|
events calendar bars & clubs restaurants specials best of chicago food and drink film and video music and clubs stage sports words art features |
Click for words events TEXT WARS Talking to the foot soldiers on the e-text frontline
Rock 'n' roll is dead. Video killed the radio star.
Add to this list of hastily issued prophesies the following: Soon,
books will become obsolete, rendered amusing anachronisms by the
advance of electronica. E-books will seize the territory currently
occupied by fusty old paper books, and free text from its
tightened—academic and literary—constraints. But is the
book dead? No. Will it ever die? Not likely... though I have my
detractors. Perhaps what is more important to contemplate than
widespread "bibliocide" are the questions that define this argument. Is
e-text really text? Will the reading experience change? Is there any
money in it? Our attention is so concentrated on the e-books versus
printed books battle, we ignore the more interesting skirmishes taking
place. A decade ago, we heard the initial rumblings of the
e-book revolution. Publishers predicted a billion-dollar industry while
critics claimed the book-burning firemen of "Fahrenheit 451" were at
hand. All speculation, since this glorious future was still ten years
away. Now, technology has captured vision, and e-books again inspire
debate. In his 1994 book, "The Gutenberg Elegies,"
essayist Sven Birkerts defended paper books in a tone reserved for
saint's relics. The original doomsayer feared the one true path of
author-directed, left-to-right reading would become overgrown,
abandoned by readers for the many roads of hypertext. An
August 9 Chicago Tribune story, "E-books Solving a Problem Consumers
Don't Have," stodgily dismissed e-text. Revealing publishers' growing
concerns that what happened to music (hello Napster) would happen to
them, and the kvetchings of writers like Richard
DeGrandpre—whose e-book "Digitopia," ironically about technology's
depersonalizing effects, bombed in the format—the future of e-books was
painted as a bleak one. The article closes with a curmudgeonly quote
from Kurt Vonnegut, who states, "The e-book is a ridiculous idea... The
printed book is so satisfactory, so responsive to our fingertips. So
much of this new stuff is utterly unneeded." Blame the
current ruckus on Stephen King. King's novella, "Riding the Bullet,"
was downloaded 400,000 times in twenty-four hours, netting him a cool
million. Of course, we must recall that he is Stephen King, the
Incredible Colossal Wordprocessor. In the marketing mind though, King's
success reestablished the crippling notion that e-books are nothing
more than a transference of the printed page to the computer screen,
and that only through the novel format is e-text useful.
Dominique Raccah, publisher of Naperville-based Sourcebooks, Inc.,
(www.sourcebooks.com) disagrees. "We decided to launch the Sphinx
(www.sphinxlegal.com) part of our site so we could reach consumers with
immediate problems." Raccah noted the most popular e-books on
Amazon.com were business and computer texts, and began e-publishing
self-help books, with an emphasis on those that provide legal advice.
Sphinxlegal.com has more than 800 forms at the ready, fulfilling a need
without packing the shelves with rapidly outdated "Such-and-such for
Dimwits" DIY books. Whole books can be bought at the site, but most
downloads are of contracts and similar forms. In a nation afloat on a
sea of forms and contracts—many outdated as laws change—convenience
achieves a rare balance with environmental friendliness at Sourcebooks.
Scott Rettberg, co-author of a hypertext novel called "The
Unknown" (www.unknownhypertext.com), saw that while many nonprofit
organizations filled print writers' needs, none existed for
e-literature. He developed the Chicago-based Electronic Literature
Organization (ELO) (www.eliterature.org), a haven for a bright, e-lit
future. "[The ELO is] not interested in the e-book as the route to sell
a million science fiction or romance novels... It's a new medium to be
explored artistically," Rettberg explains. A doctoral candidate in
English and modern fiction maven, Rettberg values the classic novel
form, but sees possibilities beyond mere e-bookery.
