This has been one of those weeks in which every­thing I’m read­ing seems related and is click­ing for me. It’s got my mind churn­ing, and I’m still not sure what to think of it all.

The first is from Will Richard­son and is titled The End of Books (At Least, For Me?), a provoca­tive state­ment to be sure. Don’t panic — it’s not really about the end of books, just print books for his own use.

“Turns out my iPad Kin­dle app syncs up all of my high­lights and notes to my Ama­zon account. Who knew? When I finally got to the page Ted pointed me to in my own account, the page that listed every high­light and every note that I had taken on my Kin­dle ver­sion of John Seely Brown’s new book Pull, I could only think two words:

Game. Changer.

All of a sud­den, by read­ing the book elec­tron­i­cally as opposed to in print, I now have:

• all of the most rel­e­vant, thought-provoking pas­sages from the book listed on one web page, as in my own con­densed ver­sion of just the best pieces
• all of my notes and reflec­tions attached to those indi­vid­ual notes
• the abil­ity to copy and paste all of those notes and high­lights into Ever­note which makes them search­able, editable, orga­ni­z­able, con­nectable and remixable
• the abil­ity to access my book notes and high­lights from any­where I have an Inter­net connection.

Game. Changer.

I keep think­ing, what if I had every note and high­light that I had ever taken in a paper book avail­able to search through, to con­nect with other sim­i­lar ideas from other books, to syn­the­size electronically?…”

Hon­estly, I didn’t know about this, either, and I’m now seri­ously con­sid­er­ing going back to read­ing non­fic­tion on my Kin­dle, some­thing I had stopped doing when I couldn’t get at my high­lights and free them. As far as I was con­cerned, they were bricked text. But I logged in at http://kindle.amazon.com and sure enough, there were the high­lights from the three non­fic­tion books I’d read on my Kindle.

On the one hand, this is incred­i­bly appeal­ing, to have all of the excerpts I’ve high­lighted as inter­est­ing to me acces­si­ble, search­able, and remix­able. Really appeal­ing, and the fact that I can now get text out of Kin­dle books makes it a plat­form I may be more will­ing to deal with again, although the inabil­ity to share a book with a friend is still caus­ing some hesitation.

As I began con­tem­plat­ing this, I read Steven Johnson’s recent post, The Glass Box and Com­mon­place Book. It really res­onated with me on a num­ber of lev­els. First, John­son revives the idea of the “com­mon­place book.”

“Schol­ars, ama­teur sci­en­tists, aspir­ing men of letters—just about any­one with intel­lec­tual ambi­tion in the sev­en­teenth and eigh­teenth cen­turies was likely to keep a com­mon­place book. In its most cus­tom­ary form, ‘com­mon­plac­ing,’ as it was called, involved tran­scrib­ing inter­est­ing or inspi­ra­tional pas­sages from one’s read­ing, assem­bling a per­son­al­ized ency­clo­pe­dia of quo­ta­tions. It was a kind of soli­tary ver­sion of the orig­i­nal web logs: an archive of inter­est­ing tid­bits that one encoun­tered dur­ing one’s tex­tual browsing.”

He then goes on to talk about a major prob­lem with the iPad, the way it locks down text (includ­ing pub­lic domain works) in a way that pre­vents users from cre­at­ing their own com­mon­place books.

“[when you try to copy a para­graph of text] …you get the famil­iar iPhone-style clip­ping han­dles, and you get two options ‘High­light’ and’“Bookmark.’ But you can’t actu­ally copy the text, to paste it into your own pri­vate com­mon­place book, or email it to a friend, or blog about it. And of course there’s no way to link to it. What’s worse: the book in ques­tion is Penguin’s edi­tion of Darwin’s Descent of Man, which is in the pub­lic domain. Those are our words on that screen. We have a right to them.”

John­son then goes on to describe (in a much more artic­u­late way than I’ve been able to) what both­ers me so much about the iPhone and iPad.

“We can try to put a pro­tec­tive layer of glass of the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all bet­ter off when words are allowed to net­work with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trou­ble to build machines capa­ble of dis­play­ing dig­i­tal text if we can’t exploit the basic inter­ac­tiv­ity of that text?… Yes, the iPad makes it eas­ier to carry around a dozen books and mag­a­zines, but that’s not the only promise of the tech­nol­ogy. The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forg­ing new links of asso­ci­a­tion, remix­ing them. We have all the tools at our dis­posal to cre­ate com­mon­place books that would astound Locke and Jef­fer­son. And yet we are, delib­er­ately, try­ing to crawl back into the glass box.

…When your dig­i­tal news feed doesn’t con­tain links, when it can­not be linked to, when it can’t be indexed, when you can’t copy a para­graph and paste it into another appli­ca­tion: when this hap­pens your news feed is not flawed or back­wards look­ing or frus­trat­ing. It is bro­ken.

