education, community colleges and finding more ways for people to constructively enter the economy. >> and, counselor. >> yes, i would concur with many of those points. i am grateful that i live in a state that has a governor in deval patrick and living in a country with president barack obama. i'm vigorously supporting him for all the reasons you just stated, in creating better access to both educational opportunities and health care which is eliminating all those other disparities. i just think it's really important that we not obsess about the 99% or the 47% and just remember that there are people behind all those percentages. and people who have been struggling and people living in poverty. we keep talking about the shrinking middle class, who are they joining? and so i want a president and a governor and a mayor that believes in making those critical investments in physical infrastructure and in people

that supports the role that everyone has to play in the economy including getting people in poverty on a pathway to self-sufficiency. that is just as important. >> round of applause for our panel. [applause] >> up next, booktv takes you to the fourth annual boston book festival for a panel called the future of reading. this is about an hour, 15 minutes. >> good afternoon. my name is amy ryan, president of the boston public library, and it is an honor and a pleasure to welcome you to the boston public library for the boston book festival. first of all, i'd like the to thank all the staff and particularly deborah porter, the executive director and founder of the boston book festival, for this amazing lineup this weekend of content-rich programs. [applause]

so you can imagine my intense interest in this program, the future of reading, and all of us in the library world are. so i'm looking forward to hearing your comments. and what i'd like to do now is introduce the moderator. [applause] >> it's my pleasure to be here, and i'd like to start by thanking debbie and her team for putting on such a great event. it's been wonderful to spend the day here. it's very exciting for me to be on this particular panel because it cuts to the heart of what this event is all about, reading and what the future of reading is. and i'm excited to have with me some of the most thoughtful people on this matter that i've seen, and i'll introduce them now. nicholas negroponte, the founder of one

>> and robert darnton is the direct every of the harvard university libraries and a professor at harvard university. [applause] so we're going the start out by

having each of the panelists give a four minute presentation on what they see as the future of reading, and we'll go into a discussion from there. and we'll start with nicholas. >> okay, thank you. i modestly suggested i go first because i wanted to talk about the basics, not particularly advocate one future or another. and in thinking about it over the years, i realize there's a very distinct difference between the future of words and the future of paper. and they get conflated. and then once you tease those apart, there's a very big difference in the general topic on the pooch of their ty -- on the future of narrative, whether the narrative, you know, loses some of the value and interest in long form because our attention spans have gone down or whether narrative is instead of one medium has multimedia and

then uses the brain differently. so i wanted to separate those and then say a word on media, again, in the very general sense. so many times people tell me, oh, we went from the tablet to the scroll to the book to we got maybe -- and we sort of -- and now we have another one called digital. rubbish. digital is not on the continuum of the others. it's the basic dna that for the first time allows us to represent this body that can then from those bits be turned into video or photography or images or words or sound or what have. or whatever. and also in a very general tone, the future of words themselves is a big -- they're not going to go away, and let's talk about the visual form more than the audio form for a moment.

they're represented by bits. and some people think digital books are new. digital books have basically been every book in the past 40 years is in digital form for a typesetter. and then it becomes undigital once it's on paper. but almost all of the books you've read in your life were phototypeset from a digital representation of the book. so that part isn't new. and the bits, what it takes to make a letter and then the number of bits and words and so on is very small. a novel is about eight million, maybe ten million bits. and when you click a photograph on your new high-resolution camera, you're taking about eight million bits. so you say, wow, what a difference it takes me four hours to read the ones in text form, but i can glance at those. so the ratio of bits is a very

fundamental issue, because we can store all the books. and then i wanted to make one last genre mark about e-books. there is no question that the form once they're all represented digitally should be at least distributed electronically because there's no wait, and there's no inventory, and they travel at the speed of light. and what's going to be the thing that tilts this is the fact that there are one billion new readers headed our way, humans who can read, in the next five years. and those billion people cannot be sent pieces of paper. it's not possible. you cannot mail paper to one billion readers, let alone update it and do all those things. but we're going to lose something. and one of the things we lose, people are very nostalgic, including me, when you have things called books, you have built into that the memory --

most people have libraries. when you walk into your library, you can remember when you read every book that you've read in that library. you can remember where it is on the shelf, you can probably remember the color of the spine, you can remember how heavy it is. so there are certain things that are going to disappear like they do with digital music. we don't have cds, we don't have -- but, again, you have to separate these. and can once you compartmentalize them and you realize that the basic dna is digital, then the future of reading is really high, but the future of paper is really low. that's my four minutes. great. perfect timing. [laughter] >> [inaudible] i have to have my powerpoint. >> go for it. >> who's the person -- >> it'll appear on the screen in a moment. >> okay, good. i don't want to take one second. you've heard of talks that are very brief, this is a -- [inaudible] [laughter]

