Paul Carr is a British author of several books as well as a columnist for such acclaimed publications as The Guardian and TechCrunch. Thanks to his satire and hilariously cynical style, he has been called a latter-day Jonathan Swift.  While he likely does not wear powdered wigs, he’s certainly one of the wittiest and thoughtful writers today, covering such topics as Silicon Valley and technology, publishing, travel, partying, sobriety, and being a terrible boyfriend.  Paul has lived an intriguing life:  he has worked as a magician (really), an entrepreneur, has a degree in law, and has been “homeless” for several years living permanently in hotels…an adventure for which his (fantastic) book The Upgrade was written.  He recently launched NSFW Corporation, which will publish magazine-style content for tablets and e-readers.  Paul has written much about publishing and the future of books and reading, so we were excited to chat with him.  Our biggest surprise?  He’s been known to burn books.

How do you do most of your reading today?  Do you read physical books or publications?

Of course I do. Who answers no to that question? Print is still by far the best way to consume both books and magazines. You can write on it, you can read it on long flights, even during takeoff and landing, you can give it to your friends without dicking around and most importantly you can throw it across the room when it makes you angry. Also, it’ll still be here in 200 years. The downside, of course, is that it’s also a pain in the ass to access if you don’t happen to already have the book or magazine you want to read. And searching is a non-starter.

So, yes, I read a lot in print. Until a few months ago I used to live exclusively in hotels so I’d buy books and then abandon them on the road. Now I have a real office so I have started building a library again. Whenever I pass a bookshop, I go in and buy a handful. Same with magazines/newspapers — I subscribe to the NY Times (in print!), mainly for the crossword. I also buy the Economist and the New Yorker and all that shit you’re supposed to say you buy, but I actually do. Right now I’m reading the history of Spy (“The Funny Years”), Michael Wolff’s book about Rupert Murdoch and a few Agatha Christie novels I’d never got around to.

THAT HAVING BEEN SAID, the bulk of my reading is digital. I get all my news online, obviously, but I also buy a ton for my Kindle and iPad. Right now I’m reading Meghan McCain and Michael Ian Black’s “America You Sexy Bitch” on Kindle, and an advance copy of Adam Penenberg’s new novel on my iPad. I also tend to subscribe to every new iPad magazine, mostly out of professional curiosity/jealousy. The latest is Arianna Huffington’s “Huffington” which reads like it was written for three of her friends, in both a good and bad way. I subscribe to the New Yorker, Esquire and about half a dozen other things on the Apple Newstand but I never read any of them. That thing is a total shitshow. Christ, I think I subscribe to the Daily too.

How has reading become more social for you?

It hasn’t, I don’t think. Reading isn’t supposed to be social. Maybe you’re thinking of eating, or playing Twister? Seriously, though, I tend to tweet about stuff I’m reading and I think I’ve written a total of one Amazon review. I’m always a sucker for a personal recommendation on Twitter and the like, but honestly I don’t think my reading is any more social than it was ten years ago when I did all those same things offline.

Where do you discuss what you read?

In real life a lot, and then sometimes on Twitter. I know you’re looking for a real NEW MEDIA answer here, but I don’t have one. The idea of a book club drives me nuts, even. It has too many echoes of school, having to wait for the slow kids to catch up before I can move on to the next book. Also, I rarely have anything profound to say about books I read. Maybe I don’t read profound enough books. I much more frequently discuss stuff that I’ve read in magazines or newspapers — mainly because it’s my job to do so. But, again, there’s not a huge amount of difference between how I used to riff on stuff when I wrote a column for an old-school newspaper than how I do it now online.

How do you decide what to read?

I guess it’s coming from social tools slightly more. But I really think that’s just because more of my friends who would previously tell me about stuff in person are now doing so online. The truth is, I hear about most new stuff I read through very old media channels — I walk around book stores (even if I buy online), I read reviews (sometimes online but also in print) and I get a lot of face to face suggestions. I’m so old. Online it’s usually because I know the subject I’m interested in and then search on Amazon for something appropriate.

Do you highlight or annotate what you read?

Sometimes. I tend to get animated — and annotated — when something upsets me. I once set fire to a copy of Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s wikileaks book out of pure rage…does that count as highlighting?

