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Anti-E rant of the day: ‘Ebooks will make authors soulless, just like their product’
September 18, 2009 | 10:45 am
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By David Rothman
That’s the headline over a Telegraph article by Andrew Keen. Read and, if you’d like, rant back in our comments area.
As a debut novelist published in E and P, I’m wondering if my soul is intact. Did the trade paperback edition save it? Or must I tell Twilight Times Books to kill off the e-book edition?
Keen’s actual words: “The traditional book is the most physical of things, a text to be bent and fingered and written on and imprinted with human signatures. Something to be physically loved. The ebook revolution changes all that. In the new digital age, 
readers and writers and publishers will increasingly come to reflect their soulless product.”
Nothing against P: I’m rereading on paper a wonderful Luddite book by Philip Roth, Exit Ghost, whose hero doesn’t own a television, much less a laptop or e-reader. I actually agree with warnings that Twitter and the like can get in the way of enjoyment of linear text. But loss of soul by readers or writers? Is it possible that individuals so threatened never had much of one to begin with?
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Comments:
His argue for e-books being ‘soulless’ because they lack physicality is silly. Media containers are not the media themselves. Is a film the DVD it comes on? Is music the CD? Of course not. Neither is a PDF, mobi, or a print copy a book.
Essentially, he’s saying that the media container, the paper book, is what has the soul, which is silly. It’s just more reactionary fear from a techno-hater.
Pro-E rant of the day: “Anti-E statements like this will make readers clueless, just like their writers”
The same antiquated argument was made about music when the radio came along. “Radio will ruin music because music is supposed to be listened to live, in concert” they argued.
It seems like each time a new technology comes along, their are always people who will fight it, saying the new technology will ruin everything. Andrew Keen is just re-hashing this old argument using ebooks as the scapegoat for ruining literature.
I think ebooks and pbooks both have their pros and cons. It’s a matter of preference, among other things. We’ve had audio books for a long time, and has it cost any authors their souls? Can’t page through them. I don’t like audio books because I just can’t get into them like I can something I’m reading, but that doesn’t make them bad. It makes them not for me. I think this guy is just very attached to paper books, and so he should read paper books.
I think it is just the other way around. With the current primitive ebook formats, all there is and all that counts is the bare text. No fancy embossed cover, no gold foil title, expensive cover or fancy artwork. Just text… which puts all the emphasis on the writing and makes good authors shine.
Does he also eschew movies and only attends live theatrical performances??
… so library books i’ve read and returned, and that only exist in my mind are soulless?
come on. so *reading* and *having physical, printed books* no longer have to be galvanized. both are excellent. now we can talk seriously about which is more important. (obviously i have formed an opinion about this.)
mr. keen just finds change upsetting, i think. “eee. the sky is falling…” or he’s just an idiot. some people are, i hear.
Brad is right. Woe be unto human kind if we learn something new and use it. Woe be to man if knowledge is limited to the printed page. Woe be to souless writers like the one above…I am wondering just when he lost his soul
I agree with all the above but find it inconclusive. Some of the distinctive attributes of paper and screen come into play as library aggregates. Here the distinctive self-authentication attributes of paper complement the self-indexing attributes of screen delivery. The interdependence of these attributes is only now getting defined, especially in the Google settlement and in academic debate where the paper and screen copies of the same title are just not equivalent.
That said, other attributes of print still matter. These include advantages of legibility where legibility is immediacy of meaning, haptic prompt navigation and persistence. I can suggest these attributes with examples.
Immediacy of meaning: I use a large book /Empires of the Atlantic World/ in both print and ebook. I look up “Boston” on Kindle and get 248 instances of the word. I look up “Boston” in the print index and get 4 contexts for the word such as port economy, slave population or massacre. E is good at syntax, paper good at semantics.
Navigation: there is a whole range of haptic prompts from paper book manipulations. For example try comparing a single concept as presented in three or four different books….on a Kindle. Or try to translate the Boston search from print pagination to Kindle location. Or imagine doubling page navigations in E when paper presents two for one. A lot of the haptic prompts in paper are invisible like the fingers acting as cursors.
Persistence: for reliable transmission across time papyrus and carbon ink is a more advanced technology than computer media. Gnostic Gospels were found and they were instantly readable 16 centuries after they were put in a jar. Don’t try this with computer media or try to calculate long-term costs for digital persistence over even decades.
“E is good at syntax, paper good at semantics.”
Um. Mr. Frost? If something befell the work-product of the human indexer when the e-version was being created, I think I’d blame the publisher, rather than the technology. And a special, double-ding against the publisher for not hyperlinking index terms to the passages referenced. No ‘translation to location’ should be necessary. And one would have the added perq that when one was old & shrivelly, one would be able to enlarge the font and still read the same text, and one’s notes. Hey. I know *I’m* planning ahead.
Human indexing is great. (Unless it happens to be awful. But that’s a separate topic.) But the human eye may miss occurrences of a term, whereas an electronic search won’t — as long as there are no typos/misprints. I believe that human and machine indexes are complementary systems.
Re. Persistence: Yep. No argument here. Except that if we idiot-humans can work out our interests and agendas, and standardize our stuff and get serious about creating some miraculous data-storage system for the entire body of the world’s knowledge, *and* we back it up thoroughly, it will take up a lot less space than print, and its susceptibility to destruction by *fire* will decrease with every backup copy stored in a different location. No, it won’t last forever. Neither will we.
Books and paper are a very mature technology. We’ve been used to handling them as part of our daily lives for centuries.
