Gutenberg Bible at Huntington Library

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. “The Death of the Book” … or not. Many articles, books, scholarly tracts, and dissertations have been written on the subject and will continue to produce more words about the disappearance of words from books. And in spite of it all, the book is still alive and well. But, ok: “The death of the book” is more often than not a kind of shorthand for the many real and significant changes that we see happening as as result of new technologies and economic realities.

To that end, The Guardian has a number of interesting dispatches from the Edinburgh Book Festival including, “The death of books has been greatly exaggerated.” The very, very short version usually goes something like this: ‘ebooks are replacing printed books, the ebook will therefore replace the printed book, etc., etc.’ But to this, The Guardian decides to try a more empirical approach– “hang on a minute. Anecdotally, that’s a pretty awe-inspiring collection of proofs. But the plural of anecdote is not data. What is the data telling us?”

As we well know, it’s all about the narrative. Anecdotes tell one kind of story, and data can be used to tell many different kinds of stories. So which is it? One interpretation, takes a discerning eye upon the previous decade of UK book sales (although not including ebook sales yet), tells a surprisingly different story:

“According to Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry standard for book sales data, book sales are pretty healthy … Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later – a decade in which the internet bloomed, online gaming exploded, television channels proliferated, digital piracy rampaged and, latterly, recession gloomed – 229m books sold. So, a 42% increase in the number of books sold over the last 10 years.”

The book industry is in trouble, reports tell us, but more books have been sold …? The crucial question, of which the data still remains to be seen, is whether ebooks are in fact cannibalizing printed book sales as much as our collective perception tells us it is. This seems to be an open question — anecdotally the answer seems to be yes, but The Guardian’s response is sensibly for us to wait and see numbers before coming to that conclusion.

Then there’s the Amazon.com question. Amazon (worth a somewhat-humdrum $90 billion, according to The Guardian) is somewhat famous for keeping its sales figures close to the vest. Instead of absolute values, they prefer giving us pictures of relative values:

“In May this year, Amazon announced that, for the first time, it was selling more Kindle versions of books than paperback and hardbacks combined, and (here’s the thing that doesn’t get quoted so often) sales of print books were still increasing.”

Well that is interesting. The news about Kindle books outselling hardback books was oft-repeated, but I’d never heard that second part before.

Piracy is another pressure that is besetting the ebook industry. Piracy is a problem, and chances are it will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future — yet many people tend to pair the example of the music industry’s struggles with piracy with the ebook piracy like a pair of ill-fitting shoes. It doesn’t quite fit. (Adrian Johns has a great treatment of this subject, Piracy: The Intellectual Property War from Gutenberg to Gates). One line of thinking is that piracy is simply more convenient, which is partly a result of not having more compelling options to buy — think of how the music industry and its consumers have in fact changed with the rise of iTunes.

One of the sexiest selling points for ebooks, and Kindle books, is that it provides instant gratification. We like instant gratification. So much so, that we’re willing to pay for it. Amazon’s Kindle has gone a long way towards making it easier and quicker to buying books:

“So is there not another view: that people are paying relatively high amounts for books a year before their paperback release, because they want them quickly on their digital devices? That convenience trumps pricing and format every time?”

There’s something else generally to be said about the business of ebooks. Some people just don’t plain don’t want to talk about it, because it’s creating an uncomfortable crossing of art and commerce: “There is a profound queasiness which breaks out at the conjunction of art and business.”

As we said, there’s a narrative to be traced through all of this. What that story is, is still being figured out. But since this is a story that involves human beings and human emotions (uncertainty, frustration, greed, etc.) the truth is likely to come out of some struggle between our objective and subjective accounts of what’s happening with ‘the death of the book’ –

The Death of the Book Tumblr

“This, combined with the emergence of digital technology, creates enormous uncertainty. It’s a fact that the transition to digital devices will mean greater efficiencies and more focus on cost and, overall, a rather less generous publishing industry than before; a rather colder-hearted, fiercer one. The old world is fading, the new world isn’t yet in focus … It’s almost impossible for someone who has spent decades working in a calm, creative environment not to be enraged by the sight of American technology companies tipping everything on its head.  But let’s not overdo things.  Let’s not lose sight of the data we have, and let’s not invent data when we only have anecdotes.”  