the reality is a little different, i believe, than what nicholas is saying -- >> uh-oh. [laughter] >> oh, no, she didn't. >> i need someone to come here and show me where the -- >> clicker is here. >> oh, clicker. okay. i've lost 30 seconds on that one. [laughter] now, so how many of you heard ray a few minutes ago speak? so fantastic talk. when he was talking about pattern recognition, pattern recognition as a piece of the neocortex, this is something that i want to actually clarify for you a little bit in the story of the reading brain. i'm going to ask three questions. as a cognitive neuroscientist and as a member of the species who will steward, i believe, this next generation with these questions. first, can the evolution of the reading brain inform the future reading brain? can insights into the reading brain influence the future of

books, and can socrates and proost provide guide posts to both? what you see here are the circuits that are possible. before when you saw this, this is somewhat what ray was talking about. we build a circuit. my dear friend nicholas was saying the dna digital. no dna for reading. it is not natural. rather, what reading does is show us how the brain learns something new, how it creates a new circuit from old parts. and if you look at this, you're going to see how each writing system, in fact, uses a different circuit. now, the good news is that this shows us the extraordinary nature of neuroplasticity. but there's a cerebral rub. it also indicates to us there's no one reading brain. it's going to be very influenced not only by the writing system, but by the medium itself. and that's what i believe our

society is in this enormous transition. whatever words we use, a transition from a more literate, print-based society to a digital culture. how does that affect us? now, those of you who have read a little bit about natalie phillips' new work on jane austen, the brain, an english major looking into neuroscience, what she found is that the brain when it reads intensely -- what i call deep reading -- is, in fact, activating an extraordinary number of neurons. the realizing brain, however, can stop after 280 milliseconds and optionally give you a very nice but superficial surface reading. the ability to read in a deep fashion, to think about inference, to think about the print, to go beyond the tech to our own insights, this requires

not only extra milliseconds in that a brain, but it requires years of concentrated thinking and comprehensive skills -- comprehension skills. my major worry is that as we move into this medium, we are going to be changing the circuit in ways that we do not at this moment understand. we are lurching at this moment in the textbook industry towards digitizing everything without the evidence to say this is right for this time, this reader, etc. now, the advantages everyone in here knows. we're talking about massive information, and ray was extraordinary about that. but we're also talking about differences in how we comprehend potentially and think. here i go back to socrates. socrates didn't want us to read. [laughter] he was wrong. [laughter] but he said something that was

indelibly imprinted in my mind when i saw him say that he feared that the permanent seeming nature of print would give the illusion of truth and create no ambition in the young beyond the superflutie of knowledge. is that superficial reading the new threat that we face as a species, as the next generation of readers? will it, in fact, short circuit the brain? there's no question it will change it. so my question, i go actually into proof to answer it. and there's no answer yet. like nicholas, we don't have answers. but we have a moment in which i believe absolutely we must pause to think about what we want to preserve as we add the advantages of digital reading in all its many contexts. proost said something in a book that no one reads.

[laughter] and the book is called on reading. have you read it? [laughter] even should read this book. it's extraordinary. but one of the passages that is most memorable for me is he talks about more than any neuroscientist or educator, what is at the heart of reading? we feel quite truly that our wisdom begins with the knowledge of the author. that which is the end of their wisdom appears to us as but the beginning of ours. i believe that our children who are becoming inoured to what -- inyou ared o -- inured to what we might call continuous detention in what they read, there is a danger in them for the medium propensities to make them more and more superficial readers which is the last thing we want.

so my real question is how can we create a truly biliterate plane? how can we create deep readers? how can we use all our intelligence to preserve what is best in that expert reading brain as we move to the advantages of this -- [inaudible] thank you. [applause] >> robert, you're up next. robert? >> yes? >> you're next. >> i'm next. okay. yes, i confess i haven't read a lot of proost, not that particular book, but it's very edifying, and i find myself in agreement with it. i'm not sure about the rubbish comment, however. and i should try to explain, because it seems to me that maryanne notwithstanding, we don't really know what reading

is when it goes on under our nose. we're beginning to know. we understand more about the hemispheres of the brain and the way synapses give off messages and so on, but we're far away from this mystery which is the actual process of reading. however, we are in the middle of a time of tremendous change, and i don't think it's an exaggeration to say that there is a new orientation towards texts that has already developed, and it is pointing us in a new direction. but i'm an historian, so whenever i try to figure out where we're headed, naturally, i look backwards or at least into a kind of rearview mirror that i hope will tell me something about trends in the past that can inform our sense of where we're going now. so i do think that these technological revolutions if you want to call them in the past mattered, but they are few and

far between, centuries between. the important one in a way was a shift from reading by turning pages instead of unrolling scrolls. that is the invention of the codex somewhere around the time of the birth of christ. that's a difference in the way our sensory ap apparatus works,e way our brain takes in messages that are inscribed. a second, very mysterious change happened later. we've noticed that words began to be spaced in medieval man you scripts. before that, believe it or not, they were all run together. why? because the unit of perception wasn't the word at all, it was something connected with oral communication. so cicero would have a few wax tablets, and he would look for units of meaning that were not congruent with words.

