Scan barcode
quintusmarcus's review
5.0
Booklovers are a bit disoriented these days, between the rise of the e-book and the collapse of the physical bookseller Borders. Are these trends truly related? And what does that mean for the future of books? The independent publisher Soft Skull Press wins the award for breathtaking timeliness. They have just published a collection of essays, "The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books". Twenty-five authors consider not just the future of the novel and imaginative writing, but also that of the physical book. Not surprisingly, although there is some pessimism, these writers, and I would guess most of their readers, cannot imagine a world without books (and novels) in some form or another. One of the founders of n+1, Marco Roth, puts it best in his essay "The Outskirts of Progress":"The "future of the book" is, by definition, unknowable. There are only attitudes towards the future which shape possible futures from the vantage of the present: foully apocalyptic, silvery utopian, cautiously conservationist. These attitudes can even coexist within each of us. The crisis of the book is really a crisis of our free will to culture. If we commit ourselves to the culture of thought, inquiry, and rhetorical expression that arose in conjunction with the written word, inevitably we'll carry books with us in whatever shape, and inevitably we'll want to "access them" and compose them in their traditional bound and printed form, if only to feel a shimmer of connection to earlier human generations." Of this last point, I'm not so sure--I can easily imagine physical books slipping away, or at least becoming luxury items. I cannot abide physical newspapers now, because I cannot interact with them. When I read a newspaper online, I clip bits and pieces to Evernote to remember, I share articles with friends, or evaluate the tone of comments piling up at the end of an article. I think it is possible that as the reading of ebooks becomes a social experience, I may feel the same way about printed books. But then, I am a collector, and I cannot imagine having something physical to put on my bookshelves. At the end, though, I think Joe Meno speaks for most readers when he says, "For me, a book, in whatever form it takes--hardbound copy, paperback, electronic version, online instrument, text downloaded on a cellphone, even a story read orally--a book is actually a place, a place where we, as adults, still have a chance to engage in active imagining, translating word to image, connecting these images to memories, dreams, and larger ideas."
More...