Also worth checking out from The Guardian — a lively and interesting open online Debate: The end of the book?

And finally – you might also be interested in “The Death of the Book” Tumblr page, which compiles the news — or epitaphs — it’s actually quite a handy archive.

The Wall Street Journal has a thought-provoking book review/op-ed from Joseph Epstein: “What Killed American Lit.” It begins as a relatively straightforward review of massive scholarly production, The Cambridge History of the American Novel (1272 pages, $185.00):

“In 71 chapters, the book’s contributors consider the traditional novel in its many sub-forms, among them: science fiction, eco-fiction, crime and mystery novels, Jewish novels, Asian-American novels, African-American novels, war novels, postmodern novels, feminist novels, suburban novels, children’s novels, non-fiction novels, graphic novels and novels of disability  … Other chapters are about subjects played out in novels—for instance, ethnic and immigrant themes—and still others about publishers, book clubs, discussion groups and a good deal else. “The Cambridge History of the Novel,” in short, provides full-court-press coverage.”

 More interesting than the review of the book (which doesn’t itself seem to be interesting, according to Epstein’s review: “All that the book’s editors left out is why it is important or even pleasurable to read novels and how it is that some novels turn out to be vastly better than others. But, then, this is a work of literary history, not of literary criticism.”) is the larger discussion about the state of literary study in the U.S. This is at least a little different from one of those other ‘Death of American Literature” jeremiads, though.

For one thing, Epstein argues that the zeitgeist of the American literary academic world signifies a breakdown of the distinction between high and low culture — which just happens to be the topic I wrote about in the upcoming book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy).

“The Cambridge History of the American Novel” could only have come into the world after the death of the once-crucial distinction between high and low culture, a distinction that, until 40 or so years ago, dominated the criticism of literature and all the other arts. Under the rule of this distinction, critics felt it their job to close the gates on inferior artistic products. The distinction started to break down once the works of contemporary authors began to be taught in universities.

The study of popular culture—courses in movies, science fiction, detective fiction, works at first thought less worthy of study in themselves than for what they said about the life of their times—made the next incursion against the exclusivity of high culture.” 

Not to get all postmodern here, or post postmodern, but is the collapse of the high/low culture really such a bad thing? Or, let’s look at this way — would we really be better of reverting to the Matthew Arnold mode of drawing a hard line between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, a distinction supposedly to be taken care of my the ‘critics’ as experts? I do generally agree that a distinction between high and low culture is a valuable thing and should be respected; but I also think there is such a thing as making too much out of it. It seems an awful big jump to take from a flattening out of high/low culture distinctions, to a sort of literary cultural relativism:

“In today’s university, no one is any longer in a position to say which books are or aren’t fit to teach; no one any longer has the authority to decide what is the best in American writing. Too bad, for even now there is no consensus about who are the best American novelists of the past century.”

Is that true? Really?

There is a larger discussion made about the state of the English in the modern university. Certainly what caught my eye were the numbers comparing the decline of students choosing to pursue that English undergraduate degree. I’d be curious what date range this decline is referencing (probably should google it), but it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow, or possibly both, at seeing that number halved:

“Some indication of what it must be like is indicated by the steep decline of American undergraduates who choose to concentrate in English. English majors once comprised 7.6% of undergraduates, but today the number has been nearly halved, down to 3.9%. Part of this decline is doubtless owing to the worry inspired in the young by a fragile economy. (The greatest rise is in business and economics majors.)”

Do I think that this means the English department in academia is in trouble? Yes, but not necessarily from the same conclusions that Epstein draws possible sources of decline. But I get the sense that he is of the mindset that would find ‘interdisciplinary’ to be a dirty word. And if anything, that interdisciplinary approach, to me at least, seems to be one of the keys to reversing those trends of decline. Many if not most other fields are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary in their approaches and good work is coming as a result of it. Why should English be any different?