so reading ceased to be something that was primarily oral and something that was done primarily in groups, sometime in the middle ages. the experience itself became different. now, certainly the invention of movable type or reinvention of it by guttenberg made an enormous difference, a difference really of the availability of reading matter on paper. paper only became available widely in the west in the 14th century when it's combined with movable type in the 15th century, suddenly the democratization of reading is becoming a serious possibility. and later with mass education and increased wealth, we're moving into a new world many which the experience of reading is very widely shared. but all of these changes, it seems to me, are -- i won't say less important than that of the

digital revolution, but now reading is, i think, fundamentally different. and my students at least who are born digital, they're digital natives, don't read daily newspapers on paper. they switch from one medium to another rapidly. i wouldn't say their attention span is desperately short, but i have a friend who teaches in the university of virginia, and he says he cannot any longer assign a novel by henry james. it's just too long. [laughter] there are too many big words. [laughter] and i think the frequency of the use of, you know, of tweets and twittering and that sort of thing is eroding our language of adjectives and adverbs. so the language itself is changing along with our attention span for it. you know, it used to be that there was a fundamental

difference between reading a book, having a conversation on the telephone, going to the movies. now you do them all with the same physical material subseparate tunnel. and so there is a kind of infusion in the experience of communication that didn't exist before. i'm not very good at prof sizing the past, but i do feel that technology is driving a fundamental change in the way we apprehend texts. we don't know how far that's going to take it, we don't know what the hemispheres of the brain are going to do with it, but we do know a little bit of the sociology that surrounds it. and i have pluses and minuses like you. i think we are losing deep, long-term reading. the loneliness of the long distance reader is something that is very interesting. [laughter]

but maybe we're gaining things. i mean, the last book i wrote actually appeared simultaneously in print and on the line. it's about communication in the 18th century street songs. it's a academic monograph that none of you will probably want to read, but the point is that you can hear the songs by reading the book, and then you tune in online, and you hear them to the actual music of the time. so this is listening to the past in a new way. so that's the way i feel positive. that is, there are new possibilities opening up through the electronic book, and there are losses through the way electronic media are being used. what the balance is between those two is hard to say, so i'm eager to hear what the next panelist has to contribute. [laughter] >> that's great. cheryl? [applause]

>> thank you. i wish i had the, i wish i had the answers. i, i represent, actually, a traditional publisher, so the perspective that i'll bring is really that of sort of the business of reeding, if you will -- reading, if you will. and in that regard, i am in agreement with so many things that have been said and certainly i think it's when you think about twitter, i don't think i've heard a five syllable word on twitter, so i think that sort of thing is becoming lost. but from the business of publishing, i think we're at such an interesting time, and it is really my belief that we are in a sea change, a paradigm shift, you know, insert sort of overused word here. that's exactly where we are. and, you know, as publishers we have to think about how we're adapting to this. one of the observations i would

say is that the shift to digital, if you will, has created a power shift. and i think a lot of the power, if you will, has shifted to you, to the reader. a quick slide we could put up, but it's just a couple of images, so if we can't get it up, it's, it's no problem. but really sort of four key principles that i want to share. the future of reading, and i'd actually say even sort of the presence of reading -- i'll see if this goes anywhere. okay. it's becoming like a boundless, borderless, personalized and social all at once. so what i mean by boundless is a little pun there as well. we're not just talking about the unbinding of a physical book, but we're talking about the infinite choice that readers have, the likes of which, you know, we've never seen before. how do you want to find the

content that you want to read, how do you want to ingest it? do you like paper? do you like long form? do you like shorter bits? do you like theories? do you like rich media? do you want to experience this with the audio as you mentioned and some forms of content are just so well suited to that. that presents tremendous possibilities but also, i think, for a publisher tremendous challenges in figuring out, you know, sort of where to make those investments and how to create, um, the experience that you, the reader, want. borderless, this is a really, really interesting one, and i think the we talk even a year from now -- i think if we talk even a year from now we will see a very, very different market internationally for e-books than we do today, i think -- there we go, i'll try to go back one. sort of this borderless nature. the access, the unprecedented

access that readers have to works that are being published in other countries and other languages and to be able to have instantaneous access to these things, i think, is sort of mind-boggling. and the access is so immediate. personalization, i think, is very interesting. i think it can be done very poorly, and i think it can be done very well. readers, again, are in control here. from small changes. at a publishing house, we put so much just care and feeding and painstaking detail into the design of a book, the font choices. on an e-reader, you might change that. you might not want that font. that is really uncomfortable if for a publicker. [laughter] and really -- for a publisher. and really liberating perhaps for a reader. so how do we deal with those changes of control, if you will. and that's even a small one. you can b think about readers

customizing the delivery, um, of content to them and really defining what they want their reading experience to be. and social is a much overused word, but certainly so, so true and so applicable here to how it's changing the business of publishing. you go to publishing conferences, and you hear the word "discovery." it's all about discovery. where is the discovery of books happening. in a lot of ways it's happening just the way it always has, which is you're talking to fends friends, you're recommending books to one another. but the means of doing that is just so rapid. you're discovering authors, you're having a more personal relationship with authors that was, that was never possible before. so the impact of social networks has really had a huge impact. books are very, um, very personal but also, obviously, lend themselves very much to discussion. there are technologies that allow discussions each within a

