Whither Reading in a Digital Media World?
PHK
with fear by desperate defenders of the print-on-paper paradigm for
literature, news, and information. In the 1890s, movies and the
phonograph were going to replace our beloved books and newspapers; in
the 1920s radio reared its ugly head, and who can forget the tirades
against television from the 1950s to the present day. Then, in the
1990s, beginning with Sven Birketts' The Gutenberg Elegies, we were
warned that computers would soon destroy the book. More recently, the
computer has morphed into a whole army of digital devices that appear
to threaten the print-on-paper paradigm.
What is to be done?
It has been said that the demise of railroads in America was the
result of railroad companies failing to recognize that they were in
the transportation business, not the rail business. As authors and
publishers, we need to understand that we are in the business of
communication not the business of creating and selling print-on-paper.
So bring on your e-Readers and your smartphones, your 3-D televisions,
and your digital tablets. We'll be ready because while reading and
writing and publishing will take different forms than they do now
(just as they did when the manuscripts of Medieval monks gave way to
the movable type of Gutenberg and, more recently, when "hot-metal"
typesetting machines were scrapped in favor of electronic
compositors), the novel will endure as will the short story and the
news account and instructional texts and... yes, even celebrity
gossip...because people will always read and others will write and
others publish. Tweet that, why don't you?
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