Ebooks and the technologies we use to display them are in their infancy. While many of us have been using this digital tech daily for a couple of decades a vast majority of the world population still does not have much exposure to, or need for, the display and propagation of digital “stuff” – books in particular.
Gary mentions the differences between searching for “Boston” on his Kindle vis a vis the index of the printed version. One tends to overwhelm with its literal interpretation of the search (oddly I only get 86 hits for “Boston” rather than Gary’s 248 hits) whereas the print version only provides 4. The printed versions index makes some assumptions that the reader is likely looking for info on Boston as it relates to a few “likely” topic areas – port economy, slave population, massacre. That’s great if that really does match what you were looking for. Not so useful though if you were looking for something different than the editorial choices the printed book gives you.
In the digital version of the book he mentions you can easily refine your search so that rather than just looking for “Boston” you could look for “Boston massacre”. Doing that search on my Kindle version of the book shows 5 hits for “Boston Massacre” and returns the list of choices with the search terms highlighted and the sentence or two around the search terms so one can read the search result in context. To me, this is much more useful. The printed index may have an index listing for “Boston Massacre” but how many pages does the printed version refer you to and how quickly can you flip to and fro to gather the context of those index “hits”?
While the current Kindle does not offer very advanced search syntax this will change as the technology continues to mature. Being able to use Boolean, wildcards, WITHIN and other more advanced syntax elements will come in the not too distant future.
Finding a page location from the print version in the Kindle version is easy – multiple keywords (a sentence fragment) will take you right there. In the printed book form page numbers vary from edition to edition or format. Do scrolls have “page” numbers? How easy is it to go from “page” to “page” in a scroll? Is that part of the reason scrolls are no longer widely used (an obsolete book technology as it were)?
Navigation on current digital devices can be cumbersome. However, is that due to the current level of the technology – screen sizes, screen resolutions, low “horsepower” CPU’s, crappy operating system, etc? Or, is it just likely that the tech will never match the ability of a paper book?
I have no idea what the future holds but I think it is safe to believe that the technology will one day be everything we want it to be.
It is very cool that we still have and can read many books from past millenia. But how much knowledge has been lost due to the fragility of papyrus and paper? How many ancient libraries were burned to the ground? How many cultures have had their entire written existence turned to ash?
The long term preservation of digital stuff does pose a challenge. But separate the content from the media on which copies of it may be stored. The media will change as we already know from our short experience with digital stuff. As we move away from always having to get/distribute digital stuff via various types of hardware (floppies, CD’s, thumb drives, etc.) and rely on our stuff being held in multiple data depots in multiple locations and delivered to use via the net (wired or wirelessly)the media problem disappears.
Have we not already learned that the use of open formats is necessary to help our digital culture extend it’s lifetime. As our experience and use of digital stuff matures the longevity of the digital stuff itself will not likely pose a problem for items contained in universal formats (long live ASCII).
Those Gnostic Gospels survived sealed in those clay jars for many centuries and left undisturbed may have lasted a few more. However,once those jars were opened and the contents exposed to our current atmosphere and its pollution they would have soon become nothing more than dust if not for the great expenditure of money and manpower and technology to try and ensure their ongoing survival. In what form are those Gospels likely to be viewed a thousand years from now? Digital probably.
An obstacle to wide acceptance and successful marketing of dedicated reading devices is not what you would guess. It is the self-imposed, narrow mimicry of the print book. With endless native uses for a connected, hand-held delivery device why gravitate to the most installed, refined and cloistered base application first?
Here are examples of other uses that immediately pop into mind: 1 industrial spying and espionage, 2 musical performance, 3 placed base learning and tourist guide, 4 congregational recitation and hymn, 5 dedicated literary magazine, 6 book art medium, 7 writers’ references, compositors’ dictionary, 8 podium prompt, teleprompter, 9 coursework text anthology, 10 fashion accessory, talisman, 11 device geek blog topic, 12 retail fulfillment device.
Print, in its long history, has intruded many of these imaginary, potential and fantastic uses for electronic reading devices, but not effectively or conclusively. But the bar is set high for linear text and overt book content.
Name one ebook not available in print format…. Name one print book not available in e format….. One is Transformed Illusions, Digital Technologies and the Forms of Print; Deegan and Sutherland, 2009 an exposition that no ebook advocate will ever encounter which defines the interdependence of print and screen.
And one more weird remark before we drop off the endless scroll here. All book transmission requires physical media. Spinning drives and server farms are not different from papyrus codices and they are a lot more expensive to power over time. Even energy costing their storage life is not enough, we must also cost their delivery services, also sustained over time. I remember seeing Nicholas Carr on this carbon footprint costing topic. And, oh yes, the paper industry plants twice as many trees as it consumes.
Content, not physical form, is what matters. Duh.
Do they, now? And are those mature trees like the ones they “harvest,” or saplings that will take decades-to-centuries to equal the trees they replace?
And do they also clean the rivers they pollute with chemical runoff? Do they clean the air filled with the diesel fumes of their delivery trucks? Or the soot generated by the coal-fired plants that power them? Do they restore twice as much land as their storage warehouses and bookstores sit on?
Defending the traditional printing industry based on environmental grounds is already proven to be a losing battle, waged by traditionalists who are used to hiding the dirt under the rug. Digital media is more versatile in every way, while having a smaller carbon footprint.
Basing any discussion about e-books on dedicated devices is missing the point. E-books are distilled writing: They strip away the physical trappings, leaving a more pure product, the soul of the work itself. They can be read on whatever device works for you, they are not held back by paper or ink or mass… that is their greatest power.