"Essentially, we're trying to take a different approach to the
industry... what are its unexplored possibilities?" Rettberg asks. The
ELO site leads to numerous phantasmagorical associations of image and
text, a grand and glorious vision populated by the eye-popping effects
of HTML, DHTML, Flash and Shockwave. Like the rocket scientists of the
thirties, who labored under the shadow cast by the then-crackpot notion
of space exploration, ELO members may look eccentric now, but they
promise greater signs and wonders. Rettberg also points
out the correlation between the ELO's snippet-like productions of
poetry and prose, and today's reading hour: the lunchbreak. Perhaps a
publisher's responsibility lies in providing reading opportunities to
everyone in the form with which they're most comfortable. Not
lobotomized, as Birkerts feared, just visually interesting, inexpensive
and accessible. The tactic worked for paperbacks in the fifties, when
publishers feared cheap editions would never sell, and academics
imagined readership would drop. Sound familiar? Within
ELO's directory of more than 800 works, I found sites like
www.poemsthatgo.com, a batch of hallucinatory, animated poetry. Could
such content be a tad avant-garde for the man and woman on the
street—or more precisely, on the train to work? Rettberg notes some
re-education may be necessary to help e-lit along: "If you don't have
an audience accustomed to thinking of the work as 'literature,' you may
have a hard time selling it." Ordinarily straight-laced
University of Chicago demonstrates another shortcoming to the "e-text
is bad" argument. The university maintains a searchable online database
of academic texts. Elisabeth Long, U of C's Digital Library Development
Center co-director, writes in an e-mail that the library is "less about
portability than accessibility—opening up the text to a kind of
analysis which is painstaking in the real world." The tactility of
books can frustrate a researcher seeking specific data, but with
e-text, cross-references are possible, inviting comparisons between
far-flung texts. It's not all blocks of type on a screen,
either. Websites allow the illuminated texts of Blake, Rossetti and
numerous, nameless monks to be studied a world away. True, reading "The
Book of Kells" on your iMac lacks the musty sensuality of the original,
but try visiting the University of Dublin and checking it out for two
weeks. "If you want to read William Blake, you may do best by grabbing
a paperback of his poems," Long mentions, "but if you want to study
Blake's work, the electronic material that is available is of
significant value." Elitist printed text attitudes also
rudely exclude the commoners from self-expression. As the media and
academé have helpfully pointed out for years, people are steadily
growing less adept at self-expression. Nostalgists painfully report on
a golden age when journals were commonplace literary affairs, and
amateur journalism clubs were widespread. Now, print publishing remains
a closed community, owing to cost and editorial gatekeepers. Even the
promise of the zine explosion is hollow. Publishing takes time and
money, not to mention design skills and distribution. Now,
thanks to new technology, journal-keeping and amateur journalism are
revived and combined. LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com), for example,
provides a free diary service to download-weary Web denizens. Not
merely a BBS, LiveJournalists link to one another's journals, weaving a
vast web of life accounts. To quote Sartre, "We look upon persons and
characters as mosaics in which each stone coexists with the others
without that coexistence affecting the nature of the whole." Linking
and interweaving, LiveJournal's entries create an exquisite corpse of a
literary corpus. Whereas most famous diaries have to wait
until their keepers' deaths for release, the diaries of folks like
local writer Jason Pettus (www.geocities.com/jpettus.geo/) have fairly
loyal followings during their creators' lives. Pettus doesn't live a
life fraught with mystery and danger, but despite this handicap, his
site has, by his report, a readership of 16,000 daily. Pettus and
LiveJournal have transformed a lifetime into a shared experience. The
diarist is text alive; the passages in his life become chapters.
Faceless authorial authority is pushed aside—the writer becomes more
real, accessible and interesting. Now, about quality. I was afraid that might come up.
William S. Burroughs once said the biggest obstacle a writer faces is
knowing how much bad writing he must do before he does any good
writing. Perhaps it is so with e-text. We need to be more patient and
less focused on its marketable, or social fabric-rending aspects.
Standards are important, but folkways and artistic experimentation are
not subject to aesthetic or financial control. As for whether e-text is
the "death of the book," one should consider the following: Electronic
text frees the writer to eternally craft his or her work, a process in
which most writers—at least the good ones—would happily indulge. Birkerts would disagree. "Nearly weightless though it is," he says,
"... the word printed on the page is a thing. The configuration of
impulses on a screen is not—it is a manifestation, an indeterminate
entity both particle and wave, an ectoplasmic arrival and departure."
As owner of several hundred books, I cannot rave enough about the
experience of reading and the simple elegance of the book. Still, any
demonization of e-text must be questioned, whether for its lack of
financial worth or aesthetic purity. For all this talk about the
e-text's ephemeral nature, it's easy to forget that when we buy a book,
we are buying a medium, a means of conveyance. It is good policy then
to recall the old saw about freedom of the press applying to he who
owns one. In the face of such a tremendous opportunity to resurrect
interest in the possibilities of the word, the pessimism of e-text's
detractors may very well be the death of the book. |
|
about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment |