I wrote an essay called The Virtual Book but I never defined the term. By virtual book I mean a book unbound by the traditional and physical constraints of printed books. I say ‘virtual’ because the greatest possibilities I see are in the virtual world of computers. Ebooks and audiobooks are just the beginning. The possibilities that excite me challenge not only the physicality of books but also their more subtle attributes.

A virtual book can be multimedia. It can consist of words, images, video, audio. There, we got the obvious one out of the way.

A virtual book can be readerdriven. Instead of forcing readers to follow the author’s thought process, a virtual book can let each reader steer the way. Wikipedia does this already. It lets you search the page for keywords, skip to the section you’re interested in, and even escape into a tangential topic, never to return. This is a natural way to consume Wikipedia because its form affords it.

Books generally have one start and one ending, but a virtual book can be nonlinear. Wikipedia is again the obvious example. But letting the reader drive is only one way to create a nonlinear book. It’s also possible to create multiple entrypoints, or even multiple endings, like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

A virtual book can be dynamic. It can change after its initial creation. Printed books, on the other hand, are static snapshots laboriously rendered by a particular author at a particular time. But what if a theory is debunked? Or a hypothesis confirmed? Or a record shattered? Or, in the case of storytelling, what if a loose end can be tied up neatly?

A virtual book can be nonmonolithic. It does not need to be discrete or selfcontained. It can consist of many interconnected parts that make up the whole but can exist without it. It can reference other virtual books, borrow bits from them, and lend bits of its own. For example, if Herbie Hancock’s memoir was a virtual audiobook, it could allow its snippets to be reconstrued into a documentary about jazz. (If Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary series was also ‘virtualized’, it could have been updated 15 years after its release to include bits of Herbie’s narration.) In fact, it could provide material for documentaries about many different topics: jazz, funk, hip hop, Miles Davis, Black Nationalism, Nichiren Buddhism, meditation, and crack addictions, to name some of the obvious ones.

A virtual book can be responsive. What if a reader could expect a book to field spontaneous questions? ChatGPT is an obvious candidate here, but the possibility is broader. What if Herbie Hancock returned to his memoir every now and then to answer questions that readers had left behind while reading it? What if readers could raise flags on issues that factcheckers would then verify or return to the author for amendment?

The possibilities are plenty, and they are thrilling. The difficulty in realizating them is not technological, but legal and political. Powerful companies – and therefore governments – are hugely incentivized to prevent the free exchange of “intellectual property”. To make virtual books possible, we need not only the technological power of software, but also its progressive politics.

Suppose you have this sentence:

Conventional writing wisdom would condemn it for using leads and leading in the same sentence. But, more importantly, it doesn’t sound right.

What if we prune leading out of the second part of the sentence?

Now there’s a bit of tension around the comma. You can hear a touch of awkwardness when you read it aloud to yourself.

Is that better? Or is there is still something off? If you’re not sure, leave it for now and read through the draft later.

In the words of writer

: Read until your ear detects a problem - a subtle disturbance. Stop there.

Take this quote by anthropologist Clifford Geertz:

A lovely little idea weighed down by free-loading filler words. First of all, the preamble is unnecessary. We all alone indicates we are talking about humans. And let us decide how significant your fact is. Don’t be so insecure (or arrogant).

How good is a sentence if decapitation improves it?

The other necessary change is screamingly obvious. We end in the end? Sure, but only after we have begun in the beginning. (Was he trying to reach a word count? Or distract a doorman while someone snuck in?)

For our troubles, we get a free upgrade from having lived to live. Free the verb to be a verb.

We’ve chopped our way down to the meat of the sentence. Is there any fat to trim?

Is We all better than We?

How much better is kinds of life than lives that it deserves three times the space? Sentence space is precious. Raise the rent.

Can we prune more? Riding the high of halving the original, it’s tempting to cut out in the end.

