Now, here is an interesting way to think about books: Book as a Database. Don’t go technophobic on me now, the author of the three-part article, Chris Kubica, explains it so clearly that it will be painless. The explanation part anyway. The thinking about what it means part, maybe not so much.
As Kubica explains, “a relational database is something that stores information in a structured, organized way.” Now think of a book. Structured. Organized. A container for information. A database on paper. Now digitize that book and viewing it as a database opens up a myriad of possibilities from queries like how many times was word “X” used to even bigger possibilities when the book is placed in a reading ecosystem where you can ask for how many other people in your geographical area have read or are reading this book. The book as database in the reading ecosystem could also allow the sharing of comments, ratings, questions about the book, etc. And of course with a book as digital database you can add multimedia and links.
This is not a particularly oirginal idea and in some ways just sounds like more e-book evangelism, but if you step back a bit it is an interesting. However, it is not one I feel comfortable with. For certain types of books the concept works fantastically; technical books, textbooks, particular kinds of nonfiction books. But for a novel? Kubica mentions choose your own adventure novels and it would work for that. But for a regular novel?
Book as database makes an assumption about the way we approach reading a book, that somehow reading text on a page or screen is not enough, that it needs to be somehow improved by linking it to all these other things. It also assumes that we are reading a book for information and while a novel can be informative, I doubt that many read James Joyce or the latest NY Times bestseller looking for information on a good walk through Dublin or advice on how negotiate the tricky relationship issues that arise from having a vampire as a boyfriend.
A book can be a database but not all books should be a database.
Yes, I agree with you … it’s a bit of horses for courses. Different books lend themselves to different uses and therefore needs.
As for novels, I do love it when I can search for something in a novel later, such as to find a special quote for a blog post! I use the Jane Austen texts at pemberley.com all the time when I want to find something in one of her books. And, being able to search novels electronically is probably also a great boon for academics writing their theses and papers, though you can imagine that taken to extreme it could all become a bit mechanical.
There’s a great moment in one of David Lodge’s novels (wish I could recall the title) in which a linguistics researcher takes the work of a successful novelist and uses it as a database, deconstructing his style entirely to find out how often he uses certain words, key phrases, themes, etc. The researcher sends the data to the author, who is then completely stymied and suffers forever more from writer’s block, as every time he goes to write a sentence, he has this guy’s proof of his repetitious behaviour in his head.
So yes, great for non-fiction, but probably best to leave the novelists be.
Reading and writing are my avocation, but databases are how I earn a living. Being able to search for content is one thing – I love, for instance, being able to highlight and annotate an ebook to easily reference it later. But Kubica seems to be suggesting something altogether different. Individual words or sentences no more make a novel than a box of paints and a canvas make a work of art. I spend much of my work life extracting data from computer systems to “tell a story”‘, but there is no narrative. It is completely an act of interpretation – what data (the facts, and filters in the query) that I chose to base my report on lead to a specific view. It is as much an act of authorship as writing a short story. Now there are certain constraints that lead to its acceptability as a business report. For instance, I can’t call something “revenue” that hasn’t been sold , invoiced, paid for, because as a financial term that is what is the common understanding of a revenue report. But, if I, as a writer, create a work if fiction and someone extracts my words and reorganizes them, they don’t have the same work, nor the same experience in reading it. I may choose to break some conventional understanding of the novel, but I am still presenting ideas in a certain format that is all mine. A reader may bring her own constructs to that work in order to understand it, but she doesn’t create it herself.
whisperinggums, I hear you one the positives of being able to easily search novels for passages. I love Google Books for that very reason and my Kindle too for that reason. Digitizing a book and putting in a database to make it available for searching is very different than thinking of the book itself as a database which I think is sometimes effective and sometimes not.
Litlove, if you ever remember what that Lodge book is you must tell me! Poor novelists, we could very well send a good many of them to the looney bin if we get too “close” to their books.
What an elegant notion – “reading ecosystem”. Tell us more?
Hi, everyone. I wrote the blog posts you are discussing. Thanks for the forum to join in.
A few points.
First, I think all books should be written initially as or converted after the fact into databases, fiction and non-fiction. This way all of the searching, data-mining, charting, graphing and otherwise analyzing can be done across books, entire libraries, and so on. Also, once a book is a database in can be discussed, shared (with fair use limits). Readers can add their own notes, bookmarks, tags, highlights. All of the above is a win for everyone.
Turning a book into a database, though, does not require a reader to use any of those features. They could turn them all off or hide them and just be left with words on a page.
Also, just because a book is turned into a database does not mean it will be changed in any way from its original text. Imagine if we uploaded Moby Dick to become a database. Moby Dick is just text without pictures, hyperlinks, movies, etc. When you read this book as a database, you’d still just be reading text on a page. HOWEVER, readers could add their own highlights, notes, annotations on top of the text which other readers could opt in to reading for example in a classroom setting. Wouldn’t it be nice to be reading just the “text on the page” of Ulysses but know that at any moment you could reach into the collective knowledge of the world to define a word, understand a metaphor, see a picture of an unfamiliar object?
