Chapter 2: Bits and Books
Originally published by Henry Holt and Company 1999. Published on KurzweilAI.net May 15, 2003.
WHAT
. . . are things that think?
books that can change into other books
•
musical instruments that help beginners
engage and virtuosi do more
•
shoes that communicate through
body networks
•
printers that output working things
instead of static objects
•
money that contains behavior
as well as value
The demise of the book has been planned for centuries. This came
first by fiat, with bannings and burnings, and more recently by
design, with new media promising to make old books obsolete. Today's
book-of-the-future is the CD-ROM, offering video and sounds and
cross-references to enhance ordinary text. Who would ever want to
go back to reading a book that just has words?
Just about everyone. The state of the book business can be seen
at the Frankfurt book fair, the annual event where the publishing
world gathers to buy and sell books. It dates all the way back to
the fifteenth century, shortly after the development of movable
metal type created the need for a new kind of information marketplace.
Approaching the end of the millennium the fair is flourishing, with
hundreds of thousands of books and people on display. The only exception
is the short lines and long faces in the hall displaying books on
disk. People are voting with their fingers.
You don't need to look beyond the book you're holding to understand
why. Think about its specifications. A book:
- boots instantly
- has a high-contrast, high-resolution display
- is viewable from any angle, in bright or dim light
- permits fast random access to any page
- provides instant visual and tactile feedback on the location
- can be easily annotated
- requires no batteries or maintenance
- is robustly packaged
A laptop meets exactly none of those specifications. If the book
had been invented after the laptop it would be hailed as a great
breakthrough. It's not technophobic to prefer to read a book; it's
entirely sensible. The future of computing lies back in a book.
Isn't it curious that a book doesn't need a backlight? A laptop
screen requires a power-hungry lamp, and even so isn't legible in
bright light or from an angle. Under those same circumstances a
book continues to look great, and the reason why is surprisingly
interesting.
The light in a laptop starts its journey in a fluorescent tube
behind the display. It's guided by a panel that spreads the light
across the screen, losing some away from the screen. The light then
passes through a polarizing filter that transmits the part of the
light wave that is oriented in one direction, while absorbing the
rest of it. Next come the control electrodes and then the liquid
crystal. This is a fluid that can rotate the orientation of the
light wave based on a voltage applied by a transistor, which absorbs
still more light. Finally the light passes through color filters
and a final polarizer, each taking its cut out. The result is that
most of the light is wasted inside the display. The fraction that
trickles out must then compete with the ambient light around the
display to be seen. And since the light that does emerge must make
its way through this obstacle course, it continues on in the same
direction straight out, leaving very little to be seen at an angle
to the display.
A piece of paper takes a much more sensible approach. The fibers
that make up a sheet are actually translucent. Light striking the
paper gets bent as it passes through a fiber, and since there are
so many fibers this happens many times in many directions. The result
of all this scattering is that the light spreads through the paper
much like the spread of a drop of ink, eventually leaking back out.
And just as the shape of a blob of spreading ink doesn't depend
much on the angle at which a pen is held, the light comes out of
the paper in all directions, independent of how it arrived at the
paper. This phenomenon, called optical weak localization,
is what makes paper (or a glass of milk) appear to be white. It's
a very efficient system for converting light of most any color and
orientation into uniform background illumination for text on the
page. Crucially, like an aikido master redirecting an incoming attacker,
this mechanism takes advantage of the light already in a room rather
than trying to overpower it the way a backlight does.
In the Media Lab, as I started spending time with publishing companies
as well as computer companies, I was struck by how strange it is
to replace paper with displays that are guaranteed to be bulkier,
take more power, and look worse. If paper is such a good system,
why not continue to use it? The one advantage that a liquid crystal
panel has over a sheet of paper is that it can change. Joe Jacobson
came to the Media Lab to fix that.
He found that the key to making smart paper is a process called
microencapsulation. This process grows tiny shells of one
material around a core of another one. A familiar success of microencapsulation
is carbonless copy paper. It used to be that to make a copy of a
receipt when it was written, one had to slide in a sheet of an invariably
messy paper that had an ink on it that could be transferred by writing
on it, or touching it, or holding it, or rubbing it on your clothes.
Now it's possible to get a copy simply by writing on what looks
like an ordinary piece of paper. The carbonless copy paper has been
coated with small particles containing ink. The act of writing on
it applies enough force to break open the shells, releasing the
ink onto the sheet below. Simply touching the paper doesn't have
enough force to break the shells, which leaves the ink encapsulated
where it belongs.
The beauty of microencapsulation is that it's also cheap. There's
no need for a tiny assembly line to fill the particles; this is
done by a straightforward chemical process. A solution is formed
of drops of ink of the appropriate size in another liquid. Then
a material is introduced that grows only at the interface between
the two liquids. Once it has had time to form a thick enough shell
around the droplets, the newly microencapsulated particles can be
separated out from the liquid.
