SNL, Britney's Memoir, And Scrolling in Bed

On The Future of (Other Types of) Books

During his SNL monologue on Saturday, Nate Bargatze joked about his reading habits.

He has a point.

I read books almost exclusively on my Kindle (which, miraculously, syncs with Libby), and it’s astonishing how little an ebook does given what it could do. Ebooks are just…words. Every screen is words. Even when the book is Britney Spears’s memoir, which is a book that really should include audio and/or video clips, or at least an easy way to find them off-reader.

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When I’m not reading on my Kindle, I listen to audiobooks. Lately, I’ve been interested in music, so I’ve been reading books about pop music: how it works, the pop music factory. I usually listen to them on walks, and I do stop to switch over to Spotify to listen to the music the books describe. How simple, I think, to simply add those songs to the audiobook. Think how much more an author could do with an audiobook if clips of the music described were included with the audiobook version. Michelle Williams narrates Britney’s…