book. you know, do readers want that? some may, some may not. so really it's about thinking about all of these paradigms as a publisher, and quite honestly, figuring out then how does, you know, how does this work? in a situation where, you know, i believe we do have a paradigm shift in discovery, in consumption, how this content is consumed. and as i said, in control and how the control, i think in a lot of way, is shifting to the reader. compelling content never goes out of style. it all starts, as your slide said, with the author, with a great story, with great content. it's our job to bring that to readers. but we have to develop new skills, we have to get new tools, we have to develop some new partnerships and experiment with some new business models, and more than anything as publishers i think adopt a new mindset to be successful. [applause]

>> [inaudible] >> what's up? [laughter] that was a whole pile of brilliance. we heard that there are one billion readers coming right for us, and i find that frightening. [laughter] i want to know exactly when they're going to show up and where. [laughter] so i can be out of the way. we heard about biliteracy. i'm not sure america's ready for that. [laughter] given the current political climate. we heard about kids being unable or unwilling to read henry james and the erosion of our language, i blame honey boo boo for this. [laughter] i think we built that. and we heard about font nazis which -- [laughter] i want you to use that as a hashtag. that is my gift to you in concert. [laughter] our business leader. i'm talking as an author who recently published a book in dead tree form despite the

fact -- [laughter] i murdered a lot of trees. i just -- they look at me funny, and they make me angry. so i've been a blogger and an online, you know, person, a real person, too, like 3-d space, but it was an odd choice for me to go ahead and go with a printed book given where my origins are in terms of expression. and it was a great choice. this is a book. i think there were some fun things that we did in the process of taking advantage of a lot of what you've heard so far. the book is a memoir, but there's also a provocation and a conversation baked into it by design to take advantage of the fact that there is this back and forth with the reader, not just a broadcast at their faces. so i asked a series of black experts, they were black people, questions like when did you first realize you were black, how black are you, did you ever wish you weren't black? [laughter] and that led to a very interesting set of commentaries. i also, you know, in the process of putting the book together, i didn't forget my bit-of related

roots -- bit-related roots, and i shot all the intervies with a two-camera setup and an independent awd crow feed. i tweeted the process, i tried to capture the essence beyond my own thoughts on the matter as i could and represent that. so there's a video built into versions of the book. we marketed it heavily using video to talk about the book and solicit people's opinion on some of these questions. ..

which captures the range of all the action. my favorite is on the far right. i can be black, i've got a stronach, i'm done. [laughter] someone argued that my publisher and harper i propose going all-digital and do a print image or maybe it would've left behind half my readership in terms of the sales generated. a think of myself is digital, but the world isn't there yet and i would've opportunities like this is a physical provocation of conversation where we see someone holding the book in the public. we flip the book that are 50% white on black, 50 white on black. it's an advanced racial profiling algorithm.

black people don't be mad if you get the white vote. so that was a tactic. the most radical experiment is part of this advertisement pictured of the book in public using a web sharing software that allows or people with remote presentations and tech support due to the suggestion of a writer from a shared the shared my screen as i wrote several chapters in the editing process. i am a performer. but it turned writing into performance, which is an extreme degree such that people were asking to take control of my computer and code right with me, which was not the idea. there is a chat room and you can see how many people out there and what they are saying and i had to minimize that, but i went back after-the-fact and captures some of their commentary and they said it gives me a connection with the author. how cestus does one have to be?

very self obsessed. and i skipped half of -- sorry person backstage pretending to be me. someone used semicolons, which is weird because i didn't know how to do this; five. this is the best comment that occurred in notches on my boat. this is about comments on the internet. in the history of text on screen. user 256. but i love the idea of regular black. so i'll close on this. prebuilt ace to the team that helps collect you to make me look smart. we figured out still somewhat bulbous access to information as an author and never found out before. for examples, wednesday is the

least racial day of the week. klotzbach clock back >> out of a the rest of the panelists were to follow that. that's why he was last. nicholas, i want to start with you. use the word dna talking about the future of digital future of reading. the product is going to look entirely different than a book. it is not going to be an e-book in reading is not going to look like reading. can you paint a picture of what things will look like 50, 20 years from now? be my guess in the following way. there is a 50 euros game that the media is the message and that's over a long time ago. the message is the message. when i say dna permit encoded as

the atomic structure from which things come. once you have a represented and it's really the representation, you can then take those words, we're talking about words, the visual representation of words right from how the machine grind them on the tablet. you can do certain things. what i was trying to separate a sense you have been in that representation, not only is the distribution very different and goes all over the world come you can do things like automatically translate. you can do stuff that transforms it and then you put it into things, which guess what, me look and feel like paper that's comfortable. you can hold it, you know where you are. the pagination has said any unassertive how many chunks in the chunking of the end where you are. all these things are very

