Richard Cohen had an interesting column in the Washington Post last week bemoaning the coming replacement of the book by the up and coming electronic technology of Amazon’s Kindle.
I confess that I have several rooms walled with books (which, by the way, as a secondary benefit provides excellent insulation) and have yet to acquire my Kindle, but I can see the inevitability of the device and the benefits of it.
To be quite honest, although the book does tend to represent a peak of technological achievement with its ergonomic simplicity of symbolic access and physical handling, its portability, and its relative durability, it is true that its storage capacity is severely limited, and we simply cannot keep cutting trees or, alternately, develop an indestructible and recycleable print medium out of synthetic feedstocks to keep producing them. It just makes more sense as an advanced civilization to junk the outmoded, ecologically destructive technologies of the Middle Ages and to replace them by downloading our content from the ubiquitous and now solidly eternal Web.
But probably the most important feature of the Kindle (or whatever technology eventually supplants it) is that it will liberate us from the mistakes of our past and let us more effectively integrate our lives into the protean flow of our progressive civilization.
We will no long need tolerate, for example, Mark Twain’s racist language in Huckleberry Finn, much less have to endure the perennial discomforts of school library book choice battles over uncomfortably controversial matters of sex, race, religion, or anything else. With our more advanced Kindles, we will now be able to edit the works we consume to suit our individual sensibilities ourselves, or, better, because we are hardly likely to become less busy, entrust our supply of reading matter to portals who will pre-tune our chosen content for us to our pre-selected criteria. Lolita can become 14, 16, 18, 21, or 30 as need be, and thereby create a winning solution for everyone.
Who was it—Anaximander?—who declared that “one cannot step into the same river twice”? But, really, who would want to? With electronic text technology and now with the new Kindle, who would want to slog through War and Peace a second time—where everything on every page would happen exactly as it did the first time—when one could download War and Peace 1.2 wherein whole new vistas and possibilities could be realized?
Portability, storage, socially safe and agreeable content, ever new as desired, and, finally, that ineffable sense of being connected to the Whole via Web download explains as Cohen only began to why the Kindle cannot fail to triumph over its Medieval pretenders.
That’s an interesting line of thought, but if the online videos and music we’re seeing today are any indication of what’s to come for books, we’re likely to see (if this hasn’t already been implemented) a digital rights management process by which downloaded books will not be easily modifiable, will not be easily transferrable, will be playable only on certain specified devices (and even that limited in number).
We have a Kindle. My son loves it. I am not allowed to use it. I need my own Kindle. We too, have walls of books, so on that basis alone, the Kindle offers us storage advantages. It is great on trips, and the E-paper really does hold charge for a long time.
I think there will be a market for literature as you think it may evolve. I think most books, especially the classics, will not change that much. Lolita at age 30 would make it a mediocre book IMO. It would no longer be worth reading. Some classics which use naughty words might become more acceptable to some religious groups if cleaned up. Most will not as they are using naughty words to describe naughty acts occurring in said books.
Popular literature, i.e. junk books, may lend themselves better. Most modern romance novels, some mystery and action novels could be edited to meet desires. Blondes could be changed to redheads. Arab terrorists could be changed to another ethnic group that the reader dislikes more. It is still just a little bit of a hassle to put pdf’s on the Kindle. As they improve this and a couple other wrinkles, it should spread in popularity.
Steve
It was Heraclitus, not Anaximander. And I thought Orwell already did the definitive work on “those who control the present control the past, etc.”
But, yes, in my more paranoid moments, I too wonder if the world I remember is vanishing in my footsteps like the undersea world of the Nowhere Man in “Yellow Submarine.” Listening to all the reminiscences about 1968 reassures me a bit, because most of what I remember is still in there.
I looked up the Kindle on Amazon and was pretty jazzed about it when I watch the “commercial” for it. I would love to have one, but the price is pretty steep yet. They never mentioned anything about the ability to change the content or rating of the books one downloads (no doubt to inhibit negative impacts of their product), and I don’t know why I’m surprised about that. Silly me, getting all aghast that the publishing world would consider such a thing. I’m totally against anyone changing an author’s original work to suit their own sensibilities. If they want to read a book so tailored to their own little box of beliefs, then they can write their own intellectual property. But I’d still like to get my hands on one of those!
KJ
Heraclitus, yeah, thanks, Red.
The thing that always amazed me about books is that they never break down. They can be burned, though that’s pretty hard, it’s hard to get oxygen between the pages, and they can and often are eaten by termites or silverfish if conditions get bad enough. But it’s hard for them to just go dark. I don’t guess that’s much of a problem, really, with the electronic alternatives–who’s really gonna want to take a Kindle backpacking? And if they do break down, they can always be fixed, until they can’t.
But the more interesting thing that article got me to thinking about was the sea change in values that such a medium represents. Previously, the whole point of written language, of print, was to fix, nail down those fleeting breezes and clouds of thought and to hopefully organize them so that they could be transmitted and reproduced in a fellow creature.
But the primary virtue above all of the digital medium, hell, it’s not even a medium, what is it, something far more abstract, a protocol, of the digital protocol, is its almost purely changeling, shapeshifting potential, the very thing which provides its superiority as a protocol of exchange.
Words, images, sounds, anything representative or symbolic can be digested into digital form for exchange across networks and reconstitution elsewhere, or just held in that digital potentiality until desired or needed.
But in that potentiality what dreams may come, aye, there’s the rub (hee-hee!).
