Literature has always relied on technology. We
wouldn’t have the Dead Sea Scrolls had the ancients failed to invent
papyrus, just as we wouldn’t have “The Da Vinci Code” if Gutenberg
hadn’t come out with movable type.
Technology has also abetted literature by enabling
the wealth and leisure that fueled the rise of the popular press — and
allowed for such luxuries as a class of professional writers and a
large campus establishment devoted to the literary arts.
It is important to bear in mind that technology is
not the sworn enemy of literature as Apple prepares (according to
frantic rumor) to unveil its much-anticipated new tablet computer on
A well-designed Apple tablet, embedded in the right
business model, has the potential to blow up the book business as we
know it, ultimately upending the whole rickety edifice of publishers,
booksellers and agents, much as the digital revolution (and Apple) have
done to the music business.
It’s been clear for a while, of course, that the
future of text is digital. And an Apple tablet wouldn’t be the first of
its kind. Amazon’s Kindle is almost synonymous with dedicated
electronic readers, and others have appeared recently as well.
But these devices are relatively primitive. By
comparison, the iPhone and its iPod Touch sibling are already
remarkably good reading machines while doing so much more as well.
Equipped with a 10-inch screen and sold for the right price, the
formidable tablet will force competitors to ramp up their game.
These new tablets will give ink on paper a powerful
nudge into history’s wastebasket, helping to remake not just books but
newspapers, magazines and other material we’ve traditionally consumed
in print.
The result will be a seismic change in the literary
culture. Ubiquitous tablets will make books cheaper and more readily
available, even as physical bookstores follow Tower Records into
oblivion. Lending libraries will have to figure out a new mission; the
time is not far off when the typical 10-year-old will have the
equivalent of the
Tablets will also change the nature of books. The
reliably fixed quality of ink on paper is being replaced by the protean
nature of bytes, introducing an element of impermanence into the
written record of civilization, as some scholars have already
complained.
Shorter is always better on screen, and so expect
shorter books. Many nonfiction works are too long anyway — think of all
those cinder-block-sized biographies — in part because right now
there’s no mechanism for bringing to market anything between a magazine
article (perhaps 5,000 words) and a short book (perhaps 70,000).
Tablets will allow the length of works to be tailored more closely to
the need.
More important, an Apple tablet will offer not just
text but also sound, images and video — which will all be commonplace
in books someday, in a balance we can’t yet foresee. This may undermine
the primacy of text, but the text in most books today is far from
sacred, and a little multimedia can do a world of good in most genres —
in how-to books, for example. Think back to the illuminated manuscripts
of the Middle Ages; even when text was sacred, people liked a little
multimedia on the side.
These changes may actually help revive the
mysterious and forever expiring beast known as literature. Perhaps your
tablet will let you read poetry — or hear the poet reading it. The
novel, that workhorse of middle-class, middlebrow literary taste, will
evolve to suit the new form, just as in the 19th century its structure
and length evolved to accommodate serialization and various pricing and
packaging schemes. The cellphone novels of
On the other hand, it’s not clear how anyone will
get paid for writing, or what will take the place of the existing
commercial system, which produces ample dreck but a lot of great stuff
as well, often written and edited by experienced professionals with
families to support and bills to pay. It may get our egalitarian juices
flowing to think that the digital revolution will open up this world,
but a literary culture in which everyone is a writer and no one is an
editor is likely to leave all of us poorer.
Certainly, authors and publishers should not count
on any kind of legal or technological copy protection to assure that
their works aren’t reproduced without royalties. The music business has
already shown us the futility of “digital-rights management.” Yet it
may also show the way to other pricing models. Are music subscription
services — Rhapsody, for example — really so different from the
subscription libraries that supported novel writing in 19th century
A similar return to the past may be necessary to
preserve the system of paying advances to writers. In the 18th century,
after all, books were sometimes financed by selling investors shares in
future profits (one imagines an online marketplace for just such a
system today) or by selling advance subscriptions to book buyers.
Foundations, universities and rich folks may also emerge as a greater
source of patronage.
In the digital future, “publishing” may mostly mean
self-publishing. Yet it’s also likely that gatekeepers will spring up —
people or firms whose taste and imprimatur have value in the
marketplace. They may even function the way old-time publishers like
Scribner’s once did, running the digital equivalent of magazines,
publishing houses and retail stores under a single brand.
“The history of literature,”
as royal courts, patronage, copyright laws, middle-class leisure,
nationalism, democratic educational systems, steam-driven rotary
presses, free markets and Linotype machines.”
Sparks always fly when technology and literature get
together. We can expect that this time, as usual, they will burn down
the old and light up the new.
—
(c) 2010,
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Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