Last, creating a book as a database does not necessarily mean the author loses control of their manuscript. Just because other readers are adding notes or comments to “their copy” of the book-as-database doesn’t mean that reader has altered the original text of the work or that anyone else or the author will read their notes.
Finally, books as database do allow for all kinds of new books that aren’t possible on paper or static eBooks. Like collaborative stories, neverending serials, living autobiographies, and so on.
Thanks!
This is an interesting concept and in some ways this could be really useful. I’ve been reading parts of a novel online and it has this cool feature where some of the more difficult words are hyperlinked and when you run the mouse over them a box appears with the definition. It’s been very handy. I’m still a hard sell ultimately, though. I can’t give up my nice, comfy paper copies yet.
Chris, I can see your point. Still I think that for some works, the application is limited, except perhaps for academic or critical review. The ability to look up a word or similar reference is a great one. One of my coworkers recently said that she wanted to be able to look up a word in an ebook, not in English dictionary, but in her first language so that she could be sure she understood the nuance. Wouldn’t that be a great app! Kindle now has ability to show others comments and highlights. I had this feature turned on for about 3 paragraphs; it was very annoying. Others random comments did little to add to either my understanding or enjoyment of the work (fiction). However, if I was reading a technical work, a history, something in science or philosophy I might find it useful somewhat. However, I think I’d rather read an annotated version or criticism to help my understanding. Although I enjoy books and take a fairly democratic approach to a reader’s understanding (e.g. One doesn’t need a “expert” to know how to react or interpret a work), up to a point the “wisdom of the masses” has a limited application. Comments unattributed, unverified, become just noise. I like to discuss books, but I don’t think that marginalia can aid such a dialog.
Hi there,
I forgot to reiterate one important aspect of my vision for a book-as-database…the filter. You are absolutely right that over time the graffiti of the world written atop great works like Moby Dick would quickly become overwhelming and useless. So I envision:
1. When you first come to a work, it is just text on a page
2. You can add your own notes/annotations to the work and see those
3. You can add your friends and then also see THEIR shared notes/highlights/etc
4. You can add hash-tags or tags, like on Twitter, to see certain other people’s notes/annotations to the work like other kids in your class, noted, verified experts/professors.
5. If you want, you could peak at “everyone else’s” notes/etc, but this would have limited use except in aggregate (what are the most highlighted passages? What page has the most notes? etc)
In non-fiction, technical books, where the text itself can change, paragraph by paragraph, on literally a daily basis, leaving the comments of the entire world turned on might make more sense since there wouldn’t be much time for the metadata to accumulate before the metadata was superseded/deprecated by a newer version of the text.
Chris
Cam and Chris, thank you both for such interesting comments!
Cam, you make some very good points. I agree that the application is limited when it comes to certain types of reading. Only academics are going to want to be able to query a text in such depth as a database allows, the average reader just wants a good story. And while a book as database doesn’t interfere with the reading of the text it’s overkill to have a database that is not used. I’ve not gotten the Kindle upgrade yet but my sister has and she turned the comments and highlights off too because it was so annoying.
Chris, thanks for adding more grist to the mill. Your idea is really an interesting way to look at a book but as I mentioned to Cam it works better for some kinds of books than others. This doesn’t invalidate your idea though! And Yes, there is much potential for some very interesting creations. Do you have a Kindle? Some of the features that you mention are available on that device including Twitter and Facebook integration. Have you considered copyright when it comes to the notes that readers could make on a text? As an academic librarian in training I can’t help but wonder how access to other people’s book notes might be handled especially if a student should want to use the notation information in a paper. Something else for all the APA, MLA and other citation guides to think about!
Danielle, the built in dictionary is one of the nicest things about e-book reading. One a Kindle you just move the cursor to the beginning of the word and the definition appears at the bottom of the screen. I am much more likely to look up a word I don’t know when reading an e-book because it is so darn easy! But I hear you, even with all the bells and whistles there is still something to be said for the simple experience of reading a book printed on paper.
Colleen, how could I have skipped you? I believe Chris says book ecosystem in his article but I morphed it to reading ecosystem. The way I perceive it, it is the broader context in which a book/reading resides beyond the individual experience. It is like an ecosystem in which each book and each reader is connected to each other creating ripples and influences. Blogging about books is definitely part of the ecosystem!
Hi again.
My idea is that once an author puts their book out there into a database (like at my http://www.neverendmedia.com when I get around to releasing it) that the potential is there for all kinds of ways to read and access it. If the book is paper only, the options are forever (and increasingly in this digital world) limited.
Yes, some of the features I mentioned are available on a Kindle and in many other places. But those are still static eBooks so the possible features available using that format are also limited.
I haven’t thought about copyrighting notes that much other than a user would decide which notes to share and that your Terms of Use would need to grant “the platform” non-exclusive rights to use any content people add and choose to share.
As to “the simple experience of reading a book printed on paper”, my vision is that paper is simply one of the outputs of the book-as-database. Once it is in a database, it could be printed on demand to paper, turned into a Kindle eBook, read online, machine translated via Google Translate into French…anything. Once it is a database the outputs are unlimited.