Stories will never die

Yesterday, Hugh posted Steven Johnson’s article on e-books in the WSJ. Having had more time to absorb it, these particular paragraphs got me thinking:

A world in which search attracts new book readers also will undoubtedly change the way books are written, just as the serial publishing schedule of Dickens’s day led to the obligatory cliffhanger ending at the end of each installment. Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google’s results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.

What will this mean for the books themselves? Perhaps nothing more than a few strategically placed words or paragraphs. Perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind. We’ll have to see.

There’s one thing to be pointed out here: in the history of search engine optimization (oh, that dirty phrase), content has driven the evolution of search engines as much as the other way round. When the value of blogs started becoming apparent, Google undertook work to index individual blog posts. Blogs began to be indexed much faster than normal web content due to their faster content cycles.

I’m more willing to argue that how we write books will change because of how we begin to consume content ourselves — leading to new ways to tell stories as how we perceive time and space change. Our search engines will survive and adapt, just as they always have.

Clearly, we are in store for the return of the cliffhanger.

For nonfiction and short-story collections, a la carte pricing will emerge, as it has in the marketplace for digital music. Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.

This fragmentation sounds unnerving — yet another blow to the deep-focus linearity of the print-book tradition. Breaking the book into detachable parts may sell more books, but there are certain kinds of experiences and arguments that can only be conveyed by the steady, directed immersion that a 400-page book gives you. A playlist of the best chapters from “Middlemarch,” “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Beloved” will never work the way a playlist of songs culled from different albums does today.

It might also be worth pointing out that “cliffhangers” now exist in any kind of serialized content, not only in text — think Heroes, or Six Feet Under. Pick your favourite daytime soap opera. It has survived not merely because it has monetary value associated with it (if you make your readers itch to get their hands on the next installment), but because it also happens to be a good storytelling device.

So, I wouldn’t worry much about long-form tales dying a slow painful death. The human race has been ingenious in finding ways to express ourselves; as long as we have stories to tell, there will be books to write. It’s worth remembering that our technologies exist to adapt to our love of storytelling — not the other way around.