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Advent of the eReader

Let's not call it an eBook, let's call it an eReader. No need for reference to the book prototype, no need for the page turning motif. Maximize the device for the kind of reading associated with blogs, with emailing and thumb texting. Maximize it for images, audio and video. The eReader is for those navigating the composite, screen based reading mode.

The eBOOK revolution is so over.

If the eReader needs a precursor it would be television, if it needs a prototype it is the cell phone. The book is off to one side of the whole emergence. In fact the eReader is emerging as a counterpart of television and cell phone developments. In television the increasing definition and accentuated clarity of the screen presentation provides a similar objective for the eReader. With cell phones the wireless connectivity is an eReader objective. Cell phones also have multiplicity of functions including digital photography, keypad texting, and web searching. Again, the eReader must also aspire to multiple functions. Cell phones are the incubation niche for the eReader and its uses.

But there is one frontier exclusive to the eReader as it engenders the skills, the aesthetic, the technology and the scope of a new composite reading mode. Transcending parent reading modes in the verbal/visual, written and print domains and encompassing their children including radio, television, zines and audio and video playback, the eReader will define history's first fully composite reading mode.

So the future of the e-reader, when evolved, will not directly relate to the future of the book. These two decisive reading formats, the book and e-reader are on their own tangents into the history of communication. Their early interactions will dissipate and, in the future, we wonder why anyone would have considered an electronic book or a screen based text. These charming hybrids will shortly be impossible.

follow the reader

The few crossovers between books and e-readers are the same ones that crossed all the historical format transitions as well. These are reference works, textbooks, and wiki cosmographies. These genres are consulted in the format of talented individuals who memorize and maintain information and they are consulted in every other out of body format of transmission ever invented.

Electronic communication and digital research immediately distinguished itself in other, authentically new functions where search engines, multimedia linkage, instant connectivity and text processing expedients quickly emerged and were quickly adopted. While e-book advocates wait for their format to take off, screen based reading has already flown into history.

In a similar story the advent of printing did not distinguish itself as a technology for producing facsimile of manuscript. The revolution of printing was the proliferation of duplicates that enabled the arrangement of books into libraries everywhere. This authentic revolution in the transmission of culture may yet be undone by the new screen based reading mode. But then, following a dark era, libraries will need to be reinvented.