But in the end is contributing. It invokes the passage of time by drawing a line from begin. It draws the arc of a single life lived. Tracing this line we sense the transformation of many possibilities into one reality. We also sense the briefness of this single life now that the sentence is briefer.

There are several words here doing a job. Natural equipment means bodily and mental potential, while equipment alone would mean material tools like hammers and textbooks.

The the in front of natural equipment is one of those pesky ones. It’s like a plain, mild-mannered friend that you think you can exclude from the group but without whom things are somehow less comfortable.

When we scrutinize words like this, when we interrogate them, we learn what each of them is doing. This allows us not only to eliminate useless words but to replace imprecise ones.

Is a thousand lives enough? Should we multiply it with itself to raise the stakes?

Hmm. Now it feels too… flippant? And somehow… overstated?

A thousand lives has the modesty that lacked in the original sentence’s preamble. It sticks the landing without too extravagant a flourish.

Much better. Ok, next sentence.

I want to make the following sentence more fluid by removing its commas, but they are preventing ambiguity:

Without the second comma, the reader could initially read bubbled as a continuation of I was witnessing, before realizing that bubbled is actually a continuation of Vague memories. (Upon reflection, I realize this ambiguity is at least in part a symptom of the distance between the main subject and its verb.) Even mild confusion forces the reader to withdraw attention from the text and mentally iron out the wrinkle before they can continue reading. They might even have to re-read the sentence to straighten it out.

This, in my opinion, is unforgivable in good writing. Writers must work hard to remove all practical obstacles preventing a smooth reading experience, and only rarely subject the reader to this sort of interruption. To resolve this particular instance, I could restructure the sentence to connect Vague memories with its verb bubbled. The default, easy option is this:

But I prefer this one:

It enlivens the bubbling image by giving it more motion, which serves the spontaneity that the sentence is trying to convey. Also, it makes the content more fun to read by contributing variety of sentence structure to its containing passage:

There’s also an opportunity to make the sentence more precise by using with no instead of without any:

I think it is more natural to read with no as relating to memories. In contrast, without can sound like I’m going to say without warning or something else describing the phenomenon of memories appearing rather than the memories themselves. We could also use of no, but it also adds a new split second of ambiguity when placed next to vague memories since it sounds like I’m going to say memories of some past event. Also an option is that had no, but it’s clunky.

It’s tempting to dismiss all this as overthinking, but precision requires finetuning. A major task of writing is tweaking in response to what we anticipate the reader will experience. We do this based on our intuition as readers ourselves, not on measurements and objective criteria. That’s what makes writing art as opposed to science. (Though I think a scientific, databased approach to writing could be both revolutionary and scandalous.) We readers involuntarily predict what word will come next, so we writers must anticipate their anticipations.

There is at least one writing principle to take from all this: manage ambiguity in your writing so that the intended meaning is obvious to the reader. This sounds like a platitude, but it requires discipline that much writing doesn’t keep. Specifically, a writer should strive to make a reader’s first interpretation of a sentence easy to make, correct, and hard to doubt. A reader will disengage with your work if they lose too much faith in your competence as a writer.

Verlyn Klinkenborg’s

has a great section discussing Some Practical Problems in sentences written by “excellent college students who went on to be very good writers.” He explains why he doesn’t give his students the benefit of the doubt regarding discrepancies and imprecisions:

And who wants to follow someone who doesn’t seem to know the way?

I began with this sentence:

But I felt something was slightly off with “but also multicultural.” It’s hard to figure out exactly what I didn’t like about it. Maybe its meaning was too opaque? Or the proportions of “natively proficient in Spanish and English” compared to “multicultural” were awkwardly lopsided?

Whatever the reason, I rewrote it as this:

Immediately, I disliked the “Due to” construction, so I wrote a third version:

I prefer the latest version because it connects cause and effect using verbs rather than with logical statement. Specifically, to express the causal relationship between the “opportunities in my early life” and my consequent skills, the third version uses the verbs “allowed me to develop” rather than the more abstract, logical connecting bits “Due to” and “I am” of the second version. The reader sees the relationship directly in the sentence without having to translate it from a logical statement.