Interesting questions raised, to be sure. The answers are certainly going to be open-ended for the time being, but these questions and the ensuing debates can be productive assuming productive outcomes result from those debates. By the way — at the end of the article, a paean of sorts for the undergraduate English major:

“Undergraduates who decided to concentrate their education on literature were always a slightly odd, happily nonconformist group. No learning was less vocational; to announce a major in English was to proclaim that one wasn’t being educated with the expectation of a financial payoff. One was an English major because one was intoxicated by literature—its beauty, its force, above all its high truth quotient.”

What is the funniest novel? And where do we begin with a question like that?

Humor, on the one hand, and taste in literature on the other hand, are two such highly subjective categories, that the possible range of answers is wide and contentious. Which, after all, makes it such an interesting question. We like thinking about these sorts of questions, because there’s no real answer: it’s the process of seeking out possible answers and debating amongst alternatives that’s so satisfying.

To start, The New York Times (“What’s the Funniest Novel Ever?“) poses the leadoff question for us:

“… which raises the question: what’s the funniest novel ever? There’s a difference, of course, between the greatest comic novel (“Don Quixote”? “Tristram Shandy”? “Ulysses”?) and the novel you find the funniest.”

Their short but sweet list looks like this — and there are some good suggestions to be found in the user comments section of the article:

“Here are some nominees from editors at the Book Review: “Lucky Jim” (which got the most votes), David Lodge’s “Small World,” “The Code of the Woosters,” “Leave It to Psmith,” “Bech: A Book,” “Sabbath’s Theater,” Carl Hiaasen’s novels, Jim Harrison’s early novels (“Warlock,” “A Good Day to Die”), Richard Russo’s “Straight Man,” Michael Chabon’s “Wonder Boys,” “Catch-22″ and “Candy.” Waugh, Gogol and John Mortimer received votes, too, and one colleague who is usually not given to laughing out loud while reading said, “‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ and ‘The Anatomy Lesson’ both made my stomach hurt.”

Then there is The Guardian’s grand list of comedic novels (listed alphabetically, by author) which comes in four parts. I think The Guardian has the best — and by ‘best’ I do mean balancing both literary tastes with actual humor — and perhaps most extensive list of humor/comedic novels you’re likely to find; I’d make it highly recommended for those that are interested in this sort of thing (although if there are better lists out there, I would love to know them):

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three 
• Part Four

Update: and here is Esquire’s “The Funniest Books Ever, part three.” Good job, Esquire. A pretty solid list all in all. Personally, I found Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End one of the funniest novels I’ve read recently.

—————————————

While we’re at it, let’s also mention mention NPR’s piece, “The Funniest, and Scariest, Book Ever Written” about Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. Metafiction, bicycles, black boxes. What a funny, strange, curious book that was.

I have a hard time giving away or getting rid of books that I’ve read. I’m not even sure I can remember the last book I’ve read that I don’t still own. (My solution is usually to buy more bookshelves).

Maybe that’s why this article from The New York Times (“What We Do To Books“), which explores what happens to the physical book as it’s being handled and read, was so interesting to me –

“There has always been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us. Far less attention has been paid to the effect that we (the readers) have on them (the books).” 

Maybe I’m weird (‘maybe,’ he says), but I do find something inherently rewarding about seeing signs of my using a book. Books are meant to be used and worked with, which is likely why writing in books is such a topic of interest to me.

“On the contrary, I like the way it gradually and subtly shows signs of wear and tear, of having been lived in (by me), like a pair of favorite jeans … George Steiner wrote somewhere that an intellectual is someone who can’t read a book without a pencil in his or her hand. My version of this compulsion is that I can’t seem to read without picking my nose — hence the blood stains.”

Yikes. Too much information. But, the Steiner quote does resonate with me. The notes I write in my books are traces of memory for what I’d read, my way of interacting with the text in some way that hopefully triggers memory cues a year or ten years from now.

I still have mixed feelings about the experience of reading ebooks when it comes to note-taking. It’s just not the same. Kindle does a pretty good job when it comes to highlighting and saving passages; most of the other ebook applications still need work in this regard.

