We hear it all the time: The media landscape is changing, and those who don’t adapt will fall behind, or die. Mostly, it’s an argument that is used to slap the newspaper industry upside the head for the sin of being a relatively slow, print-based medium that is forced to take the time to actually gets its facts in order (most of the time, at least) before running with a story.
Less discussed, at least among journalists and media pundits, is the effect on the publishing industry that the proposed digitization of books into what’s been called a “universal library” on the Web might have.
Sean Wilsey has an interesting essay in this week’s Time magazine about the subject and what — of all people — the novelist John Updike thinks about it. Turns out, Updike thinks the idea of the digitization of books is “grisly,” and as Wilsey says of a recent talk he heard Updike give, “one that would lead to readers treating books like music, downloading and cutting them into playlist-like ‘snippets.'”
But that hardly makes sense, as Wilsey points out: “As I listened it occurred to me that only someone who’s never downloaded music, or someone who doesn’t read, could imagine a direct correlation between the tracks of a recording and the paragraphs of a book. Comparing word snippets to playlists is cynical propaganda, or at best an error in logic that could only be made by a person who doesn’t love and live with them both …”
What’s more, we’re not sure what would be so wrong with readers cutting a bit of a book out so they can reread it later. Isn’t that what we do when we underline a passage and mark the page? It’s doubtful that someone — other than someone trying to make a point by being cute — would even bother cut and paste different books together, anyway. And if they did, so what? It doesn’t diminish the original work; if anything, it represents readers engaging even more with the book, not less.
Rather, what it seems Updike is afraid of, frankly, is change. While the act of holding the hard copy of a book has its own aesthetic merit, the fact is we’re coming to a point where we have other options. Much like the newspaper industry of a few years ago, when management bristled at the thought of publishing original work online, stalwarts in the book industry are going to have to adapt to the new reality.
The digitization of books is actually a great idea. How many times have reporters and writers been stymied in trying to find a reference in a book that isn’t handy, or which they hazily recall? Wouldn’t having an electronic “universal library” not only help them make the piece stronger, while helping publicize the book in question? Doesn’t making the text of books available online and more accessible to the world mean that authors, and their work, get to speak to more people?
Further undercutting Updike’s fear of people cutting up literature, as Wilsey says, is that “readers don’t want to become editors. What they want, what I want, is for what I’m reading to have already undergone the sort of editing that allows reading to be an intimate, thoroughly immersive, deeply pleasurable activity.”
And if the growth Internet has taught us anything, it’s that the pleasure of reading — not the format the words are in — is what readers are looking for.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.