Defending the book

Jay Cross (no relation to this author) recently posted some disparaging comments about The Book to explain why he won't be writing books anymore and will instead work on something called The Unbook. Like so many writers advocating for things like "Learning 2.0" and other shifts in the way we work, think, and learn based on Web 2.0 technologies and the ideas behind them, Cross makes a straw man out of the current way of doing things—in this case the humble book.

I'll pick one of his characteristics of The Book as an example: Passive Readers. Of course, passive readers is a bad thing and The Unbook is supposed to have "participants, not readers," which is a good thing. Nonsense. The fact that readers aren't involved in authoring a book doesn't mean that they're passive. We highlight passages, dog-ear pages, and write notes in the margins where we agree or disagree or just think of something else triggered by what we've read. We write reviews, or give talks, or write papers, or even write our own books in response to what we've read—not just in one book but in many different related books. Which also, actually, calls into question Cross's claim that The Book is "unlinked" and not "networked." Books are actually quite thoroughly networked through references and foot notes and bibliographies going back in time, and by being referenced and mentioned by other works going forward.

What a book provides is the time and space for an author to develop a complex, nuanced, subtle, sweeping connected series of thoughts and arguments to create a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Some thinkers—and Cross doesn't say this but it seems to be lurking in the background—seem to believe that this whole can be equally well created through a series of evolving thoughts expressed in smaller doses all over the place, by multiple people working in multiple media. I just can't see it. Think of the scale of something like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. Whatever you think of the arguments in that book, there's no denying the monumental amount of work involved in tying together so many ideas from so many distinct areas to create a consistent, comprehensive whole that expresses a theory that simply didn't exist in the individual parts. We have no medium for the creation and transmission of something like that other than the book.