Findings Blog

This post is part of “How We Will Read,” a Findings interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here.

This week we sat down with Clive Thompson, contributing writer for WIRED and the New York Times Magazine, perennial blogger, and maybe the most energetic person to ever grace our offices. Enthusiastic and hilarious, Clive is actually bursting with ideas about what the future looks like — and what seem like insane ideas or improbable projections are often backed up by a surprising amount of on-the-fly statistical citations. Clive has done his homework, it seems, for every subject on the planet. In our conversation, he seemed to effortlessly switch gears from publishing to literacy, to education, to demographics, and then on to networked societies and television shows.

Clive is currently working on his first book, about the future of thought in the age of machines. He is a prolific Tweeter and Instagrammer, and you can also find him at his blog, Collision Detection. He’s written about the future of reading before, here and here. Below, he explores some of his ideas for where he think the written word is heading. His conclusions? In the future, we might be “ass-deep in books,” and he’ll need a T-shirt that says, “Piss off, I’m reading War and Peace on my iPhone!”

How do you do most of your reading these days?

I do about half in print and half on various screens. I ended up reading all of War and Peace on my iPhone. I have Stanza, which is this app that lets you download books directly from the Gutenberg project. It turned out the iPhone was a really great way to read longform fiction. I found the idea of approaching a very big book less intimidating because you only approach it page-by-page.

How do you annotate, and why?

I annotate aggressively. If I’m reading a piece of really long fiction, I often find that there are these fabulous things I want to remember. I want to take notes on it, so I highlight it, and if I have a thought about it, I’ll type it out quickly. Then I dump all these clippings into a format that I can look at later. In the case of War and Peace, I actually had 16,000 words worth of notes and clippings at the end of it. So I printed it out as a print-on-demand book. In short, I have a physical copy of all of my favorite parts of War and Peace that I can flip through, with my notes, but I don’t actually own a physical copy of War and Peace.

Why are you taking notes? What are you doing with that stuff?

If you look at the memory athletics competitions, where the memory athletes are given something written and they have to repeat it, they’re really good at lists of random information, they’re really good at information about people — and they hate the poetry event. It’s almost impossible to listen to a poem once, to read it once, and then remember it. There’s something about literature that’s just too complex. What does work for remembering literature is repeating. That’s why I like having these little printed books, or these little files of my notes, because I can literally pull up anything I want to remember from Moby Dick, and in repeating it, remember it. Annotating becomes a way to re-encounter things I’ve read for pleasure.

We forget most of what we read, right? The only way to fight that is to write it down, and consult it. So I frequently will almost randomly pick up an old book and look at my notes, because it refreshes you as to what you find interesting about that book. Recently I re-looked at a book and I was delighted to discover that even though I’d read the book 22 years ago, I’d highlighted a bunch of stuff and written notes to myself, and some of the things I remembered about the book were things that I’d highlighted and written about. It was proof that the act of highlighting and thinking about it and writing that little note does that little extra of cognitive work that means you’re more likely to remember something about the book. This is called the generation effect — when you generate something yourself, you’re more likely to remember it. This is one of the wonderful things for me about a world in which people are writing in books and talking about them more: This fantastic generation effect means we’re going to internalize and remember and understand more deeply the books that we’re reading.

It sounds like you’re having a conversation with the text, and maybe also with your future self.

Yeah. It’s a conversation with the author, with yourself, and in a weird way, if you take it along as a lifelong project, you are having a conversation with your future self.

Is the end game of writing creating these conversations?

Yes, absolutely. Whether it’s internal conversation in your head or socially. I’ve always regarded the endpoint of my writing to get people talking to me, to each other, to themselves about this stuff.

I actually strongly believe that social sharing of this marginalia is going to unlock unbelievable amounts of conversation. But I’m embarrassed at the quality of a lot of my notes — they’ll literally be me going like “hahaha” or “lol.” I look like a 12-year-old. But I’m assured that when you import them into Findings, they’re all private. So I’m going to import them, because I love going through Findings and seeing what people have clipped.

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This post is part of “How We Will Read,” a Findings interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here.

Richard Nash is the future of publishing. He’s been making waves for years in the publishing world, first at Soft Skull Press, an acclaimed independent publisher, and then with his online projects, Red Lemonade and Small Demons. If you’re interested in the future of books, you’ve probably heard Richard speak: In addition to being a prolific speaker, he’s an excellent one.

Richard is not just an entrepreneur seeking to reinvent an industry — he is also a reader who honestly loves books. Though perhaps he doesn’t get to read as much as he’d like, he talked to us about why reading matters, and why creating products that help readers matter, too. His startup Small Demons helps readers pin down details from books to share and remember later.

Pithy, eloquent, and eminently quotable, Richard demonstrated a deep belief in the written word’s power to shape humanity. He somehow managed to pair this gravitas with wit and insight. We don’t want to be too presumptuous, but every other sentence is a gem: You might want to load your Findings bookmarklet for this one right now.