I’m a hypocrite, though, of course — I LOVE it when people electronically highlight stuff from my own books and have spent many happy minutes poring over the snippets that they’ve shared on Amazon etc. It always fascinates me what catches someone’s brain. In fact, I slightly resent all of those who haven’t highlighted anything. REALLY? NOTHING INTERESTED YOU? NOTHING AT ALL? DICK.

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

It saddens me to say that it’ll probably polarize between the word snobs (like me) who turn our noses up at the slightest hint of an illustration — “I’m perfectly capable of imagining Sherlock Holmes for myself, thank you very much!” — and the rest of the world who will increasingly demand fucking video games in the form of ebooks. Why read when you can play a game or watch a cartoon? Attention spans are being sapped, so the books that really catch fire (so to speak) will be those which reward dipping in and out. James Joyce is fucked, but then he always was.  And Stephenie Meyer’s next book will be published in Claymation. 

Non-fiction could be interesting though — as newspapers and magazine publish less and less long form and people become more and more comfortable with paying for ebooks, we could very well find that ebooks become the new home of investigative reporting. It remains to be seen if that’s in the form of words or pretty video pictures though.

Where do you see print going?

Prestige. Talking points. Gifts. A good way to store a single copy of a book for posterity. Definitely not mass-market within 20 years.

Are there any tools or platforms that make you a better writer?

There are no digital tools that would make me a better writer. Not that I couldn’t use the help — truth be told, I’m a pretty shitty writer most of the time. And lazy. But beyond the shift from analogue (typewriter) to digital (word processor, with spell-check), I’m not sure any technological development has really helped with the actual slog of writing. In fact, you could make a compelling argument (and smarter people than I have done so) that even the word processor was a retrograde step as it allowed people to yack on and on without any reason to stop typing. 

That said, there are definitely tools which make the job easier. Spell check, sure, but also access to everything ever published anywhere anyhow makes it simpler to check if your great idea is original (or, of course, to steal great ideas from others). 

How about tools that help you be a better or more satisfied reader?

As a reader, the swell of digital reading has made things infinitely easier. It bugs the living shit out of me when a book I want to read isn’t available electronically — I’ve come to expect — demand — that everything is just a click away. I’m not smart enough to predict what’s coming on the horizon, but I assume whatever it is will make it even easier for me to fill my mental inbox with new stuff to read. I guess that’s a good thing.

Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve spoken of as the “connected consumer” and the importance of deep linking into and out of texts?

I think what I meant is that, whether publishers like it or not, people expect content on screen to be clickable and interactive. Also, they have become accustomed to being able to consume it in short bursts rather than, say, consuming an entire issue of Wired in one sitting. Now, note I’m not saying that’s a good thing (as many do). In fact, as I said above, the video game-ization of reading is something i detest. I just think there needs to be a middle ground.

At NSFW that means publishing in HTML5 so we’re browser agnostic and there’s no big download. We’re also publishing new stuff daily as opposed to dolloping everything out in one big weekly slop. And there are links.  Our policy — and I think it’s a good one for magazines and books is that we use links to provide supporting evidence for facts or analysis but never *as* facts and analysis. Which is to say, you should be able to read anything we publish without clicking a single link and still understand exactly what we’re talking about. I hate it when journalists don’t give background at the top of their story but instead assume you’ll follow the links they give to bring you up to speed. It’s annoying, and often lazy.

As for books, people are more accepting of the idea of books as downloads. As books become more connected, I hope we don’t end up with authors linking to more content than they actually write. That’s one big problem with everything being so accessible — at some point we’re all just copying and pasting and linking to the same stuff rather than writing anything new.  

As an author, do you like seeing highlights from your works by readers?

It’s wonderful. Given my point above about being obsessed with the parts of my books that people highlight, Findings is like an RSS feed of crack. It occurs to me that this kind of data could be dangerous as it encourages authors to write in soundbites. But fuck that — look at all those highlights! Woo!