I realize this might sound like nitpicky minutiae. But I think there is an effective difference in immediacy of meaning here. By writing “Due to X…” a writer signals to the reader that they must remember “X” until its promised role is revealed. Until that promise is fulfilled, the reader may have to digest bits of information related to “X” and its yet unknown role, all the while maintaining “X” in working memory. This is an unnecessary chore that writers should avoid putting onto the reader.

The final problem I tried to fix was the potential buzzwordiness of “an intuition for multiple cultural contexts.” I think multicultural people would likely grasp what I mean, but it’s not very concrete and could invite cynical dismissal as a non-statement. I tried this:

But was yet unsatisfied. It sounds like something someone writes about themselves on their resume or LinkedIn profile. Still too abstract to be trusted as referring to something real. So I tried to get specific:

Now we’re getting more concrete. Part of the solution is simply to name the specific countries I’m referring to. This avoids suggesting I could fit into any culture in the world, which would dilute the substance of my statement and tempt readers to distrust it altogether. I think the phrase “cultural subtleties” also helps despite still being somewhat abstract because it is suggestive of specific things that people experience in daily life, like social cues. It is general yet concrete by virtue of

.

Decades ago, The New Yorker and other magazines experimented with the journalistic form by introducing literary techniques into it. Writers aspired not just to document scenes but to recreate them for readers to witness. Though some writers criticized this practice for warping truth through interpretation, other writers flourished in it. Tom Wolfe, a practitioner and evangelist of the method, compiled exemplary articles in his book The New Journalism. According to Wolfe, using techniques of literary realism was like

into the otherwise mechanical machine of journalism. By using dialogue,

, and symbolism, writers could achieve “absolute involvement of the reader”.

The anthology includes a passage from Hunter S. Thompson’s nonfiction novel on the Hell’s Angels, which he wrote after a year of living with them. Thompson depicts a tense confrontation between the Angels and the locals of Bass Lake, the gang’s preferred destination for their Labor Day tradition of binge-drinking and mayhem-making.

On the day, Thompson’s newspaper editor requested “no more than an arty variation of the standard wire-service news blurb: Who, What, When, Where, and Why.” But in his book Thompson gives us much more. He doesn’t report the events in the cold, detached voice of the typical journalist observing from the sidelines. Nor does he simply list the facts and state the outcome. He recounts, in first person, the experience of being caught in a stand-off between outlaws known for their brutality and a makeshift militia of locals determined to defend their town:

The reader leaves not with memorizable facts, but a secondhand experience based on Thompson’s point of view:

As satisfying as it was to hear Herbie narrate the

, it was frustrating to never hear his music. Music snippets would’ve expressed much more than descriptions like “gorgeous house of sound” and “river of gorgeous sound”. Instead of working with a ghostwriter to write a book, perhaps Herbie should’ve collaborated with Ken Burns, creator of the Jazz documentary series, to create something more.

To tell the story of jazz music, Burns uses images and sound: narration, interviews, photos, videos, and music. The documentary series looks like a great PowerPoint slideshow. It’s not flashy, but it’s illuminating. The narrator doesn’t have to shower us with adjectives for us to imagine the scene because we can hear it in the music and see it in the photographs. Words tell us what is true, but our senses convince us of it.

In the introduction to his new book, Our America, Ken Burns writes:

Like Burns, YouTube video essayists offer us raw material instead of flattening it into words. Thomas Flight’s Why Are David Lynch Movies Like That? is dense with samples of Lynch’s works, and much better for it. His description of Lynch’s worst work as “still [radiating] a unique quality” would be abstract, unclear, if it weren’t spoken over clips from Dune. Dubbing audio over video is so common on YouTube that it’s easy to overlook how well it works. Imagine What Song Are You Listening To? videos without the song snippets: suddenly it would be as awkward to watch as it probably was to record.

