This column is reprinted from the Technology department of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (JAAL). It contains the following sections:

• Editor's Message (from department editor Bertram Bruce)
• Issue of the Month
• Website of the Month
• Glossary
• References

I mentioned in September that from time to time this journal year I'd invite guest authors to write the JAAL Technology column. This month's guest, Mike Sharples, has worked for many years on innovative approaches in language and technology. He was a pioneer in creating environments for students to use computers to explore patterns in language through his Phrasebooks and Boxes programs. One thing I especially liked about this work was that Mike saw that language learning could be fun, and he built that perspective into his software. He has also been a leader in areas such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and computer support for collaborative writing.

Working, as he does, in the United Kingdom, Mike has a perspective on educational technology issues that will add to my view from the United States. When I asked him if he would be interested in writing the October column, I also told Mike that I would very much like to hear his latest views on electronic books. When he wrote back to me with his acceptance, he suggested the topic of paper versus electronic publication.

Online journals and e-books are beginning to appear as commercial products. In the Issue section Mike tackles questions such as What are the implications for reading and writing? Is it as easy to read from the screen as from a book? and Should we be writing for the screen rather than the page?

-- Bertram Bruce

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For most of us writing is painful. The longer it continues, the more agonizing it gets. With a long continuous work, such as a book or dissertation, you begin to lose direction and belief in your ability to perform. The text seems formless and divorced from reality, the audience becomes muffled and immaterial. All you hear is your own querulous voice doubting your ability to write and urging you to give up, until the pain vanishes in a lightheaded rush of revision and publication. F. Scott Fitzgerald captured this experience exactly when he wrote, “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath” (from an undated letter to Frances Scott Fitzgerald).

I have recently finished the equivalent of a long dive through a subterranean cave, having written a book for a general audience on the process of writing (Sharples, 1999). Throughout the 2 years it took to complete the book a question has been nagging at me, sapping my resolve to write, gloating at my writer's block. You find it so much easier to write online, it murmurs. You can type out 50 e-mail messages a day without effort. You enjoy creating Web pages. Why put yourself through the agony of publishing a book?

I can easily dismiss the obvious answers. Academics rarely make good money from writing. Even with good textbook sales and above-average royalties, the rate of pay is about that of a jobbing gardener, and the work is far less healthy. Nor is being a published author necessarily the best way to achieve recognition and respect. A helpful (http://www.gwu.edu/~tip/, http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/mcs.html), thoughtful (http://www.eastgate.com/garden/), or provocative (http://www.rpi.edu/dept/ppcs/BRUTUS/brutus.html) World Wide Web site can do more to boost a reputation than any number of worthy monographs.

So I wrote a book rather than a Web site not for the reward it brings but for its intrinsic properties. A book can carry a story. The genre of popular science has succeeded by presenting difficult ideas as mystery stories, leading the reader on a narrative journey that gradually reveals clues about human abilities or the natural world. The codex book has evolved over many centuries as a medium for such intellectual storytelling, augmenting the linear text with a wealth of marginalia and illustration, from footnotes to pop-ups.

Until now, the best the computer industry has been able to offer to support narrative writing are cumbersome and expensive approximations to the printed book with flickering pages and jagged letters. But that is changing as, one by one, the advantages of a printed book over a computer are disappearing. Let me address the well-worn arguments.

• You can't read a Web page in bed. Yes, you can, and you don't need a light.
  
  
• People can read text faster and more carefully from a printed page than a computer screen. That may have been true when the screen glowed green and the text appeared as jagged lines of dots, but a detailed series of experiments with modern high-resolution “paper-like” screens (http://psych.utoronto.ca/~muter/ ) showed that people can read short stories on screen with the same speed and comprehension as from a book.
  
  
• You can trust a book. The Anomalies Bibliography (http://www.sonic.net/~anomaly/biblio_a.htm) is a list of the best and worst books on the paranormal. Of the misleading or downright inaccurate books on that list, many of them bear the imprint of otherwise reputable publishers. The authority of a text comes not from printer's ink, but from the process of refereeing and criticism. Online refereed journals, such as the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (http://jcmc.huji.ac.il/), are just as authoritative as paper ones.

I could continue, but comparing pages to computer screens, or books to Web sites, misses the point. The computer has flourished until now by imitating and then swallowing up earlier tools and media: the calculator, the typewriter, the spreadsheet. Soon it will devour the television. But it is also developing its own intrinsic character as a blender of interactive media, capable of merging text with images and of acting as a personal assistant, interpreter, guide, and teacher. The irony is that this genuinely new medium arose from a research project to design the perfect book.

One of the great untold (or at least only partly told, see http://www.well.com/user/hlr/texts/tft11.html) stories of the computer age is Alan Kay's farsighted project to develop the Dynabook. In California, USA, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, Kay led a group of talented researchers with a single vision: to design and build a multimedia computer the size and shape of an ordinary notebook.

