Books are So Dead

How many times has the death knell been rung for books? Well, this time it really sounds like it, but then it's sounded like it before.

I'm reading a book called The Case for Books: Past, Present, Future by Robert Darnton, a Harvard librarian. I like reading books like that, books that have a touch of irony when people see you reading them on the bus. I read Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why and I always delighted in what people must have been thinking when they saw that.

"How can you read a book about it if you don't know how to read?"

Danton's book is interesting because he's telling us why books are important now, when they may be done for good. There must be thousands of books written every year telling us that books are dead. Irony again.

In university, I attended a conference called The Future of the Page. Pretty self-explanatory. There was fear in some parties that books were being killed slowly by the Internet. That was almost ten years ago. I mean, they were worried that books were obsolete and we were still using Windows '98 for God's sake! Barbaric.

Darnton addresses these neat little devices, one made by those dastardly Sony folks--no, constant reader, I'm not banging that drum again--upon which you can read an entire book. Google is uploading books by the thousands now, though there are still some lawsuits pending.

They're getting close to the convenience of a book in device form.

Now, people can say these things will never take the place of real books. Bill Gates himself says he can't read more than three pages of text on a screen before he feels he's got to print it off.

Great, we're using more paper since digitization. My word, that's more irony, that is.

Darnton was recently interviewed on CBC Radio and besides Mr. Gates' inability to stare at computers too long, the professor described a study that had revealed that some French students found smell to be a really huge part of their reading experience. I knew a girl once who said the smell of the stacks in the library was an aphrodisiac. . . . Digression. Anyway, an enterprising company provided the French students with those handy dandy book-readin' gadgets, which had been affixed with a sticker that gave off the smell of books.

They're creating long-lasting batteries and water/weather-proof cases so you can read in the forest or by the seaside for almost the same duration you can with a regular book.

So much work being done to make something like a book, seems to me a book might still be the way to go.

But maybe Bill Gates has an issue because he's from an older generation, a generation raised on the printed word. Maybe kids who grow up reading books on hand-held doohickeys will be accustomed to the experience, especially as Gates' underlings continue to play with screen resolution and fonts and electronic ink (no idea, I heard about it somewhere) which'll make the whole thing much easier on our poor peepers.

So, yeah, I think this time, for real, just maybe, the end of the book might, eventually, probably be coming . . . soonish. SHOUT IT FROM THE MOUNTAIN-TOPS!

As a writer and a book-collector, I should be worried. As a writer who values ideas more than money, I'm not. Sure, I'll miss looking at my bookshelves and daydreaming about the joys of past summer reads, but this won't be the end of the book. It just might be the end of the paper book . . . in a while.

I like trees. S'okay.

If I write a book. If I have a good idea, I put it down, and you read it, and one of the purest forms of communication transpires, does it matter how? Not to me.

Oh, but what will writers sign? Publishers may find you less viable to promote without the pretty front cover. Blah, blah, blah. Has anyone considered that the publishing industry is long overdue for the same digital kick in the ass that Big Music suffered? Gets us back down to the basics of what it's about--the art, not the package.

Just as an aside, Google is doing some pretty ambitious work in digitizing books, but I'm not so sure I like where it's headed. See, you'd pay to access their database, and that isn't the noble goal a library has: enlightenment to the masses. No, Google wants to charge you an access fee, which they say'll be cheap for now. But it's being done for dollars, and anything that is done to make money first is soulless, and I despise it.

Print newspaper ain't dead, but it's waiting to be unplugged from life-support. But that isn't the end of journalism. Hell, it isn't even the end of newspapers.

Books are going, yeah, but it's hardly the end of books.