Like authors, journalists and essayists insist on writing things the reader needs to see or hear. Pieces like The New Yorker’s recent one on painter Florine Stettheimer lack samples of the visual art they talk about, leaving the reader to collect descriptions of the painter’s style — “feathery, ornamental…faux-naïf, fluorescent” — and try to hold them, as they spill out of mind like water out of cupped hands, until they can look up her paintings. Why work so hard? Is this the writer’s job or the reader’s? The piece leaves a faint impression compared to Affairs of the Art, a short film available on The New Yorker’s YouTube channel: a shiver-inducing yet hilarious piece that combines writing, narration, drawings, sound effects, and music.

This is

to say we abandon writing. But can we compensate for its weaknesses by

?

Can quantifying the attributes of a TV show tell us something about its quality? I reckon some of the flaws in House of the Dragon would be reflected in statistics like amount of dialogue per minute and number of decisions made per character. A non-negligible amount of time is spent on dramatic montages and orchestral music that create a moody atmosphere and remind us of how serious the situation is. This comes at the cost of time that could be spent on actual situations and actual drama, or at least character development that would contribute to future drama.

These two elements – dialogue and decision-making – each give us an independent perspective into a character, but their combination is especially powerful because it gives us a third angle: insight into what a character is thinking, including what they are thinking unconsciously. From this we get what might be the critical ingredient of great story-telling: three-dimensional characters.

My qualm with shows like House of the Dragon is that their plot feels designed and implemented. I sense the presence of writers and their attempts to show me what’s happening and persuade me that it makes sense. I can’t get lost in the fictional world as if it were a real one because I see the pencil marks from when it was sketched out. My suspension of disbelief never takes off. One might say, Well, yeah, all fictional plots are prescribed. But they’re not, and writers like Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy have

.

In great shows like The Sopranos, plot is not implemented, it’s incubated. The show feels to me like it’s happening spontaneously, developing by itself as a sequence of events, reactions, and actions. In every episode there is constant dialogue between characters and a steady supply of situations that require characters to make decisions. And much of the time, these have nothing to do with plot. Every season has at least one major narrative arc, but the dependence is flipped. Episodes don’t depend on an overarching plot for their meaning. Episodes generate the plot. Characters are agents, not passengers. I don’t feel like the writers are leading me to the plot’s predetermined destination. In fact I don’t feel their presence at all. I feel like I’m

.

I’ve been getting injured, visiting the Canadian East, defining my pattern language, enjoying summer’s end, reading, writing, coding, and more.

I’ve been getting a bit unlucky. My first attempt at returning to soccer goalkeeping resulted in a badly sprained finger. The xray showed “a couple tiny fragments of bone,” which the hand doctor that I was later referred to described as “technically a break.” To him I relayed the playful question my friend had asked: what happens to the bits of bone? Yes, he confirmed, they get “resorbed.” (A subsequent internet search confirmed it was indeed a real word.)

A few weeks later, back in the outfield, my domain, I took a meanly struck soccer ball to the back of the head. In my couple decades of playing soccer, I’ve headed many, many balls deliberately and even taken several to the face. But I can’t recall ever getting hit so firmly on the back of the head, or it ever hurting so much. The real headache, though, was navigating the quagmire of bureacratic medical advice. Was I really in mortal danger? Or could I just go home and rest? After a lot deliberating, consulting, and a tentative visit to the Emergency Room, my wife and I decide to go home for the night and consult a doctor the next day.

Z and I spent a week in the Toronto area and then a week in Prince Edward Island. It’s embarrassing how much friendlier folks are over there compared to Vancouverites. One of our theories on the subject is that it is easier to make friends in cities with more transplants, since they are circumstantially motivated to make connections. People who have lived in a place for a long time already have an established social network and are therefore not incentivized to form new friendships. Especially when the local culture is one of polite detachment. In Vancouver, strangers walking past each other on the sidewalk rarely look at each other, even in residential neighborhoods. It’s very offputting for me and Z. We are warm and friendly people.

