Earlier this week, I read something on Andrew Sullivan’s blog that reminded me of John Siracusa’s piece on electronic reading devices, referenced earlier this month. In a post entitled “The End of Permanence”, Sullivan argued that an advantage to the digital distribution of books is the ability to constantly revise and update information. I’m more skeptical of this, but part of this comes from the fact that the bulk of the books I read are fiction, and revising narrative works after the fact brings to mind conflicting images: on one hand, Shadow Country; on the other, Greedo shooting first. See also the late-2007 discussion of a possible collection of Raymond Carver stories sans Gordon Lish’s edits, which raised any number of questions of what the “definitive” versions of those stories might come to be.

Nonfiction — particularly political nonfiction, the area in which Sullivan resides — is a little more complex. Given that much of my reading is done on public transportation, I generally wait for the paperback edition of the books in question. And in the case of nonfiction works, more often than not, the paperbacks come with additional information, an afterword of some type.

One example: when I do read nonfiction, much of it has to do with politics. 2008 saw the hardcover releases of Matthew Yglesias’s Heads In the Sand, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s Grand New Party, and Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland — all books that struck me as interesting, all sparking debates in which I’d be interested in participating. And yet — chances are, the trade paperbacks of at least one of these will end up being more comprehensive than the hardcovers. And cost less money. And take up less space in my bag. Ergo: the incentive’s on me to wait.

In many ways, this seems bizarre: if I pay for the hardcover edition, I’m getting more money to the publisher and, by inference, to the author(s). And yet I’m getting an edition of the book that will, most likely, be supplanted in roughly a year. I’m trying to come up with an analogy, and all I can think of is some theoretical world where, of the two Criterion editions of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the more expensive turned out to be the single-disc version with fewer extra features. (At the very least, it seems strange that the publishers aren’t setting up some way to make sure that owners of the hardcover edition can access the new material.)

Where the Siracusa piece comes into play is in his debate over semantics — which leaves me wondering whether changes in technology and distribution will cause a significant gulf between our understanding of what a work of fiction is relative to a work of nonfiction, and whether the gulf between the two could widen even further. In other words — there are differences now, but they’re both books. Decades from now, will each have shifted into its own medium?