The toner used in a printer or copier consists of small particles
that get fused to a piece of paper and absorb light. Joe's group
has developed a way to make microencapsulated particles about the
size of toner (smaller than the thickness of a hair), which contain
still smaller particles. The inner particles come in two types,
one white and the other black. They also have a different electric
charge stored on them. This means that in an electric field all
of the white particles will go to one side of the outer shell and
the black particles to the other. If the field is reversed, they
will change sides. The result looks just like toner, because it
essentially is, but it's a kind of toner that can be switched on
and off. They call this electronic ink.
The first thing that can be done with e-ink is to cover a sheet
with it to make reusable paper. Instead of ending up in a recycling
bin, the paper can go back into the printer after it's used. A conventional
printer has a complex mechanism to spread toner or ink over a page.
Reusable paper starts with the smart toner already on it; the printer
just needs a row of electrodes to switch the particles on and off.
And since the process is reversible, the paper can go back through
the printer to be reprinted over and over again. Reusable paper
is needed because tomorrow's paperless office has turned into today's
insatiable consumer of paper, carting in reams of paper to fly through
ever-faster printers and just as quickly be thrown out. Reusable
paper ends this high-tech deforestation by recycling the paper right
in the printer. Instead of filling your trash with newsprint, a
newspaper printed on reusable paper can go back into the printer
at the end of the day to reemerge printed with the next day's news.
Even better than reusing a sheet of paper is changing it while
you watch. There's enough room to drive a microelectronic truck
through the thickness of a sheet of paper. This means that the electrodes
needed to switch the particles can be moved from the printer to
the paper itself. Forming a sandwich of paper, particles, and electrodes
creates a new kind of display. But unlike any other display this
one works just like printing and therefore can be viewed from most
any angle in most any light, and it retains its image when the power
is switched off. And even though the original goal of the project
was to make displays that would look beautiful but be changed infrequently,
the particles can switch quickly enough to approach the rate needed
to show the moving images of a video.
Joe's group began developing a printer to put the electrodes onto
a sheet of paper to make electronic ink displays and soon realized
that they could bring still more capabilities to a piece of paper.
Integrated circuits are made by depositing conducting and insulating
materials onto a wafer held inside a chamber that has had all the
air evacuated so that it doesn't react. The head of his group's
remarkable prototype printer accomplishes the same thing under air
on a desktop by creating a tiny plasma column, like a miniature
lightning bolt. This delivers to the surface the materials needed
to print circuit elements such as wires and transistors. They developed
the printer to put down display circuits to address individual pixels
on the paper, but there's plenty of space compared to a computer
chip to add other functions.
The most exciting prospect of all is called radio paper. Since
it takes very little energy to switch the electronic ink particles
they can be driven by a solar cell, which is essentially a big transistor
that can be deposited by the circuit printer. By printing still
more transistors, a radio receiver could be integrated with the
paper. Now your newspaper doesn't even have to go into the printer
at the end of the day. If you leave it out on your coffee table,
the light in the room will power its circuits, which will receive
a radio signal with the news to update the page. The circuitry can
then flip the particles to reprint the page to have the day's news
waiting for you whenever you pick up the paper. Bad news for birdcages
and yesterday's fish: this would be a newspaper that is never out-of-date.
While there's still a lot of work to do to make radio paper a reality,
the essential elements have already been shown in the laboratory.
Actively updating a newspaper points to the ultimate application
of electronic ink: the universal book. Sheets of paper covered with
the microencapsulated particles and electrodes can be assembled
into a book, with control electronics embedded in the spine. This
would look and feel like any other book, since it's made out of
the same ingredients of paper and toner. The only difference is
that this book can change. After reading it, you can download new
contents through the binding and onto the pages. This can even be
done while you read. Pages other than the one you're looking at
can be changing, so that all of War and Peace could be read
in a pamphlet of just a few pages.
The great innovation of Gutenberg and his peers was not the printing
press, which was just a converted wine press; it was movable metal
type. Before then printing was done from wooden blocks that had
to be laboriously engraved. Movable type made it possible for a
printer to produce a set of type that could be used to print all
books, arranging the letters as needed for each page. Electronic
ink takes this idea to its logical conclusion, moving the toner
instead of the type. Now a reader can own just one book that can
be any book, which can arrange the ink as needed for each page.
Instead of going to a library to check out a book, the bits of the
book can be downloaded onto the pages of an electronic book.