Before I moved to Seattle in 2019, I was warned of the Seattle freeze, the aloof attitude of locals and their aversion towards making new friends. But this stereotype never matched my experience of Seattle. Everyday I have friendly interactions with folks – at the coffee shop, by the mailboxes, at the lake, on the street. The generous spirit extends to include dogs, which can be found everywhere in the city – in grocery stores, in shops, in pubs, and even in restaurants. I suspect that the tech boom and consequent influx of transplants from all over the US, Canada, and abroad has made the city a good place to make friends. Notably, my friends here are almost exclusively not from Seattle. Several from Winnipeg and Victoria, one from Brooklyn, one from Arkansas, one from Connecticut, one from Montreal, one from Oregon, a few from the Midwest, and so on.

One of my best friends just bought a house in West Seattle and a bunch of us are seriously considering moving in with him. I would live upstairs with him and three of our friends would live in the groundlevel suite downstairs. It’s an exciting prospect, even though it would mean giving up our lovely apartment in Capitol Hill. I would really miss the proximity to urban life, but would love to live in a little complex with a bunch of people I really like. According to an architecture book I’m currently reading, A Pattern Language, that’s how people should live. It asserts that even couples should not live alone:

The catalyst for this potential move is that Z and I want to reduce the total we spend on rent across our two homes, mine in Seattle and hers in Vancouver. But the change has the potential to be much more than a practical compromise. With our friends living downstairs, we would realize the House Cluster. The backyard, which includes a garden, would serve as a sort of “public land” connecting our households. The book makes strong claims about these aspects:

Even if I don’t end up moving, I am very excited to help my friend plan, furnish, and decorate his new space. And the book is serving as perfect inspiration

There’s something strangely satisfying about starting a new book while traveling. While in Toronto and PEI, I returned to A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, a book I’d perused a few years ago. I was reminded of the book while writing my personal list of essential homemaking ingredients and came up with the title

. I’ve been thinking about writing a piece like that for a while and, when I finally started, it gripped me like a fever. Writing it while sitting at a bench on the deck looking out over the couple kilometers of green pastures connecting me to the Atlantic ocean was one of my favorite moments of my PEI visit.

The last couple months have been a fertile time for my writing. I

about a handyman that fixed my kitchen cabinet a couple years ago, and I even

. I wrote about the book

and about related thoughts I had

. I wrote a

on the topic of rules and a

on the topic of storytelling.

The latter compared the writing between House of the Dragon and The Sopranos. At Z’s encouragement, I shared it on r/HouseOfTheDragon and I received some encouraging responses. It was the first time I shared my writing with complete strangers and I intend to do it again. I think it’s a great way to motivate diligence in my thinking and writing and to test my reasoning. (It so happens that I recently came across a blog by a fellow programmer and writer and noticed that he posted his writing on r/TrueLit.)

Other books I’ve partially consumed recently include “Short Introductions” to Hegel and Hume, and The Listening Book.

Yesterday a couple friends and I went on our last paddleboarding session of the summer. It was a worthy finale. We paddled up Lake Union to a new brewery perched at the water’s edge to attract aquatic patronage. There we had drinks and appetizers before paddling back through the darkening dusk, drifting along the halflit houseboats towards Seattle’s twinkling cityscape. Back at the dock we emptied the boards of air and dove back into the lake a few times to the sound of my oldest playlist on my bluetooth speaker. Everything sounds better in the dark.

The sudden splash of water strikes the air like a crackling snare drum and even the howl and hiss of a deflating paddleboard seems to hold color.

While in PEI, I started watching Lost, which is the alltime favorite of one of my friends, and Z started watching Brooklyn 99. I’m not sure why, but, as I said about reading A Pattern Language, there is something pleasing about starting something new while on a trip away from home. Change of routine feels right alongside a change of environment.

