Present Imperfect

Preheat oven to 451. | February 07, 2008

Alright. I’m about halfway through Print is Dead and I feel like I should say something, especially in light of my last post.

Jeff Gomez can be kind of ham-fisted and just as bitterly sarcastic as the publishing-industry Luddites he criticizes when he argues against ignoring the realities of our digital world in favor of clinging to some antiquated notion that books are precious artifacts that define us as a civilization. (“The Beverly Hills Diet is a book. Does that mean The Beverly Hills Diet is intrinsic to our humanity?”), but I’m beginning to see his point.

As a technophile, I should embrace any means by which ideas are disseminated electronically. And I do. I read online all the time. I even write about reading online. But I still have this block when it comes to reading narrative fiction — and long-form non-fiction — onscreen. It’s not because I feel the computer is impersonal. I freaking love my computer. It’s not because I can’t “curl up” with digital words. I do that all the time. (My MacBook is so nice and warm! So cozy!) What bothers me about reading long-form writing onscreen is that, well, I can’t. I can’t focus for long enough because I’ve subconsciously trained myself to behave differently with onscreen text than I do with text on paper.

Naturally, it’s the Internet’s fault. I spend my entire day flitting between blog post, Flickr photostream, online news article, iChat, and email. The things I read online have to be packaged up in nice, easily digestible maki rolls of information so I can read them in intervals (or read them later). Otherwise, I tune out. There’s too much competing for my attention on that bright, shiny screen. And Gomez’s assertion that the failure of eBooks is a failure to provide digitized books for existing devices (i.e., the iPhone) rings false to me because there’s plenty to distract me even on my iPhone. (Seriously. I’m dropping pins all over the place these days.)

I still love books. I love them in spite of what Gomez seems to think is a foolish attachment to the packaging surrounding ideas, when what we should be treasuring are the ideas themselves. And I’m by no means alone in my love for books. But maybe, just maybe, I’m hopelessly out of touch.

Because, according to Gomez, your average teenager does not love books. She doesn’t give a crap about books. She may still care about ideas, and she may read and read and read those little bits of written information on the web, but she doesn’t read books. I may have pooh-poohed Steve Jobs’s specific “people don’t read” statistic, but I’m not so naive that I believe — in the face of all the evidence — that reading isn’t in serious trouble.

I get indignant about the death of print because I do genuinely believe that the book is still the best, most convenient, least distracting way to disseminate long-form writing. To Gomez’s point, though, that doesn’t matter if the next generation can’t be bothered to read at all. It could be that in order to save reading, we’re going to have to deliver words in a format that the next generation has already adopted and not insist on clinging to the belief that the book is sacred.

I’m not sure this will work. It certainly hasn’t so far. eBooks keep failing just as literacy rates drop. Should we make everything in print available digitally? Absolutely. If it encourages someone who might not otherwise read to do so, by all means. But will someone really read a novel on his iPod or iPhone or laptop when music, video, blogs, email, and text messages can — and will — wrench his attention away at any given moment?

That leaves us with some sort of dedicated reading device, like the Kindle. Except, as I’ve said before, the Kindle doesn’t improve on the book. (Gomez would argue that it does, but I wonder how often he uses the World Clock on his iPod. Just because something has more features doesn’t mean you’re going to use them.) That leaves us with the book. And with self-publishing sites like Lulu.com, who stand to make a lot of cash riding The Long Tail.

I may be forced to eat my words about the book vs. the digital book. I’m prepared to do that. I’m just not prepared to give up my books.