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locusclassicus

Death of the Book?

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May. 16th, 2010 | 03:34 pm

We all know that the versatility of electronic media spells change for the traditional publishing industry. We all know it because we have been told again and again. It is also true. And, traditionalist that I am, I can't help sighing in a small, strangled way whenever I see people using Kindle (for some unfathomable reason, this was about fifty percent of those on the plane travelling to Salt Lake City). But there are also occasions when you are surprised to see web versions on a real page in a real book. Recently, I ordered a copy of 'The Best Creative Nonfiction' - a journal compilation - and found that several of the pieces come from blogs. It's not a case of plagiarism; they are cited. What amazes me is seeing blog material in print. Surely the blog is meant to challenge certain varieties of reading - anything, really, between journalism and diaries? I follow blogs just as I follow newspapers. So it's odd to find them promoted in a book, when you would think that more people would know of their existence in cyberspace than on the page. Why have recourse to this outdated technology?

Still, literary journals seem outdated in general, since most of them still demand hard copies of your manuscript plus a stamped self-addressed envelope instead of allowing their contributors to exploit the delightful simplicity of email. One click and it's THERE. Most of them still think we're living in the 1950s. Now that really could cause the death of the book.
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Comments {2}

Lisa

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from: [info]_bounce_
date: May. 16th, 2010 11:19 pm (UTC)
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I don't know. I'm finding that I"m really loving the way that things are moving between the internet and books and back so easily. I love the fluidity of it all, the way they have broken down the biggest boundary of the space between books and ...everything else, rather than between genres and the fact that it shows blogs are a recognised medium. But then again, I've been reading blogs since 2001, writing in them since 2002. I"m probably more familiar with them than some people are.

(And yes, if I could afford one, I'd buy an ebook reader just because of that.)

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homo_academicus

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from: [info]homo_academicus
date: May. 17th, 2010 09:46 am (UTC)
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I see people on the train with their little ebooks and honestly don't know what to make of it all. I'll make some progress eventually, after all, I've moved from the Late Chalcolithic into the Iron Age - a 2000 year jump! Though people still didn't really write much, unless it was for honorific purposes.

A book has a quality of permanence, which, materially and symbolically, has a certain power to it, a transcendental quality. More so a baked clay tablet, a stone inscription.

Content on the internet is ephemeral and mutable - think of the times you went to a webpage and you got the 'error 404' message; new algorithms no longer compatible with old ones - I recently found some oldish files on my PC from an earlier time that could no longer be opened or converted.

Temporal elements are important here too. All this lost information pertaining to the past, as if it never existed. What does that mean for the future, and the implications of decisions made to maintain/erase content at a whim, as the internet permits? Since the past is the only fixed thing that in our existence can be mined and manipulated to understand the present.

So, I'm not against the internet. It's dead useful. But I have some reservations of the various implications it entails, whether or not they have been hitherto realized.

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