Jenterey Sayers can pin his growth as a teacher on one specific book.

Silence by John Cage is the work that inspired the English doctoral candidate to use collaborative teaching methods in his English 111 classroom. Sayers never comes to class prepared for a lengthy lecture anymore. Instead, he comes equipped with an open mind, ready to engage with students in an interactive setting.

“Cage says: ‘There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound,’” Sayers said. “With those two sentences in mind, I’ve tried to listen to students more and talk at them less.”

With the advent of electronic books, or e-books, such collaborative teaching methods may become more the norm. Informatics professor Matt Saxton anticipates that more advanced e-book technologies will allow students to sift through and annotate the texts in a more thorough fashion. Some current Web tools, such as Zotero, allow students to annotate texts digitally. Saxton expects e-books to incorporate this type of technology and fuse the reading and writing experiences.

Professors often expect students to search through books to find particular themes and ideas and then incorporate them into a paper. Saxton argued that e-books will enhance students’ ability to fulfill these criteria.

“What you’re able to do is seamlessly interact with the text in a way that your professors can envision, but never actually had the capacity to do themselves,” Saxton said.

Perhaps one of the most powerful effects of the e-book will be the intermingling of the reading and writing processes.

“The fact that you’re making commentary, and you’re storing commentary in a malleable format — that commentary can then easily become part of a text that you write, part of a paper,” Saxton said. “Reading and writing then become a coactivity.”

Other impacts on reading may include the deconstruction of linear reading and the customization of the way we perceive texts.

“The reader now has the power to define and structure the text in different ways,” said Saxton. “In a sense, each reading becomes unique. Their experience of the text may differ greatly from someone else, not just because they interpret it differently, but because they’ve structured the text in a way that differs from the way someone else reads it.”

What really engages students, Sayers said, is the hands-on interaction with texts.

“I’ll circulate something we’ve read, and I’ll ask a group of students to cut it up, rearrange it, add notes and images to it,” Sayers said. “The idea here is to offer students not only hands-on engagements with the stuff they read, but also opportunities to speak to each other and to talk back to history through the text as a shared space.”

While reading changes to become more collaborative, the question of quality arises.

Fellow English doctoral candidate and teaching assistant Edmond Chang suggested that it is not a matter of the substance of literature, so much as the medium that is being altered.

“Is there a difference between print on paper and print on a screen?” Chang said. “I think that asking about the obsolescence of the book is really asking about the obsolescence perhaps of paper, the medium, and not necessarily about the novel or writing or genre or such.”

He conceded, however, that superficial changes will occur.

“I do think that communication technologies like the Internet or viewing technologies like the Kindle will change the way we read, the way we create texts, what texts look like, and so on,” Chang said.

More profound ramifications of the digital age include the transitioning of the reading experience from a private experience to one that is public. For example, Google’s Sidewiki exposes print marginalia to the public by providing side notes where readers can comment on books and share their ideas with others. Sayers suggested that this may lead to Facebook-like modifications in which reading becomes an intensively shared experience through online social networking.

“In short, [readers] would be able to document and share their notes, there would be more collaboration, and reading would become a less isolated process,” said Sayers.

Chang said that some changes are inevitable, but the substance of books will remain intact.

“The attitude toward the ‘old’ media is in part because habits of reading are being confounded by or even replaced by new ones,” Chang said. “I really don’t think books will ever disappear. Our attitudes toward and understanding of them will.”

It has often been said that books have the power to change lives — as Cage did for Sayers. The impact this has on the aspiring author is particularly profound.

“I do think, though, that my aspirations to write and teach are in part because I do imagine that someday I will have books of my own, that I’ll be able to walk into a store and see my book on a shelf,” Chang said.

And Sayers is adamant about the future of the book.

“I don’t think the book is going anywhere soon,” said Sayers.

Reach reporter Sara Grimes at lifestyles@dailyuw.com.