tempt us with links beyond themselves. It is easy to imagine ebooks providing the singleminded pbook experience: “Press here to remove all links.” But, of course, you could always unpress the button. Besides, since your ebook is on the Net (ex hypothesis), all that’s stopping you from jumping out of the book and into your email or Facebook is self-discipline. So, while ebooks can provide the singledminded experience of pbooks, some of us may prefer the paper version to keep the distraction of the Net at bay.

Religious objects. Some books have special meaning within some religions. It’s hard to imagine, for example, that an ebook is going to replace the Torah scrolls in synagogues. In fact, orthodox Jews can’t use electronic devices on the Sabbath, so they are certainly going to continue to buy pbooks. But, this is the very definition of a specialty market.

So, what does all this mean for the future of books? It depends.

First, are there other values of pbooks that I left off the list?

Second, I haven’t listed any unique advantages of ebooks. For example, ebooks will allow social reading: Engaging with others who are reading the book or with the traces left by those who have already it. That’s pretty important. Also, ebooks are likely to radically reduce the cost of reading, especially of some categories of overpriced pbooks (e.g., textbooks). Also, ebooks will make it much easier to understand the content of books through embedded dictionaries, search capabilities, and links to explanatory discussions. Also, as more of the corpus gets digitized, ebooks will make it far easier for scholars to pursue the footnotes (except they’ll be embedded links, not footnotes). Also, ebooks will incorporate multimedia. Also, reading ebooks will build a searchable personal corpus that is far more useful to us than bookcases filled with out conquered pbooks. Also, we’ll always have our entire library with us, ready to be read or reread, which is good news for readers.

I leave it to you to decide how this mix of values is likely to play out. What will be the social role and meaning of pbooks as we go forward into the ebook era? In twenty years — giving ourselves plenty of time to develop usable ebook readers, to digitize most of what we need, and to built an always-available network — will pbooks be used mainly by collectors, and scholars working with unique texts? Will they be sentimental objects? The poor person’s medium? Will physical books be the equivalent of AM radio, of the road company of “Cats,” of quaint objects in book museums — and/or the continuing pinnacle and embodiment of learning?v

In this edition of Radio Berkman, Cory Doctorow argues in favor of copyright … the part of copyright that protects the rights of readers to own (and not just license) books.

It being Cory, the discussion covers topics such as the way in which books are like dogs and his sentimental attachment to his digital collection.

It makes me very nervous to disagree with Umberto Eco because he is so fathomlessly smart. But I think in this case I do. Sort of.

There’s a fabulous interview with Eco in Spiegel (in English) about why he loves lists. He is characteristically pithy, provocative and wise. A crucial paragraph, from the beginning:

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

I read the first sentence and was provoked, as Eco intends. Lists are the origin of culture? Please say more! But Eco doesn’t really explain, in this interview, why lists — as opposed to other forms of collections and orderings — are so important. The urge to make order, yes, but not lists themselves.

A list is one particular way of creating order. Lists are sequential and one-dimensional: Wines listed by year, or by place, or by ranking, or by the chronology of when you first encountered them. (Lists can be hierarchical, but they’re only lists if they can be resolved back down to the one-dimensional.) Lists thus are one elemental way of ordering the world. And they have a peculiar fascination, which Eco expresses beautifully. But I think it’s wrong to say that they’re the origin of culture. I think it’d be more accurate and useful to say that culture originates with collecting: Pulling things around us because of their appeal (a word I’m purposefully leaving vague).

I’m sure I’m making too much of Eco essentially drumming of interest in his exhibit at the Louvre, but the issue matters a little bit. I think (based on little to nothing) that lists emerged as a stripping down of multi-dimensional collections. Culture first happened (I imagine) when we pulled together pieces of the world that spoke to us in ways we could not articulate. We assembled them as spaces through which we could wander, or piles through which we could collectively sort (“Oooh, I particularly like that green shiny stone!”). Lists are an abstraction, and culture began (I suppose) with an unarticulated sense that some things go together — and perhaps our first conversations were about why.

Eco goes on to say many wonderful things about why we have liked lists, including proposing that listing properties of an object can liberate us from looking for the definitional essence of things. (For more on this, read his important book, Kant and the Platypus.) In fact, Eco suggests that a mother defines a tiger to her child “Probably by using a list of characteristics: The tiger is big, a cat, yellow, striped and strong.”

I have a bunch of issues with that.

First, that type of definition really just makes explicit what’s implicit in the traditional approach to definitions as essence. In the traditional Aristotelian approach, the essence is the creature’s spot in the hierarchy of beings. So, a tiger is a species of cat, and thus would be specified by its difference from other cats but also by all of the properties of the classes above it (mammal, vertebrate, animal, etc.). The essential definition and the list definition both consist of a list of properties, but the essential definition nests them so that they don’t all have to be spelled out, and so we can see which differences “count.” Eco says, “The essential definition is primitive compared with the list,” but it seems to me that a beautifully nested, hierarchical system of essential definitions is in fact more advanced — it requires abstraction and systems thinking — than a mere list.

But, I don’t want to miss Eco’s essential (so to speak) point here, which is that defining something with a list breaks us out of the notion that there is a single, knowable essence. Absolutely. There’s no eternal essence, “just” a set of properties that are relevant depending upon our circumstances. With that I wholeheartedly agree.

My second problem with this is that — as George Lakoff says in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, explicating and expanding the work of Eleanor Rosch — the mother (heck, maybe even the father) probably actually teaches the child what a tiger is by pointing at one, or at a picture of one. We learn through prototypes, not through essential definitions, and not by making lists. List-making is an abstraction and a secondary activity.

Third, the listing the parent does seem to me to not have the properties that make lists captivating to Eco. The parent isn’t trying to give a complete listing that brings a sense of mastery over the infinite and over death. She’s just pointing out some of the salient features. If it is a list, it’s not a list of the sort that Eco has charmed us about.

Fourth, while lists of properties are a useful corrective to thinking that things are exhausted by a definition of their essence, lists strip out so much that they don’t seem like much more adequate than essential definitions. A tiger isn’t a list.

This is just a fun interview in Spiegel, so I may be taking it too seriously. So, even if lists occur within culture — including the lists in literature he points to — rather than being the origin of culture, the interview does indeed help us to see why our fascination with lists is a fascination with something bigger than lists.

Giles Turnbull at the Morning News reports on his research interrogating (gently) children from different families about what they call various Lego pieces. Quite interesting in its own taxonomic way, and a topic that’s amusing even just to contemplate.