The Future of Books is Books
The Future of Books is Books.
Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Gertrude Stein, as I’ ve just finished the wonderful biography Gertrude and Alice by Diana Souhami. I am much for fixated on Getrude–”Twentieth century literature is Gertrude Stein”–Stein the person than her writing. Souhami satisfied that itch more than those Stein works I found hard to focus on (it’s like free jazz and Shakespeare in that, after ten minutes of caucauphony, it suddenly flows).
The Future of Books is Books.
I’ve been reading about Kindles and ebooks, and how the nature of interaction is changing. But I’ve only been able to picture a book with hypertext, which makes Wikipedia so addictive to me while watching television. Any text would be a Norton Critical Edition, in short. That seemed tame. That I can read my i-touch in the dark, on my side, while my three year old goes down sold me on the e-reader. The FUTURE!
Reading about the i-Tablet, though, killed that.
The Future of Books is Books.
Text is dead, Wired declared. That was the paraphrase. The reason, they effectively argued, was that text took a small footprint of the offerings of the new generation of tablet computer. Video, sound and images would crowd out text. Copyright, already shaken out in the music and video worlds, is holding firm in the written world and keeps most books out of the hands of anyone with a screen that’s not a Kindle.
When publishing does join the party, people will have moved on. Romeo and Juliet was meant to be staged, not read, and the tablet will provide. Media–art–is evolving. Text on a tablet will be underwhelming.
Which is why the future of books will be books.
Because text makes sense in a book. The tactile nature and ease of delivery–the emotional sense of it–will keep it locked on the page. While bestsellers and pulp will migrate–heck, it will all migrate–the experience of text will remain on the page just as the experience of music has remained, after the advent of MTV, in the ears. It just makes intuitive sense. Art will move on.
The future of books, though, is books.
