We open a book, turn on a tv show, go to a movie, consume whatever form of content we like best. We’re looking for entertainment, but it’s never pure entertainment. It inevitably requires suspension of disbelief. We are thwarted by limitations that are entirely out of the control of the author or director.

It comes down to time. We have come to expect our movie to be about two hours long, give or take, because that’s about as much as the human attention span (not to mention bladder) can stand. We know that when the TiVo cursor gets closer and closer to the end of the hour mark, the episode is about to wrap up neatly. And we can tell that there are fewer and fewer pages left on the book, meaning a denouement is right around the corner.

Hold onto that thought for a minute… You’ve seen the Kindle from Amazon by now, I assume? It was on the cover of Newsweek, and has gotten coverage in a ton of other places.

(If you want a quick immersion, Grant McCracken has two great posts on his first experiences with the thing here and here.)

Back to the original line of thought now:

What I’m interested in is the experience of reading a book and what the Kindle brings to the equation. And for this post, it’s not so much about the quality of the display or how the machine feels in your hand when you’re sitting feet up in an easy chair with a favorite book. Those things are important, sure, but others have written more eloquently and more perceptively on the subject.

(To wit, check out Peter Merholz’s thoughts on the importance of form to books: “Materiality is central to our relationship with books. And I think this gives a clue as to why Kindle (nor any e-book reader) will never resonate the way iPod has.”)

Regardless of whether it’s a “good” form or not, by standardizing the physical experience of reading a book, the Kindle takes the physical experience out of the equation. And by doing so, it removed expectations that come with that physical experience — when the story arc is coming to an end, for example.

It’s a fundamentally different relationship with your book when you aren’t influenced by those expectations.

Possibilities for the author are exciting. The author will be able to screw around with expectations, play with the experience the reader will have. Kind of a book-land analogue to watching an Andy Kaufman routine. Maybe authors will begin to serialize their work, like comic books, or like how novels used to be published. It’s akin to the idea of the “infinite canvas” — that with the digital age comes the possibility to publish a comic book that is not constrained by the size limitations of the paper it is published on. (Thanks to Peter Merholz for that last thought.)

What’s it going to be like from the reader’s point of view? I have to imagine that the back of your mind doesn’t chatter at you as much, and that suspending disbelief is a little bit easier. Authors playing with form will be entertaining, I’m sure. But there’s the equal possibility that we’ll be unhappy with it all. Maybe we like old-school printed books because the experience is more transparent, because we are more in control of the experience, because we get hints at what’s coming…

Maybe we like it when our books talk back to us.