Monday July 10, 2006

Future books

I?ve been reading a lot recently about books, what they are,
and what they can and perhaps might become. 
There?s a huge amount of editorial content ranging from the
possibilities that digitizing content a la Google might make to the more arcane
experiments in form and definition of the book itself such as Mackenzie Work?s GAM3R
7H30RY, http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/
(There?s a nice summary at http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/books/writing-in-public/13910/).

Two recent editorials in the NYTs garnered a lot of
attention. Kevin Kelly?s essay, ?Scan this Book? presented what seemed to me to
be a highly utopian view of digitized books where everything that was possible ?
and hence in his view desirable ? rested upon social networking. It seemed that
there was time for everything except perhaps actually reading content straight
through and reflecting on it.  John
Updike?s speech at the Book Expo, http://bookexpocast.com/?p=12,
was reprinted as ?The End of Authorship? and offered a stinging and somewhat overly
vitriolic rebuke that focused mostly on the high literature end of books.
The best summary of the two I?ve seen comes from Ben Vershbow where he says,

I say it again, it's a shame that Kelly, the
uncritical commercialist, and Updike, the nostaligic elitist, have been the
ones framing the public debate. For most of us, Google is neither the eclipse
nor dawn of authorship, but just a single feature of a shifting landscape. Search
is merely a tool, a means: the books themselves are the end. Yet, neither
Google Book Search, which is simply an apparatus for extracting new profits off
of the transmission and search of books, nor the present-day publishing
industry, dominated as it is by mega-conglomerates with their penchant for
blockbusters (our culture haunted by vast legions of the out-of-print), serves
those ends very well. And yet these are the competing futures of the book:
lonely forts and sparkling clouds. Or so we're told.

Posted by ben vershbow on June 27,
2006 01:47 AM at http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/06/the_least_interesting_conversa.html

If:Book is a good place to start reading if you are
interested in this sort of thing. It has some thoughtful takes on defining and
thinking about books. For example, http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/06/what_is_a_book.html

See also, http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6332156.html.