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

For this installment of the How We Will Read series we chatted with comedian and author Baratunde Thurston (@baratunde on Twitter).  A man once called “someone I need to know” by Barack Obama, Baratunde has been an internet pioneer of political satire and comedy for years. He is an author, a standup comedian, a lecturer, and even a television host.  Baratunde’s playfulness using digital media to tell stories and connect people is legendary…from holding a real-world rally to maintain his Foursquare mayorship, to sharing his computer’s desktop to the public while writing his recent book How To Be Black.  Among other real and imaginary positions of importance, he has served as Director of Digital at The Onion and co-founded popular black political blog Jack and Jill Politics.  Read on to find out why Baratunde hates hardcover books and how he hacked a hashtag into his own book.

How has reading become more social for you?

I’ve experimented with the bookshelf app on Facebook that will capture everything I’ve ever read and just rate books.  I did all that and then I didn’t use it.  And I did it with GoodReads.  I got into GoodReads years ago.  It was a community of really intentional readers, sort of like Artisanal Reader World.  If there were farmer’s markets for books, the people on GoodReads would be the ones to shop there.  [laughs]  Again I didn’t stick to the service, I invested a bunch of time and rated a bunch of things and then stopped.  So the way I find books is mostly through what my friends write (I have a lot of writer friends), and books that I hear about through conversation, whether it’s online or offline.

How do you read books today?

Almost always digitally.  I feel about hardcover books the way I feel about phone calls.  There is a burden associated with receiving a book.  Like when you get that phone call and you wonder “Is this an emergency, did someone die?  You couldn’t have used an asynchronous form of communication?  You really want me NOW?”  So when someone gives me a book, I’m grateful, but it’s kind of like giving me a CD.  Now I have to convert this.

Plus, I live in an New York apartment.  Space is the most valuable thing in my life.  Time is money, space is money, too.  Plus, I travel all the time.  I use a Macbook Air and I’m given a book which does 1/1000th of what that computer does and weighs twice as much and takes up five times as much space.

Where do you discuss what you read?

I do not engage in book clubs.  I think they’re racist and fascist and anti-earth. [laughs] No, I just have never been a part of a formal book club.  I do talk about what I’m reading.  I post my thoughts about what I’m reading online in Facebook and in Twitter, and I share some of those quotes.  I’m a big fan of the pull quote…finding some really juicy nugget and boom! Toss it out as a provocation and see how people react.  And I do that even with articles I’m reading.  That’s how I use Instapaper.  I rarely tweet out an article I’m reading, I tweet out a quote from the article I’m reading.

I let the world come to me, mostly.  I look mostly at my feeds, and whatever’s happening in those feeds.  If something bubbles up that looks interesting I save it.  I have If This Then That programmed to push favorited tweets to Instapaper, and then when I’m on flights I load up my Instapaper and read.  I also talk to people a lot.  I have a very new app, it’s called “Conversation”. [laughs]  It’s really immersive.  It’s high touch, high impact.  I think there’s a future in it, but it doesn’t scale very well.  When I think about other ways I discover or share my reading process, I notice it’s mostly passive.  Rarely do I ask “What do I need to read right now?” 

Is that because now there’s so much to read you don’t even have to ask the question?

With books, I think because the time it takes to read a book I’m never short on material.  It’s really about prioritizing what I read next.  I probably have fifteen books on my Kindle that I haven’t read!  It’s so easy to buy them, but you can’t consume them fast enough.

I’m also a big audiobook person.  I grew up listening to books on tape, like actual cassette.  I’d go to the public library to get them through from middle school all the way through college, and then shifted to CD’s.  Then when Audible came out I died and went to heaven.  I have books in Audible, I have books in my Kindle, I have all kinds of queues.  I get into certain media consumption modes.  Like, I’ll want an immersive long form reading experience, so will focus on that and shift away from Instapaper articles and the New York Times and just read a book.  Same with audio, I’m either into a bunch of podcasts for a couple of weeks or I pick a book.  And I occasionally deviate from the book for one or two critical weekly podcasts that I think make me a smarter and a better citizen.

Do you read more fiction or non-fiction?

