From the Reader’s Perspective:

Many people envision the future as a depersonalized experience, where we’re all cogs in the machine, reduced either to energy-producing units (e.g., The Matrix) or undifferentiated pleasure-seekers (e.g., Wall-E): in both cases, soulless and anonymous. Ever the iconoclast, I think the future will give us ultra-personalization, from what we wear to what and how we read. We’ll still have physical books, audiobooks, and ebooks, but our experience with them will be as individual as each of us is.

Paperbacks and hardbacks will continue to offer the tactile pleasure of holding a beautifully crafted volume—even more artful than the current leatherbound, sprayed-edge craze. You might be able to order a book in various aromas of paper (with as many options than incense provides) to engage more of your senses. Page textures might vary as much as print sizes. In these ways, physical books will become more cherished, with some ultra-bougie versions treated as luxury items. For those who want to disconnect from screens for a while, books in this traditional—albeit heightened—form will provide a sensuous experience.

Digital books will evolve even more. Integrated, augmented reality and virtual reality in three dimensions could bring any story to life with visual depictions of settings, action scenes based on the text that would be watchable from multiple viewpoints, and so on. Nonfiction could teach you even more effectively in this way. Active participation will make the author’s words feel personal and realistic. The e-reader could analyze your eyesight and light level and adapt the font size and screen brightness accordingly, to always make reading comfortable. Moreover, it could detect whenever you pause on a word or reread it and offer a contextual definition and synonyms to assist your understanding.

Many audiobooks are already using AI-generated voices, but, unfortunately for voiceover artists, those narrative skills will continue to improve. Soon, audiobooks will be narrated in tones that are indistinguishable from human ones, with the ability to adjust the pace and emphasis to fit the mood of the scene and the author’s style, seemingly with a diverse cast of dozens or hundreds—whatever the text calls for.

The book of the future will adapt to your life. One format won’t replace another. Rather, you’ll be able to choose the reading experience that best suits your mood, location, and desire for engagement. You will have more ways to connect with stories and knowledge than ever before. Reading will become more accessible, more adaptable, and a profoundly more personal experience.

From the Writer’s Perspective:

The book of the future will adapt to the reader’s life. One format won’t replace another. Rather, you’ll be able to choose the reading experience that best suits your mood, location, and desire for engagement. Physical books will be able to be ordered with custom flourishes—escalating levels of cover design and illustrations and perhaps even different paper scents and textures. Each copy could be as individual as the person ordering it. Ebooks could be enhanced with augmented reality and virtual reality in three dimensions could bring any story or nonfiction tome to life. Audiobooks could be orchestrated with a diverse cast of dozens or hundreds of voices—whatever your text calls for.

Therefore, the craft of writing will begin to incorporate these considerations. The flourishes you as the author introduce in the text will influence readers’ experience of your words like never before. Your creativity will become even more important and distinguish you from your writing peers because those choices you make, word by word, chapter by chapter, will be enhanced by the technological evolution of books in their various forms.

While AI will continue to help you to eliminate grammatical errors and brainstorm ideas, no program will ever be able to match your intuition about characters, plot twists, settings, and so on. Despite that, AI will nonetheless be your competitor, as companies churn out a seemingly infinite number of stories, with AI-generated marketing to trumpet them, in the time it takes you to perfect your masterpiece. Any reader paying the least bit of attention will be able to discern the human touch from the derivative, literally unimaginative products those firms will blast out, but they might still fall for the pretty packaging and only too late realize there’s no soul behind those words. The trick will be rising above the scintillating noise so that readers discover you and your creative work. Unfortunately, the days of the hermit-like writer who won’t engage with their audience are long gone—that is, if that writer wants to be read.

As self-publishing, micro-presses, AI-narrated audiobooks, and other independent platforms continue to offer free or inexpensive means of getting stories into the hands/ears of readers, even more writers can enter the industry and try to make their mark. This, too, is a double-edged sword: the democratization of publishing gives more writers a shot, but that means even more competitors will be vying for a finite number of readers’ attention and digital wallets.

It is also possible that readers will want a bigger say in the literary entertainment and education they consume and will favor writers who give them a voice in the way a story unfolds or nonfiction is presented. The art of writing and the act of reading could incorporate a feedback loop, with serialization, fanfiction, and perpetual interaction between creator and consumer producing a dynamic, fluid process, where the book continues to evolve and remains a living entity rather than a fixed product. The Neverending Story could thus become the subtitle of every story. Such a world would turn paperback and hardback books into anachronisms because those tomes would be frozen in time, unable to evolve.

That future might never come to pass or only will do so for authors who want to continue to engage with the same story forever, but it’s a certainty that technology will influence more than ever what we write, how we write, and how readers engage with our work.

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