Following on the delightfully depressing Onion story that I quoted a few days ago, this morning I read two more pieces about the printed word and the decline of its readers, both of which are worth sharing. (Thank you, Roger Ebert, for tweeting them.)
The first is satirical, about that ephemeral mainstay, the newspaper: “After a Thorough Battery of Tests We Can Now Recommend ‘The Newspaper’ as the Best E-Reader on the Market.”
What concerned us most about The Newspaper was its lack of Wi-Fi. Information on the system was locked, while on other e-readers it was open, ubiquitous and current. Eventually, however, we found this advantage to be overstated, even misleading. Engineers using The Newspaper typically did so 30 to 60 minutes a day. Afterward, they went outside, formed relationships, and took in what life had to offer. Those using Wi-Fi-enabled e-readers tended to stay on the couch, scanning video sites for cats; eventually, downloading recipes for artichoke cheese dip they’ll never use.
But in the modern world of the newspaper, 30 to 60 minutes a day, followed by relationships and taking in what life has to offer, just isn’t enough for the advertisers. They need a constant stream of eyeballs, only nominally attached to brains, to keep the content mixer churning. Just this morning (or should I make it more breathless and say, “Only moments ago”?), the Fresno Bee promised to “ship out a tweet and email alert the moment we get word today on Prop. 8 judge’s ruling on marriage stay.” They’re doing their best to keep what can only charitably be called “readers” on the line, with what can most accurately be called “pre-news.” This is a service? And if, when the momentous ruling comes down, I am too busy doing other things to read that tweet or email alert, I suppose my consciousness of facts barely relevant to my happy existence will have to be delayed. Alas.
None of this is new. Henry David Thoreau said it 150 years ago, when the telegraph was the iPad of the 19th century: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
The second piece is more of a lament on the widely-rumored death of books, “The World’s Most Perfect Product.”
[T]he book—the printed one, wood pulp and ink, glue and sweat and blood—remains a nearly perfect product.
Think about it. It hasn’t been fundamentally improved upon for 1,000 years. Few other products in the world match it for reach and purity of function. It’s cheap, transportable, sharable. It’s immersive, transformative, offers universal and timeless appeal across all nationalities, religions, races, creeds, politics, classes, education levels. No other product you can name matches the book across the efficiency/cost/intimacy/experience matrix. It’s flawless.
So of course, we have to kill it.
I have hundreds of books. They are everywhere I am. When my wife and I go on vacation, I usually have a separate suitcase just for books. A Kindle would be easier to carry, but also easier to lose and easier to break. If we have important things to say, then memorializing them in physical books, with volume and heft seems appropriate. Maybe I’m flying off the rails when I say this, but putting our libraries into e-readers almost seems like a nihilistic admission that everything everyone says is equally valueless. Sure, in the grand, cosmic scheme, our little glued-together piles of marked paper probably are just white noise. But to us, to the humans who write, read, and collect books, those books do more than Twitter could ever do, by connecting us with people long departed as though they live on, so that we can be more than just today, but the accumulation of all our yesterdays. And books can record, even unwittingly, our mistakes, so we can continue to learn from the failures of long ago.
Computers and the internet and digital data storage are enormously useful to move lots of information around quickly, but they rely on a broad range of technologies just to stay useful: the generation of electricity, the manufacture of new storage devices, the creation of software to migrate from old devices to new ones every few years, and so on. Permanence is not their strong suit, not yet at least. But a book, once made, is relatively easy to maintain. Just leave it alone it in a cool, dry place and your descendants will probably still be able to read it in a thousand years. Which is not to say that books are indestructible, or that every book ever written is still around, just waiting to be perused at the Library of Congress, because they’re not. But books are proven. Their physicality is not just aesthetically pleasant, but can also be commensurate with the importance of their more abstract contents.
I love my MacBook and my iPhone as much as the next guy. I’m on Facebook and Twitter. I do most of my professional legal research online. I’m blogging right now. But I keep myself surrounded by books and I write on paper with a fountain pen because, while those electronic gadgets supplement the hell out my more antique devices, none of them can replace those things.
A world without newspapers may be a world without a conscience, unless you are Henry David Thoreau, but a world without books is a world with amnesia.
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