…is in its early stages, but it has begun.
By all reports, gloom was the theme of BooksExpo America, the big annual trade show, which took place this past weekend. The stories are here and here.
Kevin Kelly’s New York Times Magazine piece ($$) was mentioned—dismissed, that is—by literary lion John Updike as the spawn of the devil.
Updike went on at some length, heaping scorn on Kelly’s notion that authors who no longer got paid for copies of their work could profit from it by selling “performances” or “access to the creator.” (”Now as I read it, this is a pretty grisly scenario.”)
Unlike the commingled, unedited, frequently inaccurate mass of “information” on the Web, he said, “books traditionally have edges.” But “the book revolution, which from the Renaissance on taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling pod of snippets.
“So, booksellers,” he concluded, “defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity.”
Is it impolite to ask Mr. Updike what he has done to hold up the crumbling financial edifice that is the book business? what he proposes be done to save the business so that his precious human identity not suffer more grievous wounds from technology?
I allied myself with “philistine” Jeff Jarvis over on his blog, where I said:
If you love books, set them free.
I’ll be coming back to this topic. There’s a lot to say.
2 comments ↓
[...] Remember Kevin Kelly essay’s “Scan This Book” ($$)? The one John Updike heaped scorn upon? Well, so much for the “reign of the copy,” as Kelly referred to it. If you remember, Kelly predicted that the courts will see long, bitter battles for years to come. In the next few years, lobbyists for book publishers, movie studios and record companies will exert every effort to mandate the extinction of the ‘’indiscriminate flow of copies,’’ even if it means outlawing better hardware. Too many creative people depend on the business model revolving around copies for it to pass quietly. For their benefit, copyright law will not change suddenly. [...]
[...] *** I grumbled about John Updike’s reactionary fears here and here. Search the “books” and “publishing” categories to see more of what I’ve written about this subject. [...]
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