Books should be web-enabled

Notes

I don’t read as many books as I once did. I still make my way through two or three at a time and have a pile I’m waiting to begin (like Pooh Bear, I always like to know where my next pot of honey is coming from), but my pace is way slower than it was years ago. Part of this is having four kids and a demanding job, but part of it also is that I enjoy reading quality material online. I love well-written hyperlinked prose and I appreciate what strong visuals and design add to well produced web content.

But a good book can take you to another place, and I don’t love reading long-form material on my iPad. It just doesn’t feel quite right to me, so I don’t order many books for instant download. Count me among those hoping the physical book lives on for a long time to come.

Yet right now I’m reading Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography in physical form, and I find in certain sections the work suffers from a very real weakness of not being web-enabled. For example, Isaacson gives a lot of ink - as he should - to the great 1984 Mac Super Bowl commercial. He describes the drama of how it came to be, and many details of the video itself. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in whipping out my iPhone at that stage to Google and watch the video again. Of course you want to watch it once you learn more about its history! So why doesn’t the book contain a QR code to the video alongside the text in that section? Or, better yet, why don’t publishers come up with a more elegant book-to-web function than those ugly QR codes?

This would in no way lessen the experience of reading the book as a book - it would obviously be optional to smartphone off to YouTube, and the visual interference on the page would be minimal. It would add a near-immediate experiential dimension that brings an important additional layer of meaning to the text. It’s a natural extension of what the author of a non-fiction work is trying to achieve, a tool that at this point should be in their kit.

I hope my kids are still reading non-fiction books when they’re adults, but I also hope those books are web-enabled in a way that grants them greater insight and understanding of the ideas they address.