Much more non-fiction, but there are some fiction books. I’m in Game of Thrones right now.  I’ll read a chunk of a series and then go to a different book to mix it up.  Epic tales…that’s what I love in books.  I, Robot series.  Foundation series.  Dark Tower series.  I love series, including in television.  The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Killing…those long arc TV shows.  The reason I love those is because they’re like books.  They keep you going…it’s like watching a book in a way a movie doesn’t.  It’s too tight, 90 minutes isn’t enough time.

The beauty of series is that they exist counter to the instant, tweetable, gratification that we are obsessed with.  To invest the time into watching all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica, or reading all 16 books of the Left Behind series, or Game of Thrones…it’s such a counter-intuitive investment to make.  But I think because we have such short attention spans, thanks to our devices and general media model, there’s a piece of all of us that craves a long form tale.  We crave the idea of sitting around a fire listening to a storyteller weave this magical thing.  And that’s how I feel about books, though TV has become more book-like.

Where do you see print going?

Print is becoming a specialty.  A novelty.  A vanity.  It’s things that end in -ty mostly.  [laughs]  It doesn’t make a lot of sense, given planetary resources, given inefficiencies, to force the maintenance of a physical distribution model for most book reading.  As an author who has gone through the process…it is painfully delayed in so many ways.  I was in London just yesterday and stopped by Waterstone’s book store in Trafalgar Square.  “Do you have my book?” “No we’re out, but Picadilly has it.”  You don’t go to Amazon and hear, “Oh port 80 can’t distribute the book right now, come back to Amazon next week.”

We’re beyond scarcity, and that is a known fact of the new world.  What we do still have as a value is a visual social indicator physical books communicate that ebooks can’t…unless we had a display on the back for the cover of what you’re reading.  

While you were writing How To Be Black, you shared your screen with the public as a kind of live social reading experience.  What was that like?

A friend of mine sent me an email that I should use this screen-sharing service join.me to share my screen and let people watch as I write.  And I wrote him back this really long message about how it would ruin the writing process, would be too invasive, and would turn the creation into performance…and by the end of this long rejection I said, “Yeah I wanna do it!” [laughs] I got my own custom join.me screen-sharing URL, cleared my desktop and put a little billboard that said “Welcome to the live writing experience.  This is what I’m testing.  Pre-order the book! (with a link)”  And then I just wrote.  There was a chatroom which created an instant community.  It turned me into a platform for other people to connect.  I made it clear “You’re not here to talk to me, but I’m an excuse for you to talk to each other.”  That’s what’s so much of the world.  Twitter is an excuse to connect.  Facebook is an excuse to connect.  So, I became a service, a platform for people, and that blew my mind.  Plus there was stuff going on in the chatroom, “Oh this reminds me of that,” and “Oh my friend so-and-so told me about this thing.” So, not only are you giving people a generic reason to connect, you’re giving them a reason to share their version of your story…or see themselves in it.  When I looked back over the logs there were a lot of personal stories emerging from that.

It’s like a having a comments section as you’re writing.

I just shifted the timeline.  But it still was a social reading experience.  I’ve seen other artists do this.  Sculptors, specialty painters, visual artists…they will create in public.  But I had not ever seen someone use screen sharing.  Someone told me of an example from a while ago, like back in the typewriter days, of a writer sitting and writing in public.  But you don’t get the chatroom.  Using the web for that was not something I had ever come across.

How do you feel your audience is different for your book versus the web? 

I don’t have book author analytics, but I know who reads my website.  I go to Quantcast or Facebook stats.  I know where they are and what their ages are and what languages they’re speaking.  The book…I have a sense from only a few indicators.  Twitter, Facebook, and the real world.  Twitter is self-selected though: readers who also tweet about what they’re reading and do so in a way that I can see them.  They must spell the title correctly, mention me, or use the book’s hashtag.  We’re talking a funnel within a funnel within a funnel.  So that’s going to lean heavily toward young, digital, probably male.  People who post to Facebook are much fewer than Twitter.  And then there are live events.  When I go out into the world, physically, that’s my focus group.  It’s speaking at Pratt Library in Baltimore, or doing a book party in Chicago, or running into people who just recognize me and say “Oh I read your book.” It’s like a real world tweet.

