QUILLBLOG

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.”