Naturally, few of us read in the way that Dickens’s audience did, but that is because of a deficit of time, not necessarily one of attention. We do, however, read and write more every year. The statistics of our hyperactivity are astounding and show, for instance, that the information passing through our minds has risen threefold in the past 30 years and increases by about 6% every year. An office worker processes an average 20,000 emails per year (and this rises by about 14% every year); an American teenager is likely to send and receive about 3,339 texts each month; Facebook gets well over 100 billion hits every day, while Twitter records about 1 billion tweets every week. Imagine the reading and writing involved in all this.
So, the truth is that serious books such as Franzen’s Freedom or The Corrections have to compete for our time, whether in print or on a screen. But if a book is good, it will earn the effort and reflection that no doubt Franzen’s books deserve. Yet this is not an entitlement and the idea that we are becoming incapable of sustained attention simply doesn’t hold up, as the sales of complicated science books attest. Indeed, I have a strong sense that the web has vastly increased our collective intelligence; that we are better informed, shrewder and able to grasp things more quickly than we were 20 years ago.
With this enormous brain at our fingertips, our intelligence is evolving and that means that writers and their writing will also evolve. The ebook is part of this and writers should grasp the opportunity with all the lack of self-consciousness and wonder that Hockney demonstrates in his use of the iPad. For one thing, there is so much fun to be had.
If Dickens were alive today, guess who’d be blogging, offering the occasional tweet, setting up literary websites, digging out some of his old work and repackaging it in ebooks. Dickens loathed many of his publishers, whom he regarded as lazy, thieving parasites, and he would have been thrilled by the opportunities we have of unmediated connection between writer and reader.
ebooks
Imagine buying a car that locks you into one brand of fuel. A new BMW, for example, that only runs on BMW gas. There are plenty of BMW gas stations around, even a few in your neighborhood, so convenience isn’t an issue. But if one of those other gas stations offers a discount, a membership program, or some other attractive marketing campaign, you can’t participate. You’re locked in with the BMW gas stations.
I used to buy a lot of MP3s. I don’t anymore. That’s not to say I don’t listen to MP3s. I have about 10,000 of the little guys squeezed like vienna sausages into my iTunes music folder, and I listen to them a lot. But when I buy music today I buy it on vinyl. I’m no audiophile, no retro hepcat, but my ears tell me that music sounds better on vinyl - warmer, more nuanced, less shrill - and I make it a point to listen to my ears. Also, I’ve rediscovered the pleasures of looking at the art work on record jackets. Thumbnail images are pretty weak substitutes. In fact, they suck.
But the decisive factor in the transformation of my purchasing behavior, as a marketer would say, wasn’t aesthetic. It was the decision by record companies to start giving away a free digital copy of an album when you buy the vinyl version. Hidden inside the sleeve of a new record, like a Cracker Jack prize, is a little card with a code on it that let’s you download the digital files of the songs, often in a lossless format, from the record company. So I no longer have to choose between the superior sound and packaging of vinyl and the superior mobility of digital. When I’m near my turntable, I spin the platter. When I’m not, I fire up the MP3s.
Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right - in tune with the universe, somehow.
There’s a lesson here, I think, for book publishers. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren’t going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it’s not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way.
(via ayjay)
Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring. Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough. Jonathan Franzen ☀
In an age where business dominates our governments and writes our laws, every technological advance offers business an opportunity to impose new restrictions on the public. Technologies that could have empowered us are used to chain us instead.
With printed books,
- You can buy one with cash, anonymously.
- Then you own it.
- You are not required to sign a license that restricts your use of it.
- The format is known, and no proprietary technology is needed to read the book.
- You can, physically, scan and copy the book, and it’s sometimes lawful under copyright.
- Nobody has the power to destroy your book.
Contrast that with Amazon ebooks (fairly typical):
- Amazon requires users to identify themselves to get an ebook.
- In some countries, Amazon says the user does not own the ebook.
- Amazon requires the user to accept a restrictive license on use of the ebook.
- The format is secret, and only proprietary user-restricting software can read it at all.
- To copy the ebook is impossible due to Digital Restrictions Management in the player, and prohibited by the license, which is more restrictive than copyright law.
- Amazon can remotely delete the ebook using a back door. It used this back door in 2009 to delete thousands of copies of George Orwell’s 1984.
Even one of these infringements makes ebooks a step backward from printed books. We must reject ebooks until they respect our freedom.
Books are being blown to bits. New ones are “born digital”; millions of old ones are being assimilated into the mind of the machine.
Some people question the wisdom of this transition to digital reading matter. Paper and ink have served us pretty well for a thousand years or more. Is it prudent to store everything we know in tiny smudges of electric charge we can’t see or touch? Critics also worry about who will wind up owning our cultural heritage. And then there are the sentimentalists, who say it’s just not the same curling up by the fireside with a good Kindle.
Well, I for one welcome our new computer overlords. And I would like to point out that books are not only for reading. There are other things we (and our computers) can do with the words in books. We can count them, sort them, make comparisons among them, search for patterns in their distribution, classify them, catalog them, analyze them. Yes, these are nerdy, mechanical, reductionist assaults on literature—but they are also methods of extracting meaning from text, just as reading is. And they scale better.
Sony has a platform for e-books. Amazon has a platform for e-books. Barnes & Noble has a platform for e-books. Apple has a platform for e-books. But Apple is the only one which allows its competitors to have apps on its devices. And Apple is the anti-competitive one? John Gruber (via ericmortensen) ☀
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