RIT's Future of Reading Conference, June 9-12, Rochester, NY

Liz Lawley writes to tell us about the Future of Reading Conference at RIT: "This three-day symposium at RIT June 9-12, 2010 will be organized around a central question: How will reading change in the next decade? With a target audience of 300-500 participants, the conference will feature provocative and challenging presentations by experts in writing systems, content creation, vision and cognition, typography, visual media, and display technology. Speakers at this conference include Margaret Atwood, Chris Anderson, and Massimo Vignelli. Should be a very cool event, with lots of discussion surrounding the technologies of books and reading."

RIT Future of Reading Conference (Thanks, Liz!

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Now that e-readers have dropped to $100, paper-based books are on the way out.
- ptrourke
  
  Nope, not entirely. I have a Kindle and a Sony Reader. They’re great for linear reading (fiction, for instance). Not so good for reference reading, and lousy for any reading that involves a lot of annotation (footnotes; I’m not even getting into the question of writing notes in the margins, because I rarely do that and normally use a notebook instead).
  
  That idea – that electronic readers are inferior to print for non-linear and annotated reading – is counter-intuitive, of course: you’d think that the ultimate serial medium, paper, would be at a disadvantage to the hyperlinking and cross-referencing capabilities of software.
  
  I think it is a matter of form factor and user interface. One great new book I picked up recently is Harvard/Belknap’s *The Annotated Origin*, a facsimile of the first edition of *On the Origin of Species* with annotations in the margins by biologist James T. Costa. The book is in a wide (landscape) format, with the facsimile near the binding and extensive margins for the annotations. As an e-book on a Kindle, I’d have to select a hyperlink, move to the annotation, then click back to the text; but on the codex, I can just look left to refer back to the text from the annotation.
  
  Another book that shows off the abilities of print over current user interfaces is Wai-Lim Yip’s *Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres.* This book takes the side-by-side translation format you see in series like Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library, I Tatti Library, and NYU’s Clay Sanskrit library a step further, providing the original Chinese, annotations, and a metaphrase translation in such a way that you can see how the poem is put together in Chinese.
  
  I think a wide-screen iPad might be able to replicate a lot of the features of books like these (say one that was just an inch or two taller in portrait), thanks to the multi-touch interface; and so, I suppose, would a large-format, wide-screen, multi-touch, color Kindle. But we’re until then, we will not nearly be at the point where we can dismiss the paper codex as obsolete.
- Anonymous
  
  i disagree. i hate handheld readers. there are so many more positives to a printed book for me that i cant see myself switching anytime soon. i still even buy all my tradebooks in print, even though many in the field are pdf now too. it’s not the same.