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When did you last read a book? I don’t mean buy one. That might be
asking too much. Books continue to sell despite the rise of the
Internet. How many read them is another issue. Life has too much going
on for some in our society to allow them to spend time with a book. In
this, the age of the I-Pod, Podcasting, and whatever else you can
name, publishers and booksellers face the problem every day of who
reads what and why. Despite this, publishers keep publishing. Writers
keep writing. It seems a necessary drive in every society in the
world.
I read all the time. I read alone, preferably when it is quiet, a
habit I picked up from spending too much time in the library stacks
when I was in college. I read fiction, history, biography, current
affairs, poetry. I read pretty much everything I see on a printed
page. The printed page. Black ink on white paper. I read labels on
food packages and bottles. I even read the fine print on
advertisements. Reading is an old habit I refuse to break. Without
reading my life would be empty. Others in this age increasingly
dominated by digital think differently.
The New York Times surely prides itself on telling us what is new in
society, especially in digital and the rapidly changing world in which
we live. Case in point is a recent spate of articles, including a
long, tedious piece written by Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine in the
Times magazine dedicated to the theory that the printed book, if not
dead, will soon be extinct. The reporting -- subtitled “a manifesto”
-- says that digital will someday rule publishing, and the sooner the
better. I wonder when Mr. Kelley last read a book from cover to cover.
I can only guess that Mr. Kelly does not read, cannot read and
obviously refuses to read anything between hard or soft covers.
The premise is that books in their present form are doomed anyway.
Therefore, we had better subscribe to the theory that digitizing every
book on the planet will save every other book on the planet from
extinction. Once done, civilization will be the better for it. Saving
books is a good idea. It is one of the reasons we have libraries. But
there is something else. Digitizing books because a coterie of
self-designated prophets, meaning in this case, Google and its
acolytes, including Mr. Kelly, say it is important, does not give
books their just due. Putting these books in a single place, such as a
hive or part of a collective, does not mean we will be better
informed. It also does not mean we will be better readers. I don’t
mind people not reading every word in a book. It is all right if
people stop reading a book because they get tired of it or they don’t
like it. It is what can happen to an author, the books he or she
writes and the audience. It is part of the writing game. I do resent
the idea that isolated paragraphs might define an author’s work and
that somehow these few words would be enough to make the book
understood by anyone who reads it. Often reading parts of a book out
of context does not give the book and the author his or her due.
Digitizing the world’s books is not a bad plan if we want to preserve
the world’s literature. Books disappear for a variety of reasons. They
disintegrate. Some societies ban them. Others burn them. Hopefully
digitizing books will preserve them for all time. But the idea that
all things digital are good for the mind, the soul and, most of all,
the simple pleasure of reading, is somewhat frightening. I still find
it impossible to read a book on-line and worse on a digital book
reader. I admit that reading in short bursts on the Net is easy
compared to the sustained concentration required for a book via a
machine. Reading on-line is impersonal, nothing more than symbols in
space devoid of personality, lacking in soul. Reading an old-fashioned
book is personal. The printed page allows the mind the opportunity to
snap, crackle and pop with enthusiasm or not, with agreeing or
disagreeing with the writer. How does one write in the margins of a
page in a digital format? Or do margins and the ideas you put on them
no longer have meaning and also disappear?
Writing a monthly column often means that an idea that I have alights
elsewhere, the product of another mind. Since seeing those stories on
digitizing books, I immediately thought of the Borg. Ever hear of the
Borg? Other writers have and they too connect digitizing and making
every book available in one location something to fear. That tells me
I am not alone. The Borg, according to
Startrek.com, is “a cybernetic
life-form … part organic, part artificial life. The Borg has a
singular goal, namely the consumption of technology.” The Borg is a
collective made up of thousands of former humans or humanoids, none of
whom can or want to think as individuals. To aspire for individual or
private thought is sure death in the collective. With the Borg’s
collection of all technology comes the control over individual
thought, and thus the death of freedom.
Google, the Borg come to life, with its proselytizers from Wired
Magazine and elsewhere, is in the forefront of the digital revolution.
It wants to digitize everything it can lay its grasping paws on. Once
done, its world audience will have the right to access everything, and
I mean everything, it digitizes, but at what cost? Some look forward
to this new collective or hive as a way to integrate every book, thus
most thought, and to fuse it in one place. In some people’s minds, a
drive for connections would be otherwise impossible without everything
in one place. But the fun in seeking connections is discovery of the
unusual and unique. The Google-Borg and its followers want everything
mechanized instead of freewheeling as it is now. In other words,
anyone will be able to try to make a connection to anything through
the collective. Original thought might disappear, the individual will
surely disappear, and the hive will rule. The insanity or silliness of
one book replacing every book and thus available as pieces of an
author’s life in snippets or as many slices of different sausage is
frightening.
I am not ready to cede my right to read how I want to the collective.
At the sake of repeating myself, the best part of reading is the world
one enters through the author’s creativity, be it fiction of
non-fiction. I am not ready to surrender my creative material to the
collective for the sake of making it easy for someone to read an
isolated paragraph here and there without understanding the whole.
My hope is that digital will not rule the world. If it does, we are in
deep trouble. Digital as an adjunct to life is good, even important,
but it fails miserably as our savior. Digital is empty. Broken down it
is only a series of symbols. Though it serves an enormous purpose
because it squeezes everything into one common dominator, authors are
all different. So too, are their books. Realistically, digital has no
spirit. There is never a sense of an author’s struggle to get his or
her words onto paper the best way he or she knows. There is no
awareness of joy. Ultimately, digital is not the answer to creativity
nor, for that matter, to life, especially for the world’s books.
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At NBC News for 35 years, Ron Steinman was bureau chief
in Saigon, Hong Kong and London, was a senior producer on Today and wrote
and produced for Sunday Today. At ABC News Productions, he produced
and wrote documentaries for A&E, TLC, Discovery, Lifetime and the
History Channel. He has a Peabody, a National Headliner award, a
National Press Club award, a International Documentary Festival Gold
Camera Award, two American Women in Radio & Television awards and
has been nominated for five Emmy's. He is a partner in
Douglas/Steinman Productions, whose latest documentary, "Luboml: My
Heart Remembers," aired on PBS' WLIW/21 and the History Channel in
Israel, April 29, 2003. He is the author of, "The Soldiers 'Story",
"Women in Vietnam," and most recently, "Inside Television's First
War: A Saigon Journal," University of Missouri Press, 2002. |