How do you do most of your reading these days?

On my iPhone. Because It’s in my pocket. It’s just the sheer convenience of having it with me, wherever I am. Books have an immense number of positive qualities that they’ve derived over the course of 500 years from continuous contact with humans. (Talk about an iterated product. Books have been iterated for 500 fucking years. That’s a hell of a lot more usage data than pretty much any other media device human beings invent.) But there’s certainly limitations around books. Interestingly, one of the limitations is that they are too wide for optimal reading experience. We are used books being wide, so for cultural reasons we prefer width, but the reason for width in books is economic efficiency, not reading efficiency. It is easier to read in narrow columns. I can actually read more easily on the iPhone because my eyes spend more time going top-to-bottom than left-to-right.

I should also add that I’ve been reading in this format since about 2002. I have read on Palm Pilot. I have read on the Treo. And I have read on all iPhone systems, including the iPhone 1 — before there were apps, there was a little hack that allowed you to convert a Word document into a single HTML page. I read one manuscript in seven hours in a single sitting in a single scroll because the thing about the single HTML file, you couldn’t stop reading. Otherwise you’d have to go back to the start and flick through the entire fucking thing, which would be insane, so I read it in a single start-to-finish sitting, from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m.

That’s kind of crazy, but also kind of awesome.

Books are attention machines. In web metrics, we look at average length of visit per use. I certainly remember when I was running Red Lemonade, I was struggling valiantly to get that up to ten minutes. Other content sites are probably doing the same thing, struggling valiantly for a five-minute average or a thirty-minute average. But look at the book. There isn’t an upper limit on the average time for a book. In a situation where you’re trying to get people’s attention, books are actually incredibly good at maintaining that attention.

There’s a certain strand of thinking around publishing which concludes that people’s attention spans are diminishing, and consequently books should follow that diminished attention span by becoming shorter, by adding more things — by adding links, by adding video, by adding audio. That is an enormous mistake, because it is undermining books’ greatest strength, which is their ability to maintain user attention over an extended period of time by requiring the user to use his or her imagination to interpolate the video and audio. To project what those five senses would be experiencing.

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We recently made an update that will allow you to capture quotes directly from the Google Play ebook reader directly in your browser.

Unfortunately we are not yet able to import quotes from across all of your Google Play compatible devices like we can with the Amazon Kindle ecosystem, but we hope to add this in a future update.  In the meantime, you can use Google’s great browser-based ebook reader to capture quotes directly into Findings with our existing bookmarklet.

This is the fifth post of “How We Will Read,” a Findings interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. See our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here.

Kevin Kelly is a scholar of the future. There seems to be no better way to encapsulate his myriad intellectual endeavors, which have sought to explain the new economy, technology as an extension of the self, and the mechanisms of complex organization. Even the creators of The Matrix recognized his brilliance — they made his book Out of Control required reading on set. It’s impossible to speak to him without it realizing that you are talking to someone who has a wide and incredible knowledge of the world. A humble and extraordinary man, Kevin has so many ideas for the future, he doesn’t quite know where to put them all.

Currently, Kevin maintains an active presence on his website, KK.org, where he blogs on several different personal projects he is pursuing, including the sequencing of his own genome and incisive analysis of gadgetry. A founding editor at WIRED and prolific writer of nonfiction books, Kevin’s explorations have never been far from text. So that is precisely what we wanted to ask him about. And who better to ask about the future of books than a scholar of the future?

You’re posting your book New Rules, New Economy in blog posts over the course of a couple of years. I noticed that the posts are formatted in a way that makes them seem annotated. Can you tell me about that?

I long ago got in the habit of marking up books as I went along — talking to it, marginalia, dog-earing, all that kind of stuff. I’m an active reader, and I mostly read to write.

This project is a recycling of that book. When the book was out of print, I decided to re-issue it as blog posts page-by-page. I had some heuristics, and my assistant Camille went through the book. It’s her work. There was some emphasis elements that we decided on, and on her own judgment, she followed through emphasizing in more than one manner.

I have had an idea of actually republishing the book in paper in the kind of annotated way. That was inspired by Tom Peters, the business guru, who does these books where he has a kind of kinetic typography. I always liked that, so I thought I’d try to imitate it here.

Why post your book as blog posts at all?

I’m so far onto the left of the copyright issue. I believe that the natural home of all creation is in the public domain. I believe that is naturally where it wants to reside. I think that works enjoy a temporary moment where they are monopolized and you can charge for them, but they’ll revert back to the free. So putting it out free was basically my habit. I believe — I’m not sure — but I believe I was the first person ever to put an in-copyright, in-print book on the web for free. I happened to have owned the digital rights. Because when it was contracted in 1989 or 1990, nobody knew anything about digital rights.

