Why did you bother to write a book?

That question has been lying in wait for me like a succubus for the past two years, sapping my resolve to write, gloating at my writer’s block, reclining invitingly at the start of each unwritten chapter. You find it so much easier to write online, it murmurs. You can type out fifty lengthy email messages a day without effort. Why put yourself through the agony of producing a published book? Why not simply create a web site on How We Write?

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 the recognition and respect of your peers. A helpful, thoughtful or provocative Web site can do more to boost a reputation than any number of worthy monographs.

So I wrote a book not for the reward it brings but for its intrinsic properties. I wanted to create a coherent narrative and the best the computer industry has been able to do to support narrative writing is to produce cumbersome and expensive approximations to a book. But that is changing as, one by one, the well-worn arguments in defence of the printed book are disappearing.

You can’t read a web page in bed. Yes you can, and you don’t need a light to read it by.

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 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 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 doesn’t come from printer’s ink, but from the process of refereeing and criticism. Online refereed journals such as the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication are every bit as authoritative as paper ones, and they can contain sound, video, animation or software.

I could continue, but comparing pages with computer screens or books with 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 letter, the spreadsheet. Soon it will devour the television. But it is also developing its own persona in the form of the laptop computer and Web browser: personal assistant, interpreter, guide, and blender of media. The irony is that this genuinely new medium came out of a research project to design the perfect book.

One of the great untold (or at least only partly told) stories of the computer age is Alan Kay’s far-sighted project to develop the Dynabook. Kay led a group of talented researchers at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s with a single vision, to design and build a computer the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. It 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, letter, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change…" (Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, "Personal Dynamic Media," Computer, March 1977, 31.)

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 mockup 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 ten 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 called the Star. The business world could see no 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 design principles 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 realise the vision of the Dynabook. The wooden mockup of the Xerox researchers bears an uncanny similarity to recent mini-laptop machines 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 based on icons, menus, and multiple windows is the model for the Windows interface. Their object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk, was the forerunner of Java.

Yet, somewhere along this evolutionary trail the original purpose was lost. The Dynabook was intended as 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 intellect 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 means of displaying print on a screen, but a new medium with the power to adapt to a reader's needs and interests, to remove the barriers between reading and writing,  to share knowledge, and to create an interaction of words, sounds and images.