The book was supposed to come out in February 2011.  That didn’t happen.  Then they decided to push it to the fall of 2011.  I proposed we split the publication, to come out with a digital-only book in February, because production-wise we could meet that.  Then we’d follow it with a very special hardcover edition.  But the publisher was really against it.  And I was like, “But I’m a digital dude!”  I literally yelled that at a meeting.  My audience is connected to me through the internet mostly.  I said, “We’ll do well.  We’ll kill it.”  And they said “No, you’re going to leave too many other readers behind.”  And they were absolutely right.  My sales are 50/50!   There are too many people out there who need to read this book who would have never heard of it.  Not everybody has a Kindle, not everybody has an iPad.

Speaking of which, how do you feel the rise of digital books versus physical books are affecting the digital divide?

You know, there is probably a Pew study on this.  I have not seen anything in particular about ebook consumption by age, by race, by language.  I would assume there’s a lower penetration of ebooks among black people, even though there’s a higher penetration of mobile devices than the general public.  Mobile internet use is much higher.  I have not anecdotally come across people who’ve read my book on a phone, nor do I have a sense whether more or fewer black folks are reading the book on a device.  I will tell you the level of social digital conversation around this book by black people is very high.  Because of Twitter, because black people run Twitter.

Black people run Twitter?

This is the hidden truth: black people dominate Twitter.  The trending topics, the amount of mobile penetration of devices…study after study continues to prove that Twitter is disproportionately black.  And if it’s a conversation around my book, I think it’s heavily black.  I want to pull the avatars of all the people tweeting about the book, and view the shades of what those images generally are…assuming people are putting their faces up, you’d get a sense of the color line.

I came across a Twitter reading group because they mentioned me and I love myself. [laughs]  So I looked at this thing Ninjas Be Reading (#NBR), and it was a heavily black hashtag-based reading group.  So I joined in, and I took questions.  They were like OMG we got the author!  And I retweeted some of the best comments.  It was so natural.  Because of Twitter’s bias toward black out of proportion to the population leads me to think that social reading and cultural discussions around book objects or cultural objects by black people in general is high.  There is a great market, a great opportunity there.  That it is not leaving people behind, quite the opposite.

So does your book have an official hashtag?

#HowToBeBlack!  In fact I went so far as to print it on the top of every other page, instead of the title.  I hacked the book!  This is the fun part, the playing.  I worked at The Onion doing digital storytelling all these years, I’ve been flying through Twitter, doing Foursquare campaigns on the streets of New York.  I love this.  And the idea of doing a book was kind of counter to my general direction as a storyteller [makes a record-scratch noise] WHAT? Baratunde is writing a hardcover WHAT?  [laughs] But, even within that framework I made room to put a hashtag on every other page to provoke a conversation.  And it worked!  That’s the beauty of it.  People want to engage.  It doesn’t mean they have to have a 3D immersive reading room that you walk into Second Life-style.  It may be as simple as printing a hashtag on every page of your book to indicate that conversation it possible.  Let the audience fill in the blanks.  It’s not all high tech.

This interview was conducted by Findings co-founder Corey Menscher.

This post is part of “How We Will Read,” an interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here. And check out our new homepage, a captivating new way to explore Findings.

This week we were extraordinarily lucky to get some of the precious time of Maria Popova, the Internet’s most awesome curator. Maria is best known for her site Brainpickings, in which she and her co-curators find the most interesting stuff on the web, consistently — typically, what is the most beautiful, inspiring, and poignant. Maria, unlike many of the rest of us, approaches the vastness of the web with a sense of wonder that is infectious. Her work always communicates the passionate belief that the connectedness and openness of the Internet can foster creativity, curiosity, innovation, and growth. We all adore Maria and were thrilled she could talk to us — because in addition to her extraordinary insight on creativity, she also loves reading, and had much to say not just on what books are, but also on what books ought to be.

How do you do most of your reading and annotating these days?

I prefer digital — Kindle on iPad is my weapon of choice. (Despite its many design and usability flaws, which are the subject of another conversation.) I’m an active marginalian and like being able to switch between my reading and Evernote, where I save quotes from and notes on the reading material in question. I also read a fair amount of longform on Instapaper, mostly at the gym during my morning workout. It’s safe to say I only ever use the iPad for Instapaper, Evernote, and Kindle. In fact, reading is the sole reason I got one.

