A Look at the Vook

Can you even remember the last time you actually read a book?

Sure, you read—you might even do it quite often. But what you probably do when you “read” a book these days is to skim through it, skip around chapters when you can, and hunt for the book’s key ideas before moving on to the next title on your list. And while time constraints and a general unwillingness to expend intellectual energy are certainly not conducive to thorough reading, let me suggest that the reason you haven’t really read a book since, say, the eighth grade is not entirely your fault. After all, this is the Information Age, an age that values the immediate dissemination and processing of information, and that—whether we like it or not—has impacted the way we read.

A rapidly growing demographic of constantly connected individuals with scant patience for traditional media is emerging in society. According to the Radicanti Group, a Palo Alto-based market research firm, there will be roughly 139 million wireless e-mail users by the end of 2009, a figure that will rise by an average annual rate of 68 percent until there are one billion users by 2013. True, these data have nothing to say about the number of books these users read in a year or about the way in which they read. Yet they nevertheless sketch an outline of a burgeoning group for which even a DSL connection on a regular computer is a much too slow and inconvenient means of accessing e-mail. And while there has been no such survey, it’s fair to say that this rising demographic also illustrates (at least to some extent) the concomitant development of a new type of reader, for whom a traditional book—a sequential stream of text between two covers—is a hopelessly antiquated means of making a point.

Although it’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of this new group of information-age readers, recent innovations in the publishing world confirm—if not explain—its existence. Meet the “vook,” which, according to a description on the company’s website, “is a new innovation in reading that blends a well-written book, high-quality video and the power of the Internet into a single, complete story.” Recently, Atria Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, has teamed up with Vook to release several titles that readers can watch online or through iTunes. And the vook is not just an example of a technological innovation that could bring more information to more people; it’s also a product that caters to the modern reader, an individual who seems to have lost the stamina required to sit down and digest the entire contents of a book.

In a recent New York Times piece, Tufts University’s Maryanne Wolf, author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” feared the trend the vook might encourage: “Can you any longer read Henry James or George Eliot?” she asked. “Do you have the patience?”

History is full of examples of a new medium that changes the way people read and think. If the vook is to be one of these era-shifting media, it’s worthwhile to look back at the impact of preceding innovations. In “The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution,” historian Roger Chartier describes the impact of the “tripling or quadrupling of book production” on French readers in the decades before the revolution and how “a new way of reading, which no longer took the book as authoritative, became widespread.” In this era, the new innovation, so to speak, could be called the individualized text—the pamphlet or the periodical or the easily reproducible book, which allowed people to read on their own time and by themselves, which, as Chartier argues, made pre-revolutionary Frenchmen into more critical thinkers who would no longer tolerate the inadequacies of the ancien régime.

But what effects will our reading innovations—the vook included—have on today’s reading public?

Not unlike their 18th-century French counterparts, readers today face a large and growing pool of information, but I don’t see readers (if they can even be called that anymore) becoming more analytical as a result of the many recent developments in reading technology. If anything, these products seem merely to make us read faster, less carefully, and in such a way that we can no longer absorb anything not presented in an easily digestible form such as video clips or embedded MP3 files. After all, is a vook something we “read” or something we “experience”? In my mind, the distinction is an important one.

In the sense that they enable us to condense a book’s main points into a small, palatable package, innovations like the vook essentially encourage us not to read at all, for the act of reading is a sustaining intellectual process that requires scrutiny, time, and—above all else—thought. And what kind of thought is required in to “read” something like a vook?

If the rise of the vook provides an occasion to deliver any sort of eulogy, the eulogy must not be for the object of the book itself, but rather for the traditional reader—an essential but tragically uncommon character in the narrative of this Information Age.

James K. McAuley ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Currier House.