The electronic book ends the argument over old-fashioned books
versus new-fashioned bits by recognizing that both sides have strong
technical cases that can be combined. There are deep reasons why
the old technologies in a book work so well, and there are new ways
to emulate and adapt them. What jumps out the first time that you
see a Gutenberg Bible is the glossiness of the ink. It turns out
that Gutenberg made his inks by cooking a stew of oil and copper
and lead that precipitated out little platelets that act like tiny
mirrors, paradoxically reflecting light from a black background.
The printing industry is still catching up to the formulation of
inks of that sophistication. The same applies to the relatively
recent discovery of how optical weak localization helps illuminate
a printed page. It's fair to ask that any successor to the book
be able to do these things as well.
Drawing on all the resources now at our disposal to catch up to
what Gutenberg was doing in the fifteenth century is a worthy challenge.
But it's not the real goal; it's an essential warm-up along the
path to asking what we can now achieve that Gutenberg could not.
Gutenberg did exactly the same thing. He started by printing replicas
of illuminated manuscripts; after all, that was where the market
was. Then, as printing with movable metal type made it possible
to assemble more pages than before, it became necessary to invent
page numbering and tables of contents to keep the information accessible.
These innovations departed from the past practice of manuscripts
that were copied by hand, which were designed to minimize length
at all costs. There was an interesting transitional period during
which hand-illuminated manuscripts added page numbers to keep up
with the fashion, before the bother of copying by hand became too
hard to justify and quietly disappeared. Freed from the constraint
of duplicating manuscripts, Aldus Manutius in Venice around 1500
then settled on the dimensions of the modern book. It was designed
to fit in the saddlebags of traveling scholars, and his Press developed
the italics font, to fill pages more efficiently than did fonts
that imitated handwriting.
The arrival of electronic books now presents an opportunity to
rethink how collections of books are organized into libraries. A
library is, of course, much more than a book database. It's a reading
temple, a place for serendipitous browsing, a space to be with books,
by yourself and with others. My only literary connection with John
Updike is that we have the same favorite part of Harvard's great
Widener library—a small depression in the stone floor on the
way into the stacks. To gain admittance to the stacks you pass through
a gauntlet of dour gatekeepers, climb a set of stairs, turn immediately
right, and then left. The generations of readers and writers pivoting
at this last corner over the years have worn it down, hollowing
out a bowl that provides a connection to everyone who has come before.
I can't write like Updike, but when it comes to floor abrasion I'm
on an equal footing with him.
Once you're past that corner, the bookshelves appear. I have no
idea how far they extend, because it's impossible to pass more than
a few aisles without stopping to pick up an interesting title, then
wondering about a book next to it, then realizing that you simply
must spend more time in that section. The same thing happens with
the old card catalog. Drawers holding worn cards that appear to
date back to the opening of the building, if not the Civil War,
speak volumes about what books are popular and what books are not.
Flipping through the cards is even more likely than walking down
the aisle to turn a simple query into a branching ramble through
accumulated wisdom, which lasts until dinner or darkness forces
an end.
In the noisy battle between the wired digerati and their analog
enemies, there is a common misconception that the pleasure and utility
of this kind of browsing must be sacrificed if a computer is used
to access information. Too much is made of the inadequacies of transitional
technology, while simultaneously too little is expected of it. An
on-line card catalog that reduces each entry to a single screenful
of flickering green text is incapable of communicating the popularity
or context of a book. That's not a failing of electrons or phosphors;
it's a poorly designed interface. The wear and tear of a card catalog,
or of a library floor, are consequences of engineering decisions
about the construction of cards, or floors, or shoes. That those
technologies succeed through a combination of intended and unplanned
interactions provides valuable guidance for future development,
but it doesn't mean that they are the only possible solutions.
There are many things that a card catalog, even Widener's, can't
do. Of all major U.S. libraries, Widener is the only one that doesn't
shelve its books according to the Library of Congress indexing system.
This is because Harvard's system predates that of the Library of
Congress; relabeling and reshelving the millions of volumes would
be prohibitive. It's much easier to move the bits associated with
the books. Once a card catalog becomes electronic, the presentation
can be freed from a single ordering defined with great effort by
generations of librarians. Books can be shown by date, or location,
or author, or discipline. Browsing need not be confined to books
that are nearby in any one index; a smarter card catalog can show
books that are related in multiple ways. And the card catalog can
help provide context for the book by showing other books that have
been checked out with it, or perhaps a map of where in the world
the book is being read then.
Doing these things requires a visual sophistication that was beyond
the means of not only early computers but also their programmers.
Letting the programmers alone design the card catalog interface
results in a faithful presentation of how the computer represents
information internally, rather than how people use it externally.
Creating books and libraries requires typographers and architects
as well as bookbinders and librarians; the same thing is even more
true electronically.
My colleague David Small belongs to a new generation of graphic
designers who happen to be fluent programmers. Early fonts were
designed to hold ink on the letter forms as well as to help guide
the eye; David and his peers are using the interactivity of computers
to let letters act and react in ways that are appropriate for the
text and the reader. One of my favorite of his design studies presents
Shakespeare's works through the medium of a graphical supercomputer
connected to a Lego set.
