Jonathan Franzen, in the course of slagging on users of current technology (“consumers had been conned into thinking that they need the latest technology”) and that “serious readers” aren’t conned by those dastardly ebooks, writes:
“The Great Gatsby was last updated in 1924. You don’t need it to be refreshed, do you?
“Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing–that’s reassuring.
“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”
I don’t think it does printed book supporters’ cause (among whom I count myself) to implicitly suggest that they are engaged in a zero-sum debate with e-book supporters (among whom I also count myself).
The technical fluidity of digital text is, as far as practical concerns go, a rather distant outlier. I suppose it is possible in some cases to hack into and modify digital books in such a way that those who already own them are affected, but the same argument can be made against any digital information that either resides on or is distributed from, the “cloud” or on remote servers somewhere. So, by that token web sites and email are problematic in the same way ebooks are…i.e. not really problematic at all.
The (significant) exception is the ability for the vendors of a book to essentially delete the item you have purchased from your virtual library. Amazon has done this before in the case of (perhaps accidentally) pirated books put up for sale on its Kindle platform. When they became aware that Orwell’s Animal Farm and (ironically) 1984 had been made available, they not only made the books unavailable for purchase, but they reached out and deleted it from everyone’s Kindles. I believe they’ve done something similar a few times when a publisher has decided to retract a book. Everyone received a refund, but the potential hazard is obvious.
This really points to a much larger problem in our digital age–the issue of formats and longevity in a historical timeframe. It’s easy to copy digital materials, but ultimately that material needs to be stored somewhere–and existing on random peoples’ hard drives is not enough. And many work in ebook form isn’t portable…if a format dies with the device, whether for technological or business reasons, it will be a real problem if the works that have been encoded for it die with it.
But the feeling that something in digital form could be subject to change is, like the simple aesthetic affinity for words printed on paper, a wholly individual and–for the sake of argument at least–irrational quirk. Which doesn’t make either any less real: I love paper books and won’t give them up until, if I live long enough, I am forced to. But I recognize that this is my peccadillo and concerns the form, not the words.
I know this because I have also grown to love ebooks for reasons related to their form, particularly that they pack into a very small physical container and are searchable. This makes ebooks particularly suitable, for me, for reference and academic works, while their reader is also great for periodicals.
It’s no different than music. Through A/B testing I realized that I am not one of the exceedingly few with “golden ears,” so a decent compression in digital format is for me, like the vast majority of listeners, indistinguishable from the CD or DVD source (many more people believe they can hear the difference, but it is usually psychological). I still love music, but my love isn’t conditional based on their form–LP, cassette, CD, MP3–nor does it make any sense to me that “serious listeners” would eschew the modern form. If anything, most music enthusiasts I know are deeply into–and benefit from the expanded accessibility of–digital music formats.
The scroll to the codex to the ebook…it’s a sequence that will inevitably alienate some of those attached to the form of things, the way someone with an eye for design may love the form of a particular chair, but in neither case should the form be mistaken for the function and the information, whether plowing through a digital book or resting comfortably in an ugly recliner.