In terms of physical book note-taking, Geoff Dyer shares a similar sentiment:

“The creases, the annotations and the appropriate blood stains all imprint it with the fact of my having read it. The difference, of course, is that they are there for keeps whereas my understanding of the book’s contents began fading almost as soon as they were being (temporarily) installed in my head. In the short term this is quite normal. The long term is described by John Updike in his memoir, “Self-Consciousness” (Sept. 16, 1991, Paris): “I own many books full of my annotations, proving that once I read them, though I have no memory of it.” 

Cool news just before the start of the weekend: The New York Times “‘Infinite Jest’ Scene, Reborn as a Rock Video.” Here’s the setup –

“The video, which made its online debut on Monday, depicts the playing of Eschaton, a game invented by Wallace that he describes about 325 pages into “Infinite Jest.”

Adolescents from a New England tennis academy are seen ritualistically serving balls on a court onto which a map of the world has been superimposed. The balls, which represent five-megaton nuclear warheads, are aimed at objects labeled as military targets — power plants, missile installations — while a lone child oversees the game from a nearby computer terminal.

All in all, it ain’t exactly Battleship. Wallace himself wrote that the athletic skills required by Eschaton separated it “from rotisserie-league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs around kitchen tables.”

Yep, that covers it pretty well.

Also of note was this anecdote from the director of the music video, a David Foster Wallace fan, about DFW’s influence (or anxiety of influence) from Don DeLillo:

“During the visit, Mr. Schur said Wallace talked about his fear that he had unintentionally cribbed the Eschaton section from the Don DeLillo novel “End Zone,” which also uses sports and games as metaphors for war. Though Mr. DeLillo was ultimately unconcerned, Mr. Schur said Wallace “told me that for a week or so he had this really sinking feeling that his whole career was over.”

And don’t miss the end of that article — there’s an enticing bit of semi-news dropped. Infinite Jest … the movie? On the one hand, it would be all too fitting.  But, perhaps I’m betraying my bookish worries — would translating a book like Infinite Jest into movie form ruin it?

“He said he did not worry about seeking permission from Wallace’s business representatives because he had recently acquired the film rights to “Infinite Jest.”

(Mr. Schur added that he had no immediate plans to film an “Infinite Jest” feature. “I like my current job a lot,” he said.)

Hmm.

NPR (“First Watch: The Decemberists, ‘Calamity Song‘”) has a few more insights from Michael Schur, of Parks & Recreation fame, as well as Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy.

And check out the video, below:

Social reading is a topic worth thinking more about; primarily because we all engage in it, to varying degrees, every day. I discovered an excellent and thoughtful treatment of this topic over at BookSquare. BookSquare ruminates on a wide-ranging number of ideas and questions related to social reading which are worth further consideration (check out the post at: “Reading in the Digital Age, or, Reading How We’ve Always Read“).

In a very simple yet obvious way, we understand that “Social reading is normal reading.” In the broadest sense, stories and recorded information are acts of communication, and thus inherently social in nature. This remained so through the transition from an essentially oral to written word culture; reading was conceived as an inherently social act — “Some stories became institutionalized — myths, biblical stories, parables. Others, well, they never really gained market share.”

It wasn’t until the advent of the modern day mass market paperback* that reading truly became a solitary reading experience in the way that we commonly think of the act of reading as a transaction which occurs between a reader and the words on a printed page.

That interaction between reader and words takes on many forms. In particular, marginalia and annotations are parts of the reading experience which appear to be becoming increasingly more social:

“But we do not only engage in marginalia. We write reviews about the book. We write extended analyses about the book. Speeches are given about the words written by an author. Movies are made. Plays presented in the park. As people interact with the text, many transform the text.

For many of us, transforming the book is as important as reading the book.

As we have developed online tools, we’ve moved our natural tendency to comment and extend text online.”