important. when we see the future of reading, the title of this session, if we really mean by reading the consumption of words, it's never been higher for kids and adults. voice is going down from the consumption of where it's going up. but we don't think of it as reading because what we need, the subcode of the word reading is reading things that have meaning, that at beginning and end, have a narrative fiction. so when we see breeding, there's actually -- it's a very subject to word what you mean a kind of reading. and when the attention span goes down our kids are not really news the newspaper, i don't think it is because of its

being. the digital world has changed or life in many with function of word and consumption of music is higher than ever before. there's lots of things changed because we are digital. >> always feel free to chime in. >> nicholas and i worked together, so don't take the following comment to be antagonistic. the consumption of words is one thing. the comprehension of words and the use of syntax that all of us who studied chomsky in various ways realized that complexity is i believe changing. so consumption doesn't, for me, equally the deepest form of reading that i believe the species absolutely needs to handle the bits of information. t.s. eliot said, some of you

will know this better, but where is with someone they have so much knowledge? for his knowledge when we it's a much information? i am after all three and i worry is that this consumption actually obfuscates what is an insidious erosion of our capacity to think deeply about those words. [inaudible conversations] >> what i would like to hear -- i think mary maryanne and robere done a good job of the accessibility to the extreme commentary in a sea of distraction that people and the sea of destruction causes things like shorter attention span, less critical thought and so on. what i would like to you for the rest of you is a positive

picture other than accessibility. is there anything other than the experience itself? >> i want to return to chunk of vacation if i can build on your birthday are. i have a new thing and call being cultivated weight is attacking comedy started. i work at a company called data works in new york. a social reading company allows you to extract clips from the books in the articles and essays you read and share those and tag them and match them and create a playlist of words in the way we've done with music and video clips. there's another company called brief note that iran is at a conference last week overseas and they are allowed -- allowing. maybe shouldn't the sensei said this but though. thinking of synopses and new connections we make, the book has a massive chunk did not

allow for a level of insight so easily to connect this paragraph from both a two sentence from both the. you have to be in a lab somewhere are dedicating your life to the type this. and now we have every mix ability and perhaps new knowledge capable out of that. so that is one super positive thing i see. the other brought against by a book when i see people doing, the book is a good thing. the story is that thing. there's different windows into that world. one of the, what if they twitter feed, one of the talk. what is the silent part inside of someone said that's more disposable amicable and shareable. there is an unforeseen amount of magic and positive things in concert to pedantic, versus having a book on a shelf somewhere this year for a even know your neighbor was also

loving and feeling the same way about it. maybe you guys get together, have beautiful babies. [laughter] >> you've had a lot of experience from being an academic to be in a library in to been on the boards of publishers who having written books yourself. what would you like to see? but is the ideal kind of future that you would like to see in the world of the future? >> well, i think i should just write on wednesdays may be. [laughter] so i'm happy to go the road -- no comment this to be a future just a pose of wednesdays.

but i do share mary ann's worry about the loss of law, concentrated coming deep in evenflo reading. you're in a rush to get from place to place. so that sounds negative. the positive thing to me, which outweighs the negative is what i call the democratization of access to culture. it's here, it's now in its house of the future. most human beings were so far removed from the world of reading and books through most of history that we can barely grasp the possibilities today. so i mean we have a lot of information in the 17th century. most people didn't own books. those who did had two books come in the and pilgrim's progress and they read them over and over again. now, thanks to the internet, the cultural heritage of this

country is going to be within the grasp of everyone in the country in the near future. we are creating something called the digital public library of america, which will make all books in principle free to all readers. but that is a thrilling thing. it was just a utopian dream on the part of the founding fathers. we can make it happen and we will make it happen. when i look in the future i can't predict exactly, but access to knowledge is going to be democratized to an enormous degree. the >> it's not limited to the united states. it's a really big change. maryanne said that we worked together. and what we did to get there, maryanne's team chose apps for a tablet that we brought into two villages in africa but have

never seen the word and never seen a written word or they bought a bottle. no literate adults, no literate children. they're about it that's not from this tablet. many children were left in the village enclosed boxes. no instructions, no person. within four minutes, the kids turned on the power, never seen it on off switch. within four days come and they were using 47 amps per child. within two weeks, they were singing abc songs. and within five months, they have to enter it. -- packed android. [laughter] we don't know what that they will pass the maryanne test for deep reading in a year or two years, but we'll see. but i don't know if you have a slide. you can show the last slide. i think the democratization you

are talking about is so profound. i'm what i refer to a billion new readers, most of them are in countries where the touristy is extremely, extremely high. >> i mention the digital public library of america is for the world. we live in a global society and the nationalist approach makes no sense at all. >> that is the site and is one of the most compelling flights i've ever seen that kids using tablets for education because remember there are no teachers, no adults. nobody reads, nobody writes. if you look at the kids, mary ann and i don't know exactly what the kid on the right is doing. we are not sure. but the other five, look at them. they all have tablets in the kid on the far right is using the other kids tablet. talk about collaborative learning. we'll see. it's an experiment.