Initially the screen shows a hazy blob that in fact contains all
of the words of all of Shakespeare's plays. It's a 3D space that
you can fly through, so that you can grab the computer's control
knobs and zoom in to find a play, and approach still closer to find
the text of a scene beautifully laid out. Rotating the space to
peek behind the words reveals supporting annotations. Moving within
a play and among plays is done by traveling in this space rather
than by pulling books off of a shelf.
Since most of us don't have much experience with flying through
words, David adds some familiar guides. In front of the computer
is a Lego set, with toy characters drawn from Shakespeare's characters
and themes. Selecting one of these physical icons highlights the
corresponding parts of Shakespeare's corpus on the screen in the
background, showing first the large-scale patterns and then the
individual words if you move in for a closer look. Spending time
in this environment invites browsing in a way that can't be done
if the texts are frozen on pages. A good book uses a linear exposition
to convey a nonlinear web of connections between the author and
the reader; David's environment comes much closer than a flat book
to representing how I think about a Shakespeare play as I read it.
There's still one more benefit of electronic books: access. There's
an implicitly elitist undercurrent in defending printed books over
electronic books. The collection of the Widener library is a treasure
that by design very few people will ever get to see, much less use
routinely. Before printing, when books were copied by hand, they
were so precious that owning one was a sign of great wealth, usually
limited to religious orders rather than individual people. A single
book is now so inexpensive that anyone can have one, but private
libraries are still owned only by institutions and the wealthy.
The budgets of most public libraries restrict their collections
to a small subset of the wonders of Widener. Creating an electronic
Widener is a heroic task that, even if done imperfectly, will make
much more information available to many more people. Not everyone
can own David Small's supercomputer, but if the job of a local library
becomes one of providing the tools to access information rather
than holding the information itself, then it can do more with less.
Electronic books will be able to do everything that printed books
can do, but one. They can't replace the primacy of a historical
artifact. This is a point that technologists like me frequently
miss. Part of the pleasure in seeing a Gutenberg Bible is knowing
that Gutenberg held the same object that you are looking at, drawing
a connection across the centuries between you and him and everyone
else who has come in between. A completely faithful replica that
matches the specifications can never convey that.
Some information simply can't be copied digitally. The rarest of
the rare books in Harvard's collection is bound in human skin. It
is a modern witness to an old practice of people leaving a legacy
of a bit of themselves for their successors in the binding of a
posthumous book. The unsettling attraction of such a book is that
it can never be duplicated.
For people who come to a library to experience the texture and
smell and even the pedigree of an old book, there's no point in
arguing the merits of electronic ink. On the other hand, there's
no point in limiting everyone else by preserving old packages for
timeless information.
In the end, the debate about the future of books is really about
the relative performance of competing technologies. Books are designed
by people, as are computers. There are plenty of examples of apparently
irreconcilable disagreements over a new technology disappearing
once the technology catches up to the specifications of what it's
replacing. Many people used to religiously proclaim that they couldn't
edit text on a computer screen; once the resolution of a screen
began to approach that of the eye at a comfortable reading distance,
the discussion began to go away. Now writing a text by hand is the
exception rather than the rule. Such passionate debates get settled
not by persuasion, but by technical progress making them increasingly
irrelevant.
Along the way, the presumptions of a new technology must usually
be tempered by the wisdom embodied in an old one. In the early days
of the internal combustion engine it was interesting to race horses
and cars. Now we have supersonic cars, but no one is arguing for
the abolition of horses. Although horses are no longer the fastest
means of transportation, no current car can recognize its owner
with a glance, or choose a path through a narrow mountain pass,
or be left in a meadow to refuel itself, or make a copy of itself
when it begins to wear out. Cars still have a long way to go to
catch up to horses.
The computers that are meant to replace books are destined to be
transformed even more by the books. Reading is too varied and personal
to be bounded by the distinction between digital and analog. I have
some beloved books that I'll never want to browse through in any
other form, and piles of books threatening to topple over onto my
desk that I'd love to access electronically, and some inscrutable
texts that I'll never get anywhere with until they're available
with active annotations and on-line connections.
Choosing between books and computers makes as much sense as choosing
between breathing and eating. Books do a magnificent job of conveying
static information; computers let information change. We're just
now learning how to use a lot of new technology to match the performance
of the mature technology in books, transcending its inherent limits
without sacrificing its best features. The bits and the atoms belong
together. The story of the book is not coming to an end; it's really
just beginning.
WHEN THINGS START TO THINK by Neil Gershenfeld. ©1998 by
Neil A. Gershenfeld. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and
Company, LLC.
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