The history of ‘user generated content’ that comes from the experience of reading a book is vast and diverse. And, perhaps this is simply a new way of phrasing an existing idea, but could ‘social reading’ actually be a part of ‘social publishing’? The relation between the two is still being defined:

“Social publishing requires a deep interest and study of what happens to a text after it is disseminated — how readers interact with it, how they share it, how they copy it, how they talk about it — and it requires action arising from that deep study.”

One of the virtues of reading in the Digital Age, in theory, should be the seamlessness with which we can move our information around to wherever we are. But in practice, this doesn’t always seem to be the case. And perhaps I’m an exception, but I do have mixed experiences when reading my ebooks on Kindle, and then using iBooks, and then Barnes & Noble, and then sometimes even Google eBooks. While ebooks are becoming slightly less tied to devices (good), the ebook content itself, along with notes and highlighting and such forth, more often than not, is still stuck in something of a silo approach (not good). From a business perspective that division of content may make sense, but not so much from the reader’s perspective. This almost forces one to be wedded to one ebook-type of platform, be it Kindle, or Barnes & Noble, and etc, when I have to believe that the company-agnostic approach is a book reader’s default approach: “It turns out people don’t need more destinations; they need destinations that work with how they use the internets. All of them.”

Could there be a solution that integrates all of these separate islands of bookish content in a more seamless fashion?

“This means allowing readers to engage in these activities where they live (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, reading applications [in particular]), while feeding the conversation into a more centralized location. This means allowing the social part of reading to reside with the work, which means consolidating editions/versions into a single item.“

Lots of interesting food for further thought. I’d recommend reading the full post. Thanks, BookSquare!

———————————————————–

A couple more items worth thinking about –

“Digital Reading: Will “Social” Keep the Experience Value High?” shares this excellent way of thinking of social reading, as a form of ‘distributed memory’ during the experience of reading:

“the reading experience again, but as a souvenir of the book itself. During the act of reading, he says, “the books themselves are subliming, they’re going up into the air. They’re achieving what Walter Pater called the condition of music. But what will remain of them are our experiences; the absolutely central experience of reading.” Bridle says that sharing that experience is a form of distributed memory that could replace the paper book.”

In a related article, The New York Times “Social Books Hopes to Make E-Reading Communal” had some interesting news about a book app that was on the works called Social Books:

“It works like most e-reading software in that users download titles to their tablet or phone. The main difference here, however, is that users are able to leave public notes on a particular book, chapter or passage, and comment on the notes left by others. They can also share their digital bookshelves with friends on Facebook and Twitter.”

What drew my attention to this article was the following quote: “But if all they’re doing is replicating the experience of reading a physical book, they aren’t changing the experience of reading print.”

Here’s a link to the Social Classics app at the iTunes Store. It isn’t that this is a bad approach to take. Unfortunately for them, it seems like some of the bigger players in ebook apps have beaten them to the punch, though. Social network sharing seems to part of the new orthodoxy for ebook apps, at least from all of the ones I’ve encountered. But to tie this back to BookSquare’s thoughts on a unified approach to ebook content, I think there certainly is an opportunity for someone to create a solution for making all of the ‘user generated content’ of ebook reading more portable.

* As you might or might not know, the history of the mass market paperback is tied closely to the history of Penguin Books. You can visit this interesting entry on The History of Penguin Books for a brief history lesson.

The evolution of the technology of the book changes the way that we read. But it’s useful for us now to consider what the nature of those changes are, exactly.

For one thing, what of the belief that reading is becoming more social? From the Institute for the Future of the Book, is a fascinating discussion “A Taxonomy of Social Reading” (use the gray menu bar at the top to browse from page to page … took me a few seconds to notice it at first) about social reading; particularly the fact that ‘social reading’ seems to mean many different things. Kindle readers enable the sharing of user favorite passages (anonymously); Kobo’s Reading Life app has emphasized a more nuanced social reading approach; even book recommendation engines are based upon a certain social reading premise.

