The future will be digitized
Novelist Russell Smith points readers to two interesting recent pieces about the future of the publishing industry and gets off some salient points of his own in his Globe and Mail column last week.
Smith recaps a Guardian article by former Observer literary editor Robert McCrum as well as a New York Review of Books essay by Robert Darnton, director of the University Library at Harvard. In their respective pieces, which examine how the digital age is changing the way we read, McCrum and Darnton touch on the Google Print project, which is digitizing books from library collections.
Smith’s own opinion on the future of reading seems to fall somewhere between the two:
I like [Darnton’s] balanced approach - it has neither the gloom of the sky-is-falling crowd, which likes to link advances in technology to the global decline in literary reading, nor the hyperbolic optimism of McCrum, who concludes that “to be a writer in the English language today is to be one of the luckiest people alive.”
It’s interesting that this discussion is going on at a time of great concern about the audience for literary fiction in the Western world. As McCrum himself notes, it is more difficult than ever to find even a modest audience for a very well-reviewed book that has not won the big-prize jackpot. Nobody has yet attempted to explain how e-readers, no matter how anti-reflective their screens, or online libraries, no matter how inclusive, would effect a change in public tastes. It seems we are debating the best methods of decorating an empty church.
As one spoof reviewer of the Kindle says in his online video, it’s an iPod for reading, with the main difference being that “the iPod holds music that’s awesome, and really cool TV shows and movies, and a Kindle holds…” - he looks disgusted - “books.”
“This, McCrum says, will create the “iPod moment” for books, the revolution that will give democratic access to billions of pages of free literature to those who would otherwise be denied entry to the educated classes.”
Yeah, and in the previous paragraph he points out the Kindle costs three hundred and sixty bucks (and will need to be replaced every few years, I’m sure - who’s still using their first iPod?) and I can’t imagine that internet connection it includes will be free.
I’m starting to become one of those classic internet cranks, but how come we accept so easily the expensive technology requirements that will simply put us on a treadmill of handing over money to the manufacturers?
I wanted to make this same point on the Globe’s site, but they’re no longer accepting comments. I wanted to point out how narrow-minded the view of the moneyed classes is: 360? anyone can afford that, right? Oh, plus the batteries. and the internet service.
Naturally, the books themselves will be free.
what does this say about our values? why is there an insistence that intellectual property be free, as in beer, but physical property must be owned?