The more we become accustomed to this protean world, generations from now, when this digital potentiality and its intermittent realization is all that is practically economical (by having made all else impractically uneconomical) will we still notice, will we still even care if or as it shapeshifts and changes?
Or will by that time our digitized symbology no longer really have a purpose as something we ourselves actively create and use to orient and steer ourselves to ends of our own choosing but rather have become more at something of just a fluid mental filler, an electronically liquid mind chow we passively transume as part and parcel of simply not being dead?
I predict that good writing, good books, will remain as valued as ever, if not more so, as our ability to change everything increases. There is just so much shlock out there, that good writing stands out even more.
I would predict that products like the Kindle may lead to new products. Books with video clips built into them. Books with sound effects. Books with parts read out loud rather than read. I think Lahti could have fun with those ideas. Imagine reading a book on the Inquisition, when suddenly your book starts playing the Python’s “no one expects the Spanish Inquisition” clip.
Steve
I liked this bit from Cohen:
“I buy from actual bookstores, if I can. You go there and people are browsing or having coffee or staring into open laptops and pretending they’re writers or something. If I were younger, I’d go there to pick up girls. I’d look over their shoulders and say, “Oh, ‘The Prophet,’ a book of eternal truths” — or some such tripe. (It used to work.) ”
I hate to play prophet, though (let alone Prophet; I’m more into Yuban, cold-brewed, than Gibran). As the Grand Guignol of bodies sprawled over the table unfolds in the deathless (so to speak) Restaurant sketch,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9VLwV48OHs
[Graham Chapman's whistling-in-the-dark bravery-stabbing fake laugh, and John Cleese's brutish zombie derangement with the butcher knife - "Oh, it makes me MAD." - are priceless]
Eric Idle screams, “It’s the end!”
Bookfolk inclined to Idly agree within their own sphere may seize at will upon two vault-closings of mine, as print must gave way to pixel dust:
1. As I wrapped a decade as a book-and-music seller over the 1990s, as elbow-deep a techno-indifferent traditional-humanist bookman as even that profession allowed (though a slow reader with limited concentration), I finally went online one evening in July 1998.
From 8pm until 10am that is, without a single break of any kind.
And for ten years, I’ve been virtually book-and-periodical- free, though not without the guilt attending a cultural historian by grad training, who made of the history of literary journalism his specialty as a freelancer (briefly in, e.g., National Review). The closest thing I’ve ever had to a bible as thumbed-hourly text-companion since c. 1979, The Columbia Encyclopedia, saw its print version supplanted in my life with its Bartleby.com incarnation.
2. My decade in the bricks-and-mortar world of non-digital sales of books and music finds it successor most recently as an entirely eBased seller of same, out of my apartment. And my buying, business and personal alike, is entirely online.
And yet, I swear I’ll dig out those books one of these days, and read them – as soon as I check my daily web sites for the fiftieth time this evening, and glance at the perpetual Gmail window to and from my overnight intake-outflow watering trips.
On the other hand, LPs, new and used, still survive, as do turntables, if at the margins. But there’s no stopping the advances overall, though tyrants and Luddites alike attempt their Canutian rollbacks. Terrestrial radio and broadcast TV linger on amid cable and satellite, both at altitudes down from the world-bestriding colossi of their grandfolks.
“All our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.” – Kipling
“All our Pop of yesterday/Is one with minivan entire.” – DSL., having convinced his once-skeptical father to rent a minivan for a two-day trip.
Yes, Heraclitus, although I didn’t get to be first on this.
I would agree more with comment 1 above. I think the Kindle or other devices like it will be bought by some but by no means most people who buy books.
Robert, I wouldn’t have thought from your writing you’d be such a fan of these reading devices.
There was “serious satire” in the post, methinks.
Oh, I have nothing against the device as such. I’d prolly love to have a shock-hardened, EMP-shielded, atomic-battery-powered, non-RFID-chipped Kindle to tote my stuff around on.
I was commenting more on how the medium itself facilitates, interacts with, and delimits the message. Indelible ink on paper (or “super soy substrate”) makes it less easy for “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” to, of course naturally and appropriately, because our online poll indicated a majority preferred it, mutate into “We hold these troops to be self-evident…”
Such dystopian concerns seem silly, perhaps quaintly geriatric (I bet Robert chases kids off his lawn with the garden hose) firmly rooted as we still are in our world of rapidly obsolescing fixed-form media. The devices, and by implication the deep capital/industrial bases and networks that support them (just dang hard to fabricate silicon wafers and FIOS networks in the shop) and make them at all worthwhile, that distribute our newer digital, protean-form media are still wondrous enough to be stocking-stuffers in the way that, say, the auto water pump, sadly, can no longer even recall. But that shore is receding ever further behind us. Fixed-form media even now is attracting its own negative cachet, references to “dead tree editions” of this and that; such a sentiment is all too easily transferable to the permanence of the content itself, one of those vintage “inflexible works”.
As my mistaking Anaximander for Heraclitus shows, it’s been awhile since I actually opened some of the books I own. But I’ll be willing to bet good money that with any of them, when I go back and pick them up again they’re gonna say the same damn things they said five, ten, twenty years ago.
With increasing sentiments that find that sort of Apollonian permanence itself ridiculous, who or what among us in the future will there be to guarantee the integrities of centralized networks? And again, so long as we are all transuming the same correct fluid mind chow, what does it really matter? ;-)
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