That said, I read a lot of old books, most of which are not available on Kindle. Because I didn’t grow up in the U.S. and only moved here for college, I’ve always felt like I have this vast literary debt. I try to do an old book for every “new” book I get. And because most of my reading springs from the wonderful mesh of allusions and references of which literature is woven, this creates an interesting bipolar rabbit hole of past and present driving my discoveries and decisions on what to read next. It’s a beautiful process of controlled serendipity, but it can also get very overwhelming.

Because I’m a writer as much as a reader, I often take notes with the awareness that I’ll be writing about what I’m reading. I think this changes the lens of reading significantly, and marginalia play an enormous part of that. As I mentioned, I save a lot of clips and quotes and notes, but that’s a surprisingly — or perhaps unsurprisingly — laborious task. On the one hand, when I’m reading on paper — which tends to be the case with all the vintage books I read — saving something to Evernote means manually transcribing it. I do that a shameful amount, sometimes transcribing entire pages I know I’ll need to refer to. I estimate I type anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 words a week just transcribing what I’m reading. (I eagerly await the day our technology is good enough to automatically and perfectly transcribe text you take a photo of. Until then, an intern would suffice.)

On the other hand, with digital, DRM regulations are making it extremely difficult, or purposely impossible, to export highlights. (This is partly why Findings makes my life easier.) Which means we’re either back to manual transcription or, my recent embarrassment of choice, taking a screenshot of the highlight on the Kindle iPad app, then emailing the photo to my Evernote email. Evernote has optical character recognition, so searching for a keyword will also fetch results from images of text, not just typed text.

How has reading become more social for you?

It hasn’t.

I have a friend who “skims” books by turning on the popular highlights feature in Kindle and only reading those. It works for her, but to me that’s the death of reading.

Reading is a bootcamp for developing and exercising critical thinking. Without that — intellectual apocalypse! And critical thinking is about developing a point of view, and all writing is — or, should be — about arguing a point of view, implicitly or explicitly. When you bring the crowd into the equation, this concept completely disappears — because a crowd cannot have a point of view, at least not one that is simultaneously focused and authentic to each individual in the crowd.

I don’t need a focus group of strangers to tell me what I should be reading or, more dangerously, how to read what I’m reading. Decision by committee doesn’t work in creative labor, and it certainly doesn’t work in intellectual labor.

Mortimer Aldler, in the wonderful How to Read a Book, says that marginalia are your private dialogue with the author, the intellectual tug-of-war that is really the greatest compliment you can pay an author. Being guided by other people’s marginalia is like letting a thousand voices into your head while trying to hold a challenging debate. Have those conversations, by all means, but do so over dinner or tea with people whom you respect and only after you have read the very thing you’re going to discuss and made up your mind about it.

“Listen, then make up your mind,” Gay Talese famously said about the secret of writing. It’s only logical that this should be inverted when it comes to reading: “Make up your mind, then listen.”

That said, I find it intriguing to see what and how individual people I respect — as opposed to an amalgamated “crowd” — are reading. I subscribe to Steven’s findings via RSS, for instance, and have made it a game of trying to figure out what his next article or book will be based on what he’s reading. I often add those items to my own reading list — I think there’s nothing wrong with complementing your own literary diet and curiosity with discoveries from individual readers you respect.

Read More

This post is part of “How We Will Read,” an interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here. And check out our new homepage, a captivating new way to explore Findings.

This week, we were extremely honored to speak to Internet intellectual Clay Shirky, writer, teacher, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. Clay is a professor at the renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and author of two books, most recently Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

Clay is one of the foremost minds studying the evolution of Internet culture. He is also a dedicated writer and reader, and it was natural that we would ask him to contribute to our series to hear what he could teach us about social reading. Clay is both brilliant and witty, able to weave in quotes from Robert Frost in one breath and drop a “ZOMG” in the next. So sit down and take notes: Professor Shirky’s about to speak.

How is publishing changing?

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.

In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private. Privacy was the default setting. We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a Wordpress install.