but if they learn how to read, they can read to learn. >> i will say one thing and addition. it has been one of the greatest experiences of my whole life and i think nicholas sorry to bring a body of knowledge about reading to the 100 million children around the world who have no schools and teachers. we don't know the future of these children, but i actually believe in this project. we are uncovering some of the very potential solutions to the problems that we are most worried about. for example, i actually think we may in the future, not now, that may be able to use the medium itself to work on the development of inferential and illogical deductive skills. so it is by no means a binary transition we are in.

i don't think any of us believe that. it's inevitable what we do about that. this is truly one of the great projects. >> a quick question for nicholas. how did they hack android? >> well, nobody snuck into the village to help them. they hacked it because i don't know if he was at m.i.t., disable the cameras on the tablet and they figured out that they should basically hack the system to enable the cameras so they can take pictures. they've never seen a camera, so it's not clear to me how they figured out they should enable the, but that's what they hacked. >> so i want to talk about the future of institutions that rely

on the book. things like libraries and publishers. before that i want to us one quick question for mary ann and robert. i believe this might've been michael mcluhan and. you can correct me if i'm wrong. it was a sense of loss of oral culture at the time that books were introduced. in particular, words that are disembodied make people stop thinking critically and houseless context and instead acceptors because they are disembodied. how's that concerned than play-doh? has it been overblown and how did it relate to the current concerns you are thinking about now with regards to the digital world? >> in mcluhan's case, he was a romantic frankly who loved oral culture and sell books as what

he called a cold medium so that there was something in him that wanted somehow to recover that lost oral culture. and he imagined it could happen to television, which he saw as a hot medium. well, i agree that mcluhan's ideas are fun to read now, they're reading they are obsolete. in a world where children can break into boxes and begin manipulating touch is on machines that are utterly foreign to them, that is a world that is on track to in mcluhan's philosophy. but what about disembodied words? it's very hard to imagine any words that are disembodied. if it is oral communication, what we are doing now, there is a setting, a context that gives meaning to read the exchange thoughts through words. if they are words printed on a page, again, the context, the

design of the page, the way they are et cetera is part of the communication progress. i don't imagine any disembodiment at all. but there's something about electronic screens and pixels that i think is fundamentally different from words embedded in paper because printing embedded words, you could just slap them on the surface of the paper. know what that something is, i'm not entirely sure. but i do see a kind of flickering quality to the way people are construing meaning when they look at screens instead of deal with print on pages. but i submit that to you. do you feel that experience is significantly different or just another way of doing the same thing? >> i want to say first that even though coming here the cost of scientists by no means come and

i go back to your work history, by no means is descriptive reductionism explanation of the mystery that we can see in the differences in the brain when we listen to a word in the context verses we read it. and the elements i see as part of the mastery is both we bring to taxed in the time we take to bring everything we know. that's the proustian principle actually. had we are a everything we can to that word? will we take the time to do that in order to literally go beyond the text? that is to meet the great beauty of the red word. it is not in opposition to the oral word. i also believe that the digital presented word is yet another ntt and i don't think we

understand it sufficiently at all. it's the future of the present and we are studying it sufficiently to understand that transition. >> ops question was a little different and i think the better is that we used to think of displays as what you are seeing here, where's the late sensibly. but the kindle change to that end especially peak at the new one with the white is white and the black is pretty black, that is reflect the plate, the same as ink on paper to your perceptible system. put it in the torah, run out of battery in the image is still there. it really behaves like paper. they will be more and more displaced to look like an behaves like paper and have some of those qualities. right now you are staring at a 100-watt lightbulb.

that's not pleasant and you don't want to get in bed with a 100-watt lightbulb. but on the other hand, reading in bed a kindle is better than reading a book for a lot of reasons. i'm not struggling to sort of turn the pages and i could make the whole story why it's much more comfortable if i'm going in a direction where it's more comfortable to read on something like a kindle than the actual book. >> how hard do you struggle to turn the pages? [laughter] >> in upcoming advocates a kindle because you can do it with one hand. it is a one-handed reading medium. actually it's pretty good. books are not one-handed. you need two hands.

>> it's very important. you need to hold on. >> i want to go to the publishers in the world. to be publishers to take her about distribution, production and provide the event. the series services for them to take a very hefty cut. now you don't need production because you can put it out on the web. you don't need an advance because it doesn't cost that much to write. or they can convince you to something they kick starter. he don't have the distribution because you put it on the left. what is the changing world publishers in this new world where production and distribution and financing are starting to be taken by different technologies? >> so there is a lot in there. i actually disagree fundamentally with a couple of

things. their production, distribution, cost and tasks involve whether it's digital or physical. i think it's a very common misunderstanding. it's very easy to think that digital is free and it's not. i mean, there's a lot of backlash over some of the early books. we've got an extensive backlist converted. there is a conversion process that takes place. in the early days of the richest literally scanning books to get them into an e.u. format, they just were not replicated about properly. the first of all, there is still a production, not just cost, that entire neukom can see around production of the digital

