If I wanted to rescue novels as a culturally relevant mainstream industry (and I do), I’d put the majority of my effort into figuring out ways to get a wide variety of books in front of people who don’t go to bookstores.Ms. Ghareeb:
They have this already. It’s called a Library.
As I was reading Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform, or Destroy Your Favorite Medium by blogger Cory Doctrow, I could not help a quick eye-roll in response to this quote. In his post, Doctrow looks at the declining state of traditionally distributed common media: books, movies, music and newspapers. He is mostly right on the money with his assessments; the Internet is slowly eroding all of those mountains blocking the creative path of artists in all genres, Its pretty easy and fairly cheap to self-publish one’s ideas (say in the form of a blog about school libraries?) and to have those ideas reach a astounding number of people.
I would like to add to his commentary of the death of the book as we know it. Aside from the quote at the beginning of my post (my husband’s a computer geek in good standing, but he is still an avid library user. Quite an innovation. And it’s free!), Doctrow misses a few finer points about why books remain a viable technology.
A book is a wonderfully designed thing, and not just because computers are too distracting to serve as a replacement. Books are endlessly portable, and require nothing for use but light and possibly a bookmark (but now we’re getting fancy). They are cheap enough to be disposable if needed, but durable enough to be tossed about in someone’s bag, and can get wet/cold/really hot and still be usable. Books are extremely quick to access (especially if you have that fancy bookmark upgrade), and frankly, they go with any outfit. It’s a good set up, and I don’t think any manifestation of a digital reader I have seen is up to challenging these attributes.
And I would also like to point out that if any factor of book distribution is in danger of being made obsolete, it’s the bookstores, not the books. Think about what happened to music stores. The Internet makes it cheaper (thank you Amazon) to purchase books not to mention much more convenient (add to above list: books are easy to ship, being squarish and all). Self publishing is making large chains that sell books (yes, even Target and the like) less and less of a necessary evil.