The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet. But the publishing apparatus is gone. Even if people want a physical artifact — pipe the PDF to a printing machine. We’ve already seen it happen with newspapers and the printer. It is now, or soon, when more people will print the New York Times holding down the “print” button than buy a physical copy.

The original promise of the e-book was not a promise to the reader, it was a promise to the publisher: “We will design something that appears on a screen, but it will be as inconvenient as if it were a physical object.” This is the promise of the portable document format, where data goes to die, as well.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution. Now publishers are in the business not of overcoming scarcity but of manufacturing demand. And that means that almost all innovation in creation, consumption, distribution and use of text is coming from outside the traditional publishing industry.

What is the future of reading? How can we make it more social?

One of the things that bugs me about the Kindle Fire is that for all that I didn’t like the original Kindle, one of its greatest features was that you couldn’t get your email on it. There was an old saying in the 1980s and 1990s that all applications expand to the point at which they can read email. An old geek text editor, eMacs, had added a capability to read email inside your text editor. Another sign of the end times, as if more were needed. In a way, this is happening with hardware. Everything that goes into your pocket expands until it can read email.

But a book is a “momentary stay against confusion.” This is something quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital confusion. The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

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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.

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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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.)

Welcome to the third installment of “How We Will Read,” a series exploring the future of reading from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. This week we spoke to Craig Mod, writer, publisher, and former designer at Flipboard.

Craig has written and spoken on the future of books before: Check out “Books in the Age of the iPad” and “Post-Artifact Books and Publishing” — essays that have been heavily clipped on Findings. Craig has the perfect combination of skills for a leading innovator in digital publishing — his extensive experience as a designer, both for devices and for print, dovetails with his skill as a writer and his own love for reading. He’s particularly interested in the intersection of digital publishing, education, and “super cheap devices.” Craig splits his time between Palo Alto and Tokyo, working on a project that combines all of these interests. It’ll probably be incredible… but we don’t know what it is yet! In the meantime, we wanted to know how we was reading these days, and where he thought publishing might innovate. (Hint: hover cars may be involved.)

How do you do most of your reading these days?

In order of frequency: third-generation e-ink Kindle with keyboard, iPhone, physical books.

The recent touch-based Kindles fail for me given their lack of page-turn buttons (although I love how much more intuitive touch-based swipe-to-highlight … but then, I lament the loss of highlighting across pages. Always something!). I find the keyboard Kindle still works the best for me. I suspect the issues I have with the touch product will be fixed in an upcoming revision.

I find I almost never read on an iPad. The resolution is simply too low for good typography. I anxiously await the retina-display iPad which hopefully will arrive imminently.

On the iPhone I use Flipboard most frequently. But I also use plain ‘ole mobile Safari quite a bit, too. I access Techmeme half-a-dozen times a day, having it bookmarked and on the first screen of my iPhone. I find the Techmeme mobile site is a near perfectly curated quick-dip into tech news.

Kindle is for consuming books (and particularly for those kinds of books I feel the need to highlight/notate). iPhone is for news. Physical books are for art, design and photography books, or for the rare piece of fiction not available digitally.

I read mainly at home or in coffee shops. I don’t have a commute.

Kindle.amazon.com keeps track of what I’ve read or am reading. I also augment that list with a Simplenote note of physical books I read. There is always another book in the queue.

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

A better sense of edges; distance traveled.

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

Always. It’s like asking the moment I fell in love with breathing. :-)

I was lucky to have a mother who was an elementary school teacher and as such was obsessed with books. I’ve been reading something for as long as I have memory (starting with variations on the Bible, Dick and Jane, Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, etc). The first time I thought — wow, OK, so this is how you imagine another world — was when I was nine, in fourth grade, reading Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. As a child I was obsessed with gore and horror (as is the wont of young American boys) and was pulled to King for those reasons. But The Gunslinger had none of that, and yet I couldn’t stop re-reading it.

Has reading become more social for you?

A little bit. Hardly as much as those of us watching this space have expected. Amazon.kindle.com is just sitting there, waiting to be exploited. I’d love to poke my head into Amazon HQ and find out what, exactly, they’re planning on doing with that.