book. i'm actually looking at our head of children's publishing. she's smiling because we have these conversations all the time. when you talk about children's books and how produce something that is for color that it is gorgeous illustration that the author intended. >> sure it is so mature for the first copy because everyone directories free because there's no marginal cost to make 10 million copies. >> you do taper printer binding. >> marginal cost of paper printing and binding. >> and shipping. >> and warehouse. >> no, not necessarily. there is a deep infrastructure that is needed to support digital operations. the other thing i mentioned about the state of publishing

today is if you talk about the future of reading and publishing, where he backs going to go, will it be a swapping of physical for media to happen in music for example and film, photography that is. in books, i believe there is not going to be that swapping out 100% physical for digital. children's books are great example where there's a strong desire on how to slip through with your child. not that is today. five, 10 years from now we might seek out a big difference. today publishers are in the world where they can't be jumping tracks from the physical to the digital and truly supporting businesses. you're continuing to support the business, underlying a third business issuer cultivating,

which is getting to a place where we are not talking about the conversion of e-books. merely taking what used to be in physical form, but the creation of digital products, the creation from creating a digital product from conception. something that was initially conceived with the author, developed with the author to be completely new digital product. so the role of publisher in that scenario because by the one thing you had forgotten on your list of a publishers do, it's really the heart of what we do. its editorial. it's breaking that story, shaping that story with the author to bring it to market in the best possible way. that still exists in even more exciting way when you talk about the creation of digital products. >> shaping the story may be the only role actually because

there's almost nothing left. [laughter] >> and went to get much on the clock mine. but seriously, you're wrong. we see this as the other side of our partnerships. she's not my publisher, but she is a publisher. i had a very explicit arrangement with harper about who is doing what here. again because they came from a digital foundation are skeptical of everything. i could do that, i could do that. i've got spellcheck. what if you got? and it turns out it was wrong about a few eggs, i was right about a few things that i learned a ton in the process. in terms of the editorial, having an editor was great. i could have hired a great writer/editor to help you through the process. i was grateful to have the support of the person at

harvard. to support the digital age are completely. i basically offer free advertising across the nation. i can't buy that. no single person can afford to distribute 10, 15, 20,000 books into hundreds of thousands of bookstores and libraries around the world in digital overlay doesn't do that. you cut off the physical marketing. so when they ran out of physical books, my e-book sales spikes. there is a level of demand and you can see the charts switched over. but they would've gotten a physical one. the actual marketing of the theme, me and my campaign manager who i met through the admin built this internet army digital plan and harper did the more traditional big media play in and got me on msnbc about these things. that's enough working and that's

a rolodex game. there's a finite amount of people to make that sort of thing happening. the flood of authors can't pull that off on their own. so i found out i was wrong the publishers are useless. and i was glad for it because i want to make sure we are both doing something. and i learned a lot about the excitement, the upside and limit the individual authors or authors who create their own digital presence. but there is a flood of readers. there's also a flood of writing and words, which is more books than ever. how do you discover, how do you discern, how do you convince somebody that you are worth their time. attention is the currency and whether you spend it watching a cat play a fiddle on youtube or reading about the future of

blackness, that's an equal choice to some people. and we are just competing for pixels, real estate and there's so many extra writers peaking for attention that a publisher who knows what they're doing can add a little extra weight on the individual kick starter on someone who's got a law platform. there is little to it. >> i think that is true, but you are an exception because you wrote a bestseller. the shelf life of the book i'm sure cheryl whitcomb for is a matter of weeks or days than most books don't make it into bookstores. we are living in a different world. i agree in this world the publishers are crucial. i'm really worried about booksellers because that middle person is beginning to disappear and outfits like amazon are transforming the way books to

reach readers. there is a movement in the other direction that very few people have noticed. there were about 350,000 new titles published in the u.s. last year. that's a 6% increase over the previous year and paper. the industries are doing well although publishers are wringing their hands and say that the end of the world. but compare with that hundred 50,000, 700,000 books were self published. twice as many books are produced by independent authors who put them online and have something to say. you might claim there is a lot of garbage among the 700,000 books, but there's a lot of good stuff as well. so i really feel if you look up the publishing industry, i don't know if you would agree we are witnessing a transformation in its structure. system of the middle

intermediaries are moving out and somehow the public is moving in in strange ways. it used to be set books were written for the general reader. now they are written by the general reader. >> that's the beauty of the democratization as you see and videos, and music and everything that when you have like three parties, whether it's broadcast a publishers are record labels, they have to shoot widely. and you miss a lot of nuance and not in ways to represent people in ways to cater to the demands. when you share shoot for this, i'm just going to record these 10 people, it is scaled down and away the previous industry could not support because of the physical scale to manufacture hundreds of thousands. >> we only have 10 minutes

