The Future of Books: why IDEO and I aren’t on the same page

I’m a sucker for shiny concepts but IDEO’s vision for the future of the book leaves me cold somehow. The idea that we’re going to kill off the traditional nature of the book saddens me. As we smear on layer upon layer of new information, we expect less from readers. The need to use your imagination and stretch yourself is lessened. The future book does so much for you, that the narrative starts to feel like a set of vestigial limbs beneath a robot skeleton.

Turning the book into a social experience is arguably a counter-productive thing. The traditional book is contained, singular, you and the writer in a direct relationship. You shouldn’t want to jump through a mess of hyperlinks to find a definition of a confusing word or unpick the underlying political implications of a sub-plot. A great book is like a duvet you wrap around you and an adventure you rush through solving clues as you go.

The book is one of the finest pieces of design in the history of humanity. It is the physical compression of thoughts and feeling into print, an almost magical translation of experience from one human to another. It can deal with sun, rain, sweat and time in ways that ebook readers cannot even come near to managing yet. It is a universal format – the only codec you need to run it is the human mind.

Nelson, as described by IDEO in the video above, does so much work for you. It throws multiple perspectives into the equation, killing the unreliable narrator with the gifts of foresight and hindsight. It does away with the unexplainable appeal of a surprising hit novel giving you a league table of books to pick from according to their “impact on popular opinion and debate.” You’ll struggle to form your own opinion as you jump through the layers that Nelson offers you, given a perspective like a student browbeaten by an overbearing A-Level tutor.

I wrote a post last year about the need for imagination athletes, people who develop their minds as conduits for great ideas. The future of the book seems like it will turn the imagination into an endangered species. By giving you too much information and too much control, the future book has the dangerous potential to become the literary equivalent of  mashed up banana. No struggle, no challenge – just an annotated exercise in hand holding.

For someone who writes about technology and the future with one finger pressed firmly on the fast forward button, celebrating the relentless Darwinism of progress, defending the book so vehemently seems out of place. But swaddling our stories in layers of additional information seems like a surefire way to stifle their growth and I’ll be sad to see this future of books come to pass.