The force that enables these unlikely encoun­ters between peo­ple of dif­fer­ent per­sua­sions, the force that makes the web a space of serendip­ity and dis­cov­ery, is pre­cisely the open, com­bi­na­to­r­ial, con­nec­tive nature of the medium. So when we choose to take our text out of that medium, when we keep our words from being copied, linked, indexed, that’s a choice with real civic con­se­quences that are not to be taken lightly.”

And that’s a huge deal­breaker for me. Make no mis­take — apps are just soft­ware. I’m lucky enough to have the entire inter­net at my fin­ger­tips, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to buy an inter­face to it for which one com­pany con­trols what soft­ware I can use to access the great, big, beau­ti­ful web (in this case, Apple, but there are other prod­ucts with this same prob­lem). I don’t take that lightly at all, espe­cially when I read things like David Lankes’ bril­liant take on what net­worked text could be like. Of course, your mileage may vary, and you may not have the prob­lem with these closed sys­tems that I do (and it’s not just with Apple), but that’s my per­sonal value. John­son would fully sup­port Will Richardson’s right to cre­ate his com­mon­place book, as do I.

While syn­the­siz­ing my reac­tions to both of these posts, I started read­ing Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gad­get. I’m only a few chap­ters into it, but it’s already extend­ing how I think about Face­book (a sub­ject for another post) and the iPhone/iPad.

One of Lanier’s con­cerns is how deci­sions made in the design of our dig­i­tal tools lock us in to behav­iors that reduce — and even remove — our human­ity. For the ebook con­text, an alter­na­tive title for his book could have been “You Are Not an App.” It’s really tough to quote excerpts from the book with­out los­ing a lot of con­text and his sup­port­ing argu­ments, but the fol­low­ing excerpts are a glimpse.

“We shouldn’t seek to make the pack men­tal­ity as effi­cient as pos­si­ble. We should instead seek to inspire the phe­nom­e­non of indi­vid­ual intel­li­gence. (p.5)

Lock-in makes us for­get the lost free­doms we had in the dig­i­tal past. That can make it harder to see the free­doms we have in the dig­i­tal present. For­tu­nately, dif­fi­cult as it is, we can still try to change some expres­sions of phi­los­o­phy that are on the verge of becom­ing locked in place in the tools we use to under­stand one another and the world.” (p.14)

Lanier takes an oppo­site approach to where Richard­son is headed. Will is going to end up with Johnson’s com­mon­place book in dig­i­tal form, and that’s extremely appeal­ing to him. I totally under­stand why, and it’s great if that works well for him. How­ever, it’s inter­est­ing to read how Lanier wor­ries about this kind of future and the impact it will have on all of us and our very human­ity. What might we lose in the process of dig­i­tiz­ing every book and mak­ing the con­tent avail­able as unan­chored bytes?

“If the books in the cloud are accessed via user inter­faces that encour­age mashups of frag­ments that obscure the con­text and author­ship of each frag­ment, there will be only one book. (p.46)”

It’s not an argu­ment for a closed sys­tem, just bet­ter and more thought­ful options, inter­ac­tions, delin­eation of author­ship, etc., and I can’t dis­agree with that. What will the civic con­se­quences be of Richardson’s com­mon­place book (or mine, if I go down that path)? Can text be too net­worked? Are there any clues to this in how we cur­rently use our full text data­bases, where we’ve already dig­i­tized every bit and made it remixable?

Over­all, I don’t agree with 100% of any­thing any of these gen­tle­man have writ­ten (although I come pretty close with John­son). They’ve all con­tributed to a very thought-provoking week for me and I really appre­ci­ate that. I’m still try­ing to work through a lot of this in my own mind, and other than the fact that I’m against devices that lock me in to their vision of the inter­net, I’m still not sure where I really come down in this whole thing.

And what’s the sig­nif­i­cance for libraries? I’m not sure how much Will Richard­son uses libraries now, but what does it mean when he can net­work the text from his Kin­dle but his library can’t cir­cu­late any con­tent to it? That’s also a design deci­sion (made by pub­lish­ers) with very spe­cific civic consequences.

John­son ends his post by call­ing on jour­nal­ists, edu­ca­tors, pub­lish­ers, and soft­ware devel­op­ers to fight for com­mon places (not glass boxes) and con­nec­tions. What respon­si­bil­i­ties do libraries have to pre­vent the civic con­se­quences he describes? In the pages I’ve read so far, Lanier encour­ages devel­op­ers to think care­fully about the behav­iors their prod­ucts lock peo­ple into — does that include libraries? How can we help main­tain com­mon­place books in a world of dig­i­tal text while still main­tain­ing the edges of author­ship? Do we as librar­i­ans really want to pro­mote the iPad’s lock-in, espe­cially if we’re not explain­ing those civic con­se­quences to the next gen­er­a­tion of read­ers and con­tent generators?

At this point, I have a lot more ques­tions than answers.