Ask A Genius 924: Microfiche is not that much pain, Rick!
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/21
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I wanted to talk about books. Say, four or five thousand years ago, the idea of a book wasn’t a thing; you had scrolls. You had 1% of the population who were literate in advanced society at the time, like the Egyptians with the scribes. Print and press came around; you had religious texts; they were books, but there were more collections of books that were then compiled and called things like the Bible. From my view, from these mythologies, you had literature developed to some degree, but you had books outside of that that have taken on more critical… at large, even though you have things like some of those published…
Rick Rosner: It took 2,000 years to develop the technology of a book.
Jacobsen: Yeah, and then you get times when you have things like Harry Potter, which has almost as many books as the Bible’s history. So, there is an economics of information presented in the literature, which also changes as technology changes. So, I noticed this as someone who has read the news writes news or opinion pieces or critical articles, etc. and does interviews; things like social media, the new technologies that are based around communication networks and so on, change how people consume information. Therefore, they change how people consume things like books, too. They may read them, but there’s a different environment in which they read them that changes things. So, I want to get your thoughts on how that changing environment, even though you have those same technologies, will change how people frame and consume information in books because how they’re consuming information already in social media, Twitter, and so on are changing too.
Rosner: Let me start with myself where. I used to read five books a week. I tried to read a book daily in the 80s and the 90s. Now, I’m down to a book a month, and it’s a struggle to find the time. There’s all this stuff I should be doing less than I do, which is running to social media, so I read a ton of words a day, but only some of those words are in the form of a book. My wife has a similar thing; she and I have read many books, so we get easily frustrated with books that don’t deliver the efficiency we want them to. Most books are written by people who have yet to read as many books as my wife, and I have seen as many TV shows or movies. Like, I’m trying to write this book, and Carol has written the whole first draft of a book, and in my book, I want it all to be candy. I don’t wish for any passages that people struggle to get through to get to the good stuff; it has to be all good stuff, which is challenging.
For decades, I’ve gone to the library, and just if a book seems interesting, then I’ll crack it open, and I’ll see how many paragraphs breaks it has per page, and if it has fewer than two, if it’s just these long paragraphs, then I might put it back because it seems like a slog. So yeah, people, me in particular, because we’re spoiled by the flood of words coming at us, words that can be highly tailored to our interests, our patience with books is much reduced. Also, everybody knows that in the book era, the pre-Google era, if you wanted to know the answer to a question, you had to go to the library, find a book on the subject you were interested in and hope that the answer to your question was contained in there or a newspaper; go to the microfilm. Microfilm and Microfiche: Have you ever used that stuff for research?
Jacobsen: 100% I have. I had a great time.
Rosner: So, you know what a pain it is. You have to go someplace; you have to get these little boxes that have this kind of film reels, you have to find a vacant machine, you have to feed it into the machine, you have to fast forward until you get to the pertinent date; it’s a significant pain in the ass, right?
Jacobsen: You make it sound more painful than it is. It shouldn’t be that much pain.
Rosner: All right, if you’re good at it, I’m sure you can do it efficiently, but compared to Google, where you get the answer within 15 seconds, Google’s part of it is a third of a second. It’s you typing it in, and it takes 15 seconds. Well, not if you’re good at it, but you can do it in about three seconds. So, when you look at what gets made into TV and movies, at this point, I would rather see a project created from a book than read the book itself, especially if it’s made into a film that takes two hours versus an eight-episode/ 8 Hour series. Even so, more books are published now than ever before though more garbage books are published now than ever before because people can use automation to publish bullshit books. Type a command into AI that says give me an 80,000-word summary of The Grapes of Wrath with dialogue and scenes, and within a minute, probably much less, you’ll get this book-length version of The Grapes of Wrath, which you can throw onto Amazon as The Grapes of Wrath. Some suckers will buy it, and because of the ease with which you can plagiarize a thing, I think Amazon is now imposing rules on these; you can call them authors, but they’re not really, where you can publish more than four books a day.
Anyway, the market is flooded with garbage versions of every book from any reading public, right?
Jacobsen: Sure, it’s tricky with the number of books or writing styling itself as a book. I approach a book where typically it’s a proper collection of articles that have been thoroughly researched, but most books that are now published are self-published, which changes the feel of a book. It’s almost like taking away the Bible from the priest class and giving it to the laity or giving it to someone close to the laity, like a pastor, as opposed to a priest or an Archbishop. It removes that sense of magic around a book, and so we’re witnessing a more realistic view of what a book is and having a desacralization of the image of a book we’ve had for so long.
Rosner: Should a book still be a book because when you read an article online, it’s full of hyperlinks? It’s got a few paragraphs.
Jacobsen: Right. I submitted an article of 4,000 words today and put in a day’s work yesterday. It would be at least 30, 40, or 50 links.
Rosner: So, if somebody wants to learn more, needs help understanding a term, or is skeptical of your claim, they can click on something and get more information. Even if a book isn’t hyperlinked, I haven’t done this with a book, but I assume there are apps where you aim your phone at the phrase that you’re curious about, and there’s probably some Google capture thing. Are you familiar with something where you can capture an image of part of a book page, which will send you to many places on your phone?
Jacobsen: I know you could take a picture of something, and it’ll make the script for you. You could copy and paste that and then find out where it’s from, translate it into another language, or translate any language back into English based on the text sent.
Rosner: But there should be something that links it up, too. You aim your phone at the book, and it hyperlinks you. Suppose I’m reading a Miami crime novel by Dave Barry or Carl Hiaasen, and there are some references I don’t get. In that case, I should be able to take a picture of it, or if there’s something about a gator wrestling roadside attraction and I’m interested in that whole thing, I mean, I can always type in Florida Gator wrestling, or I should be able to take a picture.
Books aren’t radio. Radio has gotten crappy because radio was the most significant, most creative medium of the time in the 1930s; it was cutting-edge, with radio and movies. They had a vast viewing public, but then TV came along, films improved, and radio fell. Now, the people who end up on radio are often mediocre unless they’re good enough to have gotten a deal to be part of serious satellite radio like Howard Stern. Is Howard Stern great? Radio greatness differs from other forms of greatness because you look at the two geniuses who reshaped radio: Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. Rush Limbaugh found out that you could keep angry white guys who do much driving, angry conservative white guys, and you can keep them hooked into four hours a day of the Rush Limbaugh Show for three hours. Then, they’ll stay tuned for more conservative content. He figured that out and developed an empire.
Then, Howard Stern found out that other people, that liberals or just horny guys or just Bros, would listen to 3-4 hours a day of talking about sex and boobies and dirty talk and farts; both intelligent guys, but if you try to listen to their stuff, it’s hard to hear. It’s barely worth your time. If there’s anything else that you could direct your attention to, you will because it’s not good; it’s just good in the context of being able to do the trick of doing four hours of it every day. So, radio is, to some extent, just a fallen technology. And books, you could argue that literature is a fallen technology in different ways. It requires a kind of attention that we are less and less willing to spare for a book. To some extent, radio has changed your Sirius; Carol has paid for me to have Sirius, and I listen to standup routines. They have about six channels, so just standup comedy, and it’s been edited so you get the best, say, 90 seconds of somebody’s routine.
If you’re listening to Howard Stern four hours a day, there might be three minutes of greatness where somebody happens to say something amusing. Still, with these standup stations, somebody has gone through and picked out the best sound bites from the best comedians, and I don’t know how technology will change to make books more relevant. One way is that they just get adapted, that if you write a book, the money isn’t in getting the book published; the money is in the deal you make when it gets turned into TV or movies.
[Recording End]
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