In general though, we can assume that a range of behaviors comprise the range of what we understand to be social reading. “A Taxonomy of Social Reading” divides these into four broad categories:

• Category 1 – Discussing a book in person
• Category 2 – Discussing a book online
• Category 3 – discussing a book in a classroom, book group
• Category 4 – discussing a book in the margins

What this means, in other words: there are quite a few new and interesting readers to communicate with other readers, and to connect with larger communities of other readers. Will we see a rise or decline in some types of social reading? “As with a Wikipedia article, the truth isn’t on the surface as much as in the interstices where people collectively explore the fuzzy spaces between assumptions and arbitrarily drawn boundaries”

* Speaking of which, now there are dating websites based upon book tastes ..? Weird. (Alikewise.com was one I noticed. I’m sure there likely others). Well, Italo Calvino** certainly thought that Readers and Other Readers could be brought together from reading books, right?

** If on a winter’s night a traveler is brilliant good fun. Seriously, read it.

To follow up with our earlier thoughts (The Guardian “Is this the end for books?”), for some historical perspective, let’s take a look at this similarly-titled piece from The New York Times, c. 1992: “The End of Books.”

I do love using the Way Back Machine that is the Internet to see how much things change … and how much they don’t. There’s something familiar about this early line from the article:

“[Y]ou will often hear it said that the print medium is a doomed and outdated technology, a mere curiosity of bygone days destined soon to be consigned forever to those dusty unattended museums we now call libraries. Indeed, the very proliferation of books and other print-based media, so prevalent in this forest-harvesting, paper-wasting age, is held to be a sign of its feverish moribundity, the last futile gasp of a once vital form before it finally passes away forever, dead as God.”

Sure sounds like the opening of something we’d read in this week’s New York Times, doesn’t it? The article makes reference to something called a floppy disk, as well as some pleasing references to Borges, Roland Barthes, and HyperCard – while the main focus on this particular article is hypertext fiction*. While the notion of nonlinear narratives and the initial excitement that hypertext fiction ushered in (“true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext“, notes the article), its genealogy can certainly be traced to the likes of Laurence Stern and Italo Calvino (to name only a couple of favorites).

If you’re like me — although for your sake I kind of hope you’re not — you might be fascinated by the alternative perspective to traditional notions of narrative that the article discusses in the context of hypertext. To be fair, a lot of the questions raised within the article are purely academic, but keep in mind that the idea of hypertext in the 1990s was something which quite a few people saw as The Next Big Thing:

“You will often hear them proclaim, quite seriously, that there have been three great events in the history of literacy: the invention of writing, the invention of movable type and the invention of hypertext.” 

All that is well and good, you might say. So what exactly is hypertext? Here is a sample of that postmodernishly fuzzy description:

“… it is still so radically new it is hard to be certain just what it is. No fixed center, for starters — and no edges either, no ends or boundaries. The traditional narrative time line vanishes into a geographical landscape or exitless maze, with beginnings, middles and ends being no longer part of the immediate display. Instead: branching options, menus, link markers and mapped networks. There are no hierarchies in these topless (and bottomless) networks, as paragraphs, chapters and other conventional text divisions are replaced by evenly empowered and equally ephemeral window-sized blocks of text and graphics — soon to be supplemented with sound, animation and film.”

While it’s quite easy (and sometimes fun) to dismiss outmoded types of thinking, there is something inherently valuable in learning to think about the ways earlier thinking echoes the questions we deal with in the here and now. The Text was being re-thought and re-imagined in light of a very early beginning transition from print to digital. Now, almost twenty years later, some of the same questions have taken a more definite shape, but that doesn’t mean the answers are necessarily more concrete. The questions of reading (or as they wonderfully put it: “Navigational procedures: how do you move around in infinity without getting lost?“) is still very much an open-ended and relevant question — see for example the recent interesting book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.

* Good question: do people still know what hypertext fiction?

The New York Times (“Bells and Whistles for a Few E-Books“) takes note of a new ebook startup company, with a different approach to ebooks from what we’ve seen so far: books with their own soundtracks? Booktrack has partnered with Harper Collins to release a initial set of ebooks coupled with their own soundtracks and sound effects, to make the ebook reading experience more ‘cinematic’ –

“Reading the Booktrack edition of “The Power of Six” on an iPad is much like reading the standard e-book edition, with the addition of a small indicator scrolling down the page, line by line. (The user sets the reading speed.)

