the march towards all-electronic reading

*I first read a magazine article about the Kindle in fall 2007, a little over three years ago.

*I first read a book on my iPhone in, I believe, January 2010. That was my reread of U.S. Grant’s memoirs.

*Last August I bought an iPad and immediately used it to correct several sets of book and article proofs that were due.

I’m not yet ready to dump my traditional paper-and-binding books, but it won’t be more than a few more years for most uses. The iPad is still slightly unwieldy. It’s still easier to flip through a paper book than to flip through a book on the iPhone. Last night, for instance, I wanted to find a certain passage from the third-to-last chapter of The Scarlet Letter while on the bus on my iPhone, and gave up when seeing that I would apparently have to thumb the page 300-some times to get to the page I was looking for. It’s also still harder to make marginal notations electronically than in paper books. And it’s a pain to be dependent on battery life, though the iPad’s battery life is nicely long, unlike the maddeningly short battery life of most Apple laptops.

But my view is that these are mere engineering hurdles, and engineers tend to solve more problems every year. I’d have to think than in 10 years there will be incredibly good electronic readers, and perhaps even free instantaneous access to all books more than a few years old.

Questions…

*What will all of us do who own so many hundreds of paper books that we will no longer want?

*How will this change intellectual culture?

No time now to spell out my answers to these two questions. But the latter question, being the more important of the two, seems to me to fall out as follows… There will be a surge of youth power as publication barriers are eroded. We saw bloggers like Sandmonkey become international political stars during the Egyptian Revolution, and there will be Sandmonkey equivalents in philosophy. It’s already happening somewhat with blogs. When I was in my early 20’s, you knew you were just going to have to keep your mouth shut for 10 years before speaking aloud in the profession. That’s no longer the case.

Universities are going to be around for a long time to come, if somewhat transformed. But they will turn into just one of several sources of intellectual legitimacy, much as happened in the 17th century when suddenly (unlike the Middle Ages) almost none of the philosophers were professors. But I don’t think we’re *quite* there yet. The old institutions and old media still have enough of a foothold in real conditions that they’re going to endure awhile longer.

Still, it would be really exciting to be 18 or 20 right now. All kinds of crazy possibilities are going to open up in the next twenty years.