I started rewatching Mad Men. This time I much more easily recognize Don Draper’s extreme immaturity. It hides so well behind his restrained eloquence and impressive jawline. I also notice that Peter Campbell is offered as a character foil. He’s unsuave and unhandsome, but similarly insecure and helpless. He’s deeply envious, unaware that all the potency and respect that Don enjoys does nothing to salve the wounds that disfigure his hopeless self-image.

I did a bunch of work on this site! These new features are in the spirit of the dynamic attribute of

. (And they are the two features that I mentioned in

.)

I added modified dates to all posts as well as a way to sort posts by post date or modified date. This discourages me from treating posts like static pieces and encourages me to edit, rework, and reimagine them. I didn’t want to be responsible for manually updating the modified date of a post, so I automated it.

For my first attempt at implementing it, I put together a plugin written in Ruby (mostly written by GitHub Copilot) that found the most recent commit’s date for each post by looking through the Git history. It worked, but it also slowed down my local build a lot. I found a much better solution: set up a git pre-commit hook that updates the modified_date in a post’s frontmatter when a change is committed to it. To implement sorting, I had to use JavaScript. Working on a static website has made me appreciate how much is possible without JavaScript and what isn’t.

More challenging to implement and more exciting to complete was a feature I’m calling Revisions, which shows past edits of select posts. This one was even more important to automate. Manually creating a revision for every new post would be a ponderous task that would deincentivize me from making changes. Automatically generated revisions, on the other hand, excite me to make changes. I want to see how posts change over time and how the converge to “final” form.

So, the main task was to plug into the Jekyll build to generate new pages that represent the difference between every pair of sequential commits in a post’s Git history. Once I had that, I just had to do some minor coding in HTML and Liquid to add links in a post’s metadata to link to its revisions.

After I figured out how to get the full Git word diff between two commits (the git gem’s API apparently doesn’t expose this part of Git’s functionality), most of the trouble had to do with formatting: stripping Git diff metadata, replacing diff markers with markdown formatting, transforming Markdown to HTML, and styling the HTML. After I finally got it working locally, I pushed it up to GitHub to kick off the build and publish job. But after the GitHub Actions finished, the site didn’t look any different!

It took me a while to figure out why the GitHub Pages build was passing but not generating any revisions. I figured the git gem wasn’t being installed since it isn’t in the list of packages supported by GitHub Pages. It seemed like the plugin wasn’t running at all. Only after I added print statements to it did I realize that it was running, but only finding a single commit. Finally, I fixed it by setting the fetch-depth of the checkout action to a pseudoinfinite number so that the full Git history would get processed.

I set it up so I can easily enable or disable revisions for a post by setting show_revisions in its frontmatter. So far, I’ve enabled revisions for

,

, and

.

We’re going to Japan for two weeks over Xmas! I’ve never been and I’m very excited to go. I intend to spend time researching, planning, and learning about Japan over the next few months.

I expect to be promoted to Senior Software Engineer in December. I should know by November. We’ll see. I’ve been at Microsoft five years now, so I’m neither late nor early.

I’ll be playing a lot of soccer over the next few months. I hope that’ll naturally help me resume weight loss. I lost fifteen pounds in the latter half of last year and I’ve maintained since then. I would still like to lose another twentyfive pounds.

I’ll be watching every Arsenal game that I can. They are widely recognized as contenders to win the league, even more so than they were a year ago. It’s exciting and unnerving. The season is so long.

I’m overhauling Z’s Vancouver apartment. I changed the pendant light above the dinner table and I’m in the process of swapping the couch. There are many more things I plan to do. Replace the coffee table, install bedside wall lamps, hang up the TV, and make space for the practice drumkit Z intends to buy. I’m motivated by my excitement. If anything, it’s hard to stop thinking about it.

Sadly, summer is over. But I also love the fall. I’m looking forward to the coziness that comes with it. For me, September is a very nostalgic month. The sudden turn in weather reminds me of the beginning of the school year, a time I found quietly thrilling, like the opening montage of a new season of a TV show.