I don’t think my publishers even know. I just decided to do this. I have no idea whether I own the digital rights or not. I’m no longer even concerned about how many books I sell. I’m really concerned about how many books people read. I’m almost willing, right now, to pay people to read my books.

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Welcome to the fourth installment of “How We Will Read,” a series exploring the future of reading from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. So far we’ve spoken to a nonfiction author, two magazine writers, and a designer-turned-writer-slash-publisher (there’s no good way to put Craig Mod in a box). But we haven’t yet gotten the perspective of someone who doesn’t write for a living.

Enter Ryan Chapman, online marketing manager at the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In many ways, this series is an investigation of industries that are intersecting in new ways. Ryan in particular sits at the intersection of publishing and digital media — or the way he puts it, at the center of “the Venn diagram of literature, new media, & some cool, mind-blowing third thing.” In addition to tweeting at his personal account, he also tweets for FSG’s official account. Ryan is the editor and creator of Work in Progress, an FSG marketing and outreach website. Publishing, needless to say, is undergoing an upheaval — at the very least, a radical redefinition of self. We wanted to see what the future of reading looked like from inside one of the New York’s most prestigious publishing houses. As an integral part of FSG’s social media arm, Ryan is looking for it every day.

How do you do most of your reading these days?

It’s very environment-dependent. I read print while I commute, preferably a trade paperback I can hold with one hand — I’m sure if I was on a subway line with more open seats I’d read more hardcovers. At home it’s a mix of laptop reading and print reading. Plus the Kobo for manuscripts from work. And nothing beats oatmeal, coffee, and the Times in print on a Saturday morning.

I keep track of my reading habits on Goodreads, except when I feel like I’m adding administrative duties to my leisure time. Or when I read a guilty pleasure I’d rather keep secret. Lately I’ve been underlining choice sentences and paragraphs for the FSG Tumblr.

If you could move one feature of paper books to digital books, what would that be?

Portability. I know it’s an odd thing to say, but tablet and dedicated ebook readers still carry the preciousness of tech gadgets. I don’t mind bringing a paperback to the bar. Go ahead, spill beer on my Geoff Dyer book. But my iPad? I’m already embarrassed for how irrationally angry I’d become.

Can you recall the moment you fell in love with reading?

My grandmother taught me how to read at a young age. While I was a source of endless disappointment at the piano, she did like my progress with the ABCs. And later I remember thinking it was cool that the Boxcar Children were allowed to sleep outdoors, without any parents around.

Has reading become more social for you?

Reading has become more social extra-textually, if that makes sense. I remember discovering Maud Newton’s and Mark Sarvas’ blogs in 2004 and thinking, “Oh, this is an internet I actually care about.” It works both ways, too: The first year I used Goodreads I realized I’d only finished eight novels. The unique shame this brought on motivated me to read triple that number the following year.

But reading has yet to become more social within the work itself. That’s fine, it’s a nascent space. We’ll discover the audience or the kind of book that works best here. Will it impact colleges more? Book clubs? I don’t know.

When is the last time you shared a clip of text with a friend?

I’ve been selfishly hoarding clips so far, as a kind of record of what I’ve found interesting. No more will I have to vaguely describe the title or misquote the salient stats from that great New Yorker essay I read a month ago.

From your perspective inside publishing, what do you think have been a few examples of successful strategies in the digital age?

I’m consistently impressed by Graywolf Press. Because of their enthusiasm and authentic voice, Erin Kottke and Fiona McCrae have grown a dedicated literary community. While flashier and more expensive promotions get the press, Graywolf’s marketing proves that slow and steady wins the race. Several other presses have perfected subscriptions and bundling as a way to build loyalty with readers. Some of my favorites: Featherproof, Algonquin, Coffee House Press, and McSweeney’s.

How do you see reading evolving in the years to come?

I think we’ll see formats and reading behaviors hew much closer to certain genres and use cases. We know romance and thriller fans are voracious readers: a dedicated e-reader seems perfect for them. And interactive, iterative publishing may benefit the Design and How-To communities most, as Tim O’Reilly has shown with his titles. Will literary fiction be the vinyl of publishing? Maybe.

I hope we’ll also see much greater interoperability between devices, ebooks, and social reading platforms. This might pinch a few companies’ bottom line, but it’ll greatly benefit readers and foster more innovation.

How do you talk about books after you’ve read them? How does your work in FSG’s social media contribute to the conversation going on around books?

This is a tough question. In a way, it’s my entire position at FSG. It’s also very difficult to quantify how our social media efforts translate to quality conversations. I’m very proud of our user engagement levels in our email newsletter, on Twitter, and the like. But we have to move past these metrics when thinking long-term. I trust that we’re headed in the right direction, though I can’t say how far there is to go.

Find Ryan on Twitter (personal/FSG), at his blog, and on Findings.

(All interviews conducted by Sonia Saraiya.)