In Pursuit of a Better Book

To embrace e-books is to embrace change, to accept that books are collections of words and ideas, to believe that the form factor of a book is not sacred.

For a book is “a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together,” according to the New Oxford American Dictionary. An e-book, meanwhile, is merely a collection of words in a file, a book only if you squint. It is words, one after another, with no permanence, no sense of length or depth aside from a scrollbar or reading percentage. It is impermanent, flexible, a reading jack-of-all-trades, the farthest thing possible from sewn pages.

E-books, if anything, have more in common with their earlier cousin, the scroll. As Tim Urban discovered when trying to find the optimal way to read his What’s Our Problem eBook, “The best e-book experience … is Apple Books > iPad > sepia > vertical scroll.”  Nothing could be closer to a reincarnated scroll—perhaps a more fitting metaphor for electronic texts than the book.

E-books have always felt like they’re missing something. They’re lacking what Glenn Fleishman coined as “bookiness”: “The essence that makes someone feel like they’re using a book.” Bookiness is the heft, the aroma of paper and ink, the sensation of flipping through pages.

The harder e-books try to imitate a book—Apple Books’ paper-like page turn animations, Kindle’s estimated page numbers, and PDF documents’ faithful-to-print page layouts—the worse they feel. No amount of skeuomorphic animations and layout can make up for the slightly off-kilter feeling in e-books when the typography and margins are a bit off and page numbers change on a whim.

We made e-books in the image of books, and in a head-to-head competition on bookiness, the e-book will always come up short. “E-books are digital, but beyond that they’re not much different than books,” remarked tech analyst Ben Thompson in 2015, and maybe that’s been their problem all along.

What if we had it wrong? What if ideas weren’t meant to be bound between covers, locked away in inky, typeset pages? What if the book was only one stage in the evolution of knowledge storage, and now it’s time to reinvent the long-form text?

What if we start over, and remake the book in the image of technology?