As you will have noticed, the essays on this site are all titled “how to X”, but are not guides as much as blog entries. “How to” is just a rhetorical device, an invitation to approach a subject. I got the idea, mainly, from the HBO show “How to with John Wilson”. Episodes like “How to make small talk” are not really guides but a series of confessional musings from John Wilson and his impromptu guests. However, unlike the show, my writings here are genuinely interested in how to do things. Specifically, I will write about things that interest me: books, writing, programming, psychology, relationships, and so on.

Another inspiration is Derek Sivers’ book How to Live, a sequence of conflicting worldviews presented together. As he describes it, “Not quite non-fiction, not quite self-help. It’s a work of art.” This might sound lofty, but he means his book is for provoking readers to think rather than telling them what to think. Writing meant to stir the reader, but not to lead them to a particular conclusion. I intend to do something similar here. My answers to questions of “how to” will not be answers but responses, responses meant to be in conversation with one another, regardless of whether they agree.

A third inspiration is Andy Matuschak’s Evergreen Notes and the underlying Zettelkasten method. Instead of burying old posts beneath a mound of new ones, I want to extend a body of ideas continuously. That’s why each post has clickable #tags at the top. They form links that, over the years, will extend into networks of ideas I’ve developed or encountered. Later, when I want to revisit my thoughts on a particular #topic, I can just click on it.

I wrote an essay called The Virtual Book but I never defined the term. By virtual book I mean a book unbound by the traditional and physical constraints of printed books. I say ‘virtual’ because the greatest possibilities I see are in the virtual world of computers. Ebooks and audiobooks are just the beginning. The possibilities that excite me challenge not only the physicality of books but also their more subtle attributes.

A virtual book can be multimedia. It can consist of words, images, video, audio. There, we got the obvious one out of the way.

A virtual book can be readerdriven. Instead of forcing readers to follow the author’s thought process, a virtual book can let each reader steer the way. Wikipedia does this already. It lets you search the page for keywords, skip to the section you’re interested in, and even escape into a tangential topic, never to return. This is a natural way to consume Wikipedia because its form affords it.

Books generally have one start and one ending, but a virtual book can be nonlinear. Wikipedia is again the obvious example. But letting the reader drive is only one way to create a nonlinear book. It’s also possible to create multiple entrypoints, or even multiple endings, like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

A virtual book can be dynamic. It can change after its initial creation. Printed books, on the other hand, are static snapshots laboriously rendered by a particular author at a particular time. But what if a theory is debunked? Or a hypothesis confirmed? Or a record shattered? Or, in the case of storytelling, what if a loose end can be tied up neatly?

A virtual book can be nonmonolithic. It does not need to be discrete or selfcontained. It can consist of many interconnected parts that make up the whole but can exist without it. It can reference other virtual books, borrow bits from them, and lend bits of its own. For example, if Herbie Hancock’s memoir was a virtual audiobook, it could allow its snippets to be reconstrued into a documentary about jazz. (If Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary series was also ‘virtualized’, it could have been updated 15 years after its release to include bits of Herbie’s narration.) In fact, it could provide material for documentaries about many different topics: jazz, funk, hip hop, Miles Davis, Black Nationalism, Nichiren Buddhism, meditation, and crack addictions, to name some of the obvious ones.

A virtual book can be responsive. What if a reader could expect a book to field spontaneous questions? ChatGPT is an obvious candidate here, but the possibility is broader. What if Herbie Hancock returned to his memoir every now and then to answer questions that readers had left behind while reading it? What if readers could raise flags on issues that factcheckers would then verify or return to the author for amendment?

The possibilities are plenty, and they are thrilling. The difficulty in realizating them is not technological, but legal and political. Powerful companies – and therefore governments – are hugely incentivized to prevent the free exchange of “intellectual property”. To make virtual books possible, we need not only the technological power of software, but also its progressive politics.