Andrew Golis

Ezra Klein’s brilliant piece on the Kindle isn’t really about the Kindle, it’s about the future of writing:

The true promise of the Kindle, and its inevitable descendants, is in creating a product that goes where the book cannot. Printed text is fundamentally limited. Once on the page, nothing more can be done with it. With digital text, everything is a draft, to be edited, altered, broadened, remixed, and redirected. As better conveyors of electronic text are developed, the big question is how content itself will change to take advantage of the new opportunities.

Hyperlinking provides a useful example of how this can work. There is nothing simpler or more fundamental to online writing than coding text so that clicking on it directs the reader elsewhere. Previously, text was a closed container, reliant solely on the strength of its prose and the credibility of its author. With links, text is an open conversation. A study can be described, and interested readers can click to access the original paper. A speech can be quoted, even condensed, with the full version available to any who want it. An argument can be summarized, and the reader can click through to see whether the claims are being represented fairly. This feature is already used online, of course, but for all its elegant simplicity and obvious worth, it’s not as widely used as one might expect. Compare text written specifically to be read electronically—like that on blogs or Wikipedia—and text that is intended for printed mediums like newspapers or magazines. The electronic mediums produce writing that is far richer in links and sources, far more directly in dialogue with opposing viewpoints. The very fact of writing for an electronic medium changes the content.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 7:50 pm and is filed under media, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.