To put this project in context, the smallest general-purpose computer in the early 1970s was about the size of a desk, and the word multimedia meant a slide-tape presentation. Kay and his team built a mock-up of the Dynabook out of wood, borrowed and developed novel ideas for interacting with the screen, constructed working interim Dynabooks, and devised a programming language that would merge the profusion of media into a symphony of interaction. After some 10 years of work, the Xerox company, anxious to show some return on its investment, but unsure of how to market this radical new concept in computing, issued the Dynabook as a business computer named the Star. The business world could see little use for such a bizarre machine, and it flopped.

There the story would have ended, had not two young entrepreneurs from a newly successful company, Apple Computers, adopted the basic design of the Star for its new range of computers called the Lisa and later the Macintosh. The history of personal computing since that time can be seen as a struggle to realize the vision of the Dynabook. The wooden mock-up of the Xerox researchers bears an uncanny similarity to recent mininotebook computers such as the Sony VAIO SuperSlim Notebook. The interim Dynabooks with their high-resolution screens were the first desktop workstations. The method of interaction that the Xerox team devised -- through a mouse, icons, menus, and multiple windows -- evolved into the Windows interface. The team's object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk, was the forerunner of Java.

Yet, somewhere along this evolutionary trail the original purpose was lost. The Dynabook was to be a device for learners (the Xerox team was named the Learning Research Group), and its purpose was not to make office work more efficient, but to augment the intellects of children and adults by means of a device for creating dynamic books: books that converse, books that weave together words, images, and sounds; books that enable children to become authors of music and animation.

A Dynabook is not simply a means of displaying print on a screen, but is a new medium with the power to (a) adapt to a reader's needs and interests; (b) remove the barriers between reading and writing; (c) share knowledge; and (d) create an interaction of words, sounds, and images.

After almost 30 years, the Dynabook hardware has arrived. In a press release issued in January 1999 (http://www.fpsi.fujitsu.com/news/r-st2300.htm) the Fujitsu company announced the Stylistic 2300, a tablet computer the size, shape, and weight of a large-format book, with a new colour “sunlight” display for reading outdoors, pen input, stereophonic sound, and a screen that can show full-motion video. It is, of course, promoted as a “paperless mobile office.” But it more than fulfils Alan Kay's emotive promise, written in the 1970s, that the Dynabook would have enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference material, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change. (Kay & Goldberg, 1977, p. 31)

Writing for this Dynabook will demand new skills to enable us to combine the narrative drive of text with the engagement of hypermedia. To do justice to the medium we shall have to learn new grammars of movie making (such as shots and transitions) and hypertext (with hyperlinks and trails). We shall either become, or work alongside, people who can choreograph interaction with the reader to offer multiple pathways, layers of information, simulated conversations, and animation. The four basic skills will be reading, writing, computation, and interaction design.

It will be some months or even years before Dynabooks are as affordable as, say, personal organizers or mobile phones, time enough just to begin the immense task of designing software that will enable authors to create the new dynamic literature; inventing ways to teach the skills of writing for dynamic books; and reconceptualizing writing as the blending of text, image, and interactivity.

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An imaginative attempt at creating a dynamic story on the Web is at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/egypt/. It takes the form of an interactive edition of the February 1923 National Geographic magazine, giving an eyewitness account by Maynard Owen Williams of the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb. The story is presented both as a simulated magazine and as a “silver screen” movie of the discovery. In one section, the same story is told from three viewpoints: Williams's official written account of the event, a series of photographs taken by Williams, and the letters that he sent to the editor of the National Geographic.

An article by Bart Marable about the making of the story appeared in the March 1999 Web Techniques magazine (pp. 18-23). In “Bringing Stories to Life Online,” the designers of the Web site described how they evoked the feel of a 1920s magazine through a careful combination of color, layout, and typefont. The effect is, however, entirely spoiled by a large and gaudy banner advert at the foot of each screen advertising computer products. The site is a lesson for any aspiring Web author: Ensure that you keep full control over the screen presentation of your article.

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e-book and e-book reader -- an e-book is a book presented in electronic form to be read primarily on a screen. It may provide interactivity through dynamic links, quizzes, or simulations. An e-book reader is a device, which may be in the form of a simulated book with two foldout screens, for viewing e-books.
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Dynabook -- the Dynabook was Alan Kay's vision of a “personal dynamic medium,” a powerful personal computer that could be used by children and adults to explore and create words, music, sounds, and images and animations.
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The Ebook Network -- a forum for writers, editors, publishers and distributors, software companies, makers of e-book readers and related devices, as well as customers and interested parties (http://www.ebooknet.com/ten/indexjoin.htm).

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Sharples, M. (1999). How we write: Writing as creative design. London: Routledge.
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Kay, A., & Goldberg, A. (1977, March). Personal dynamic media. Computer, 31.
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