because baratunde is to go sign some autographs. >> i want to point out that there's a lot of people thrown under the bus on this panel. [laughter] >> i want to ask one final question before we open to one or two questions. the related question to what are the publishers, what is the rule for publisher in in the future? you mention in one of your essays that libraries have never been a place for storage of hooks. they've been a place for learning. i wanted to get from you but these places start to look like his books become more and more distaste. >> here we are in the boston public library. the place is full. libraries are becoming, i believe, nerve centers for intellectual exchange for sociability. it is a place where you go and not just the main library, the branch libraries in new york. there's 87 branch libraries in

the new york public library and they are powerful neighborhood centers. what do people do their? they do lots of things. debris books, they read magazines, take out videos and talk with one another. to interact and they get help from librarians with new skills and services. also people go to places like those to find jobs. we've got a lot of unemployed in this country and they don't find jobs by reading the want ads in the daily newspaper because the daily newspaper also is dying. want ads are on line, but there's a lot of poor people out there who don't have computers, who don't have jobs they need help you to go to the neighborhood library where there is a computer, there is a librarian to show them how to use the computer and present themselves, to get work.

so we put up on the camp and about jobs, jobs, jobs. but i say go to libraries if you want to really have an answer to that. [applause] so i don't have a complete answer to what you are saying, but my basic point is although i see about it these intermediaries beat that such as bookshops, which are the centers for intellectual as they once were, idc's libraries, especially public libraries in small towns and cities is developing a more vital role than they ever had. >> could they ever exist without physical books? >> i doubt it because this is looking at the ways students study at harvard. maybe they are not typical of the whole american population. i agree. when library is open 24 hours a day. we watched the students there.

they are sitting in groups. they've got books on the table. they also have computers. they have coffee cups. they can he and libraries, which used to be on drugs to. there is a new electricity in the air. now the old library, we just sat on a table and concentrated have its advantages as well. i honestly feel that the presence of books provides a threatening that matters. i can't see what libraries will look like 20 years from now, but i think books are around and will stay around. >> we have time for two questions from the audience. >> you raise your hand first. >> i could probably speak loud enough without this.

this is an excellent presentation. i'm glad i decided to come here this afternoon. i've been asking myself the question for quite a while and i'm hoping one of you can answer. every sunday i read "the new york times" book review and on the bestseller list on both fiction and nonfiction side. on the fiction side, there were three volumes written by pseudonym that i understand are mostly read by women. on the nonfiction side, there are books written by a gentleman who i send e-mails to address to fellow. why are these two authors of best-selling authors in the united states currently? >> could someone clarify the second author. >> you don't know bill o'reilly? >> i couldn't hear you. >> he has 10 hours a week on tv.

that's the way i understand he's so successful. i do understand why, but -- [laughter] >> i can try to explain it. as i said before in terms of discovery, it's an incredible word-of-mouth -- i won't speak to bill o'reilly. i think that's -- sorry? [inaudible] >> but on the 50 shades of gray folks, greedy folks primarily, it is rapid word-of-mouth. i wish i knew how to explain that. it i believe started as something of a self published. someone put something out there and someone latched onto a. i don't have a good answer to that question other than talking

about earlier with communities in eastern people talking. maybe it has something to do with the fact that you can read it on e.u. reader and no one knows what you are reading. >> from a quantitative perspective, the volume of sales that takes to be on that list is lower than you might think. i got on the list for two weeks of the range of 1500 to 2000 within the measures 70. according to funky "new york times" algorithms. to me that's not a lot of books. people just don't buy books. that's the first answer to your question is far fewer people buy books than you think. so bestseller confers the significance that is overstated versus what the raw numbers might actually indicate. so you get it a political settlement clinton has a biography is truly massive.

the week to week numbers you're talking about if you get on the list is like 800 depending on the list are talking about. >> if i could add a quick footnote to that, i've created bestseller list going back 200 years. [laughter] >> you haven't said anything wrong -- not one thing. >> it is not a zero-sum gain. [laughter] but it's very interesting. there are authors on this bestseller list that no one has ever heard of. it's not voltaire and rousseau. these people have disappeared. [laughter] >> that might've been wrong.

>> okay, i'll be quiet. >> i would like to add a word from neuroscience, this is not gray matter. >> last question. you right here in the front. >> i selected today 14 samples on my ipaq. my first question to mary and his defense just reading the sample is coming deep reading of the sample would be enough? i would like to argue most of the books are yes. i think we will change how we write books. i think it was also surprising to me that we talked about deep reading or different kinds of brains for reading. the completely not mentioning to me when talking about the writing experience. i think many of us because of digital are becoming deep writers and they think as a

result, we are deeply reading and a whole new way when writing is completely interconnected and i wonder if there's some psychology that relate to that in setting that as well. >> i truly don't know, but i will nevertheless speak. [laughter] i will really say only it is my only real hope that by raising these questions that we are really influencing both the deep reading in the deep writing. like my colleagues, i have received one message after another. not the psychology department, but from english departments around the country saying our students are unable, aren't voted to renege century syntax and more difficult 20th century. so i'm wondering myself, what do we do as writers to meet up? that's another