Much of the music — about nine hours’ worth for the typical novel — is instrumental or ambient noise. But during livelier passages, a reader may hear the patter of footsteps, a booming gong, a crackling fire or the tick of a grandfather clock.”

Do books need their own soundtracks? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. The Next Big Thing with ebooks is certainly a guessing game, so experimentation generally speaking is a good thing. Sounds a little fringy to me, but I’m not one to fault creative new approaches.

You can take a closer look at the first Booktrack ebook at this link on iTunes.

More such books seem to be in the near future, including some Salman Rushdie short stories:

“Its first book featuring a soundtrack is “The Power of Six,” a young-adult novel published by HarperCollins, soon to be followed by “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Jane Eyre,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Three Musketeers.”

In September and October, Booktrack will release editions of the short stories “In the South,” by Salman Rushdie, and “Solace,” by Jay McInerney.”

And you can also check out a YouTube video of BookTrack in action:

The Internet Archive’s printed books preservation project* prompts the The Guardian (“Is this the end for books?“) to survey some questions about books and the nature of reading. In particular, it’s not just how we read, but what we read that is in question –

“In some ways, though, the question of whether we do our reading off paper or plastic is the least interesting one. More interesting is what we’re reading, and the manner in which we do so. A large number of literate westerners spend most of their waking hours at computers, and those computers are connected to the web. The characteristic activity on such a computer has been given the pleasing name “wilfing”, adapted from the acronym WWILF, or “What was I looking for?” You work a bit. You check if it’s your move in Facebook Scrabble. You get an email. You answer it. You get a text. You answer it. Since your phone’s in your hand, you play Angry Birds for five minutes. You work a bit. You go online to check something, get distracted by a link, forget what you were looking for, stumble on a picture of a duck that looks like Hitler, share it on Twitter, rinse and repeat.”

The article rightfully invokes TS Eliot’s “distracted from distraction by distraction” – it’s hard to ignore the fact that we are now fully part of a reading culture characterized by divided attention: “You could call wilfing multitasking, or parallelistic cognitive layering – or you could call it cocking around on the web.” So, should we have cause for bemoaning this loss of immersive reading in favor of the always-also-doing-something-else kind of reading we all know too well? Or have we, collectively speaking, simply adjusted or evolved our reading habits to a new means of information availability? Steven Johnson and Nicolas Carr offer competing theories:

“There are two main schools of thought. One is that modern culture is making us cleverer. In Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson observes that IQ scores in the west are rising, and argues that pop culture – from soaps to video games to the web – is responsible. In the other corner is Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. He thinks the web is making us more stupid. We surf the shallows in a state of permanent distraction, and concentrate on no single thing for long enough to engage properly with it. Since much of our mental energy is spent processing the medium, little is left for the message. Carr, then, is a descendent of Plato, who mistrusted writing because he thought people would stop bothering to know anything if it was all there in books.”

The truth, as with so many things, likely lies somewhere in between. Sure, there are many more things available to compete for our attention; and so many of those things seem to offer such easy short-term gratification in comparison to other things like, you know, reading, or thinking (I personally hate having my email or iPhone-type device near me when I’m really reading a book).

The Guardian article raises an interesting suggestion which is well worth thinking about — if our attention spans are shortening, should that ultimately mean an increased demand for short stories and a waning of the longer novel (i.e., Wolf Hall, The Pale King)? That doesn’t seem to be the case. Although, maybe it’s too soon to tell for sure: “These books may resemble 19th-century novels in size, but the pace of even the most traditional of them is faster. And in many – especially in Infinite Jest, a novel about addiction, entertainment, radioactive rodents and tennis – you can see a conscious attempt to engage with the phenomenon of information overload.” 

Two other interesting points I feel compelled to touch upon briefly:

“Most commercial writing is shaped by the market, and the market is shaped by the formats that have become standard; and those have been shaped by issues of portability, how wide you can make the spine without it breaking, the sizes of printing presses, and so forth.”