I find I struggle with other “social” reading applications because they require excessive amount of work to get the books into their system. I am tremendously lazy. If the social component of reading doesn’t happen seamlessly with my Kindle habits, it’s very unlikely I’ll engage it regularly.

The most “social” reading experience I’ve had recently was at the MacDowell Colony. I had wonderful conversations with novelists and artists every day, and every day I’d have a list of five new books to read. At night I’d go back to my cabin and check for them on Kindle. I’d grab one and stay up all night reading it. Then I’d re-engage the community the next day, get more book recommendations, and so on. God, what a nourishing cycle that was.

I’ve had no such experience digitally.

Do you often annotate what you’re reading? Why? How has this changed over time, with the advent of new technology?

More highlight than annotate. I then go back over highlights later and use them as jumping points for longer discussions. As I’m reading I want any engagement with the text to be as lightweight as possible. I’m very cognizant of disruptions to the reading process and try to avoid them.

How has it changed over time? I feel like highlighting now has a measurable return — I get a personalized cliff notes of the book (again, on kindle.amazon.com). I find I’m much more likely to go over digital highlights than physical ones simply because of the hyper-simplicity of searching them in digital spaces.

How does highlighting create longer discussions? Do you share them with people, or are they for your own benefit?

Right now they’re just for my benefit. Mainly because there isn’t yet a great interface/network into which my social graph is plugged to generate discussion around them. That said — they often end up as quotes in my essays or blog posts and the discussion emerges from there, albeit then far from the original source.

I know that you’re working on your own writing — how does what you’re reading, and your highlighting process, help you with your work?

It’s a reminder. I often scribble down in my notebook a particular passage as I come across it and digitally highlight it. Then, later, I can pop into kindle.amazon.com or Findings and search for the quote I scribbled. Mainly, though, I use the highlights to refresh my memory after having made it through a book once. They’re anchors of my interests, which may inspire additional re-readings of specific chapters.

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

My hope is for even longer batteries; I don’t want ever think about charging my reading device. More responsive e-ink (although I wonder where the responsiveness/quickness asymptote may lie and fear that we are rapidly approaching it).

But more generally in terms of the act of reading? I hope not much changes. It’s not broken. At least not for standard fiction/non-fiction books. Children’s books are evolving into interesting places. But then again, we’re constantly redefining the edges of the things we can call a digital “book”. Are these children’s book applications even books anymore?

How do you think publishing might evolve? How could publishing better serve the needs of the changing reading process?

It’s already evolving. Smaller operations are, for example, making money! Especially off of independently (or, pejoratively, ‘vanity’) published books. Trust me — that’s quite a change. :-) 

I’m pretty sure all the founders and authors of the tiny imprint A Book Apart get around NYC in private helicopters. Or, OK, maybe not private helicopters but certainly hover cars. Or at the very least, fancy boots.

Nick Carr had a nice post about digital/physical bundles recently. I think that’s an under-served aspect of the reading process — giving digital away for ‘free’ with physical book purchases. Do that and you help embed some awareness of the experiential differences between the mediums into the consumer package.

I wonder if books will ever go the subscription route. Amazon is pushing in that direction (certain free book checkouts for Prime customers, for example). I used to think it was inevitable but then again — how many books a month do you read? For most people I suspect it’s a very small number. I.e., It might be hard to justify a $9.99/month subscription rate if you’re only reading one book a month. Still, the idea of a Spotify-like model — everyone has access to every piece of media — has interesting implications on sharing/gifting/excerpting/etc.

If, for example, you know everyone has access to every book (the Spotify model) then you can start to point people to chapters (this works particularly well for non-fiction). The innards of the books become much more accessible (as opposed to just the highlights captured somewhere externally — Amazon’s bizarro floating web netherworld in which highlights live, for example) and that would, I believe, make them feel a little more malleable. Good or bad? Who knows. Certainly curious.

Kindle previews sort of gets us a pinkie toe into this world. I know I Kindle preview like a madman. I assume everyone else does, too. A book looks even mildly interesting? Dump it into Kindle as a preview! We’re sorta turning into book squirrels, acquiring a variety of nuts to dig into in the cold, lonely winter months.

Find Craig at his personal website, on Twitter, and on Findings.