Just Browsing: Digital Futures

Since the early 1990s, the Internet has swallowed up other media like kudzu: Tower Records closes stores while iTunes thrives, and the most popular clip on YouTube gets more viewers than the biggest blockbuster films. But in the face of this onslaught, books have remained relatively untouched.

To me, books are a remnant from the old order when people still luxuriated in bubble baths and drank dry martinis. So when both Random House and HarperCollins announced they had a new way of combining technology and literature, I was skeptical.

Last week, Random House introduced Insight, a new browsing feature on their Web site that enables users to search and read excerpts from over 5,000 of its books. HarperCollins recently installed a similar feature, though both of them are years behind Amazon.com, which has allowed peeks into the titles on its site since 2003. But Random House and HarperCollins have loftier goals than Amazon: they want to bring literature to the Facebook generation.

Both publishing houses are introducing tools that will allow readers to export text from their books to other forums. Readers can use Insight to post content on personal Web sites, while HarperCollins’ widget can place content on social networking sites like MySpace.com. Has the publishing industry really sunk to level of MySpace? Will chunks of Ulysses soon co-exist with millions of pictures of sulky teenagers?

Maybe the eventual triumph of MySpace was inevitable. Publishing houses have only held out thus far because reading is on some level a tactile experience: with e-texts, the words become essential and the physicality of the object disappears. The literature can be put online, but not the book. And book buyers want the book.

This has helped preserve the book even while CDs became MP3s and VHS became DVDs. New technology has not transformed the form of the media, but rather how people acquire it. In the last 10 years, physical bookstores have been increasingly abandoned for sites like Amazon.com that offer books at cheaper prices. But Amazon is not without its drawbacks: when consumers purchase books online, browsing becomes a thing of the past.

Without the ability to browse, a reader becomes passive in his selection, dependent upon personal recommendations or the bestseller list to determine his next choice. Since recommendations are often way off the mark, and the bestseller list is perpetually infested with trade romances and Dan Brown potboilers, the online shopper is stranded with an ever-diminishing pool of options.

Until recently, the reader was unable to judge a writer’s style when shopping online. The New York Times recognizes the importance of actually reading a chunk of the text and has been running first chapters of newly released books in its Sunday Book Review for years. The new ability to peek inside a book online is one small step in bringing online shopping closer to real-life shopping by enabling online browsing, a pivotal action in any selection of a book.

Though it can’t compare to old-fashioned bookstore browsing, I’m willing to admit this is one combination that seems to be compatible. So maybe technology and literature can find happiness together. I’ll endorse anything that rescues an innocent reader from “The Da Vinci Code.”

—Staff writer Madeline K.B. Ross can be reached at mross@fas.harvard.edu.