by: JK Evanczuk
Since starting Lit Drift, I’ve gotten used to reading a lot of doom-and-gloom opinion pieces about the death of the publishing industry. I’ve read predictions that the paperbound book will be totally replaced by digital books within the decade, or that we’ll all stop buying books and forget how to read, and so on. Most of it I’ve taken with a grain brick of salt, because I think at this point in our current techno-literary revolution it is far too early to tell where we’ll be in five–let alone ten–years.
Still, I can’t shake my anxiety after reading this recent article from The Guardian, in which Philip Roth–one of my favorite writers–says that the novel will be a “cult minority” in 25 years. He attributes the decline of the novel to the popularity of film, TV, and computers. It’s not the first time I’ve heard claims like this. But it’s unnerving to hear it from Philip Roth.
Roth continues:
“The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen,” Roth said. “Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up.”
Maybe I’ve been living in a shiny happy non-reality for the last two decades, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. So as much as I love Philip Roth, I have to respectfully disagree.
I have a feeling literature is going to be just fine in the digital age. Here is my reasoning:
#1The media predicted the death of the book upon the advent of radio, and then again with film, and then again with television. It’s happening once more with the rise of the computer and the Internet. It’s possible that this time things are different. Anything’s possible. But based solely on literature’s perseverance throughout the last century, I’m optimistic about literature’s survival.
#2The media has predicted that the Internet would turn us into a bunch of drooling, snarky drones who couldn’t care less about grammar or spelling. But as we’ve said before, people are–on the contrary–becoming increasingly literate thanks to the Internet.
#3Roth says that people can’t concentrate long enough to finish an entire novel, but I don’t think that’s an issue. If you can spend ten hours on Facebook, you can spend two hours reading a book. If you can spend ten hours reading your favorite blogs, you most definitely have the attention span required to spend two hours reading a book.
#4What with innovative techno-literary projects like Neil Gaiman’s crowdsourced Twitter story or Colson Whitehead’s multi-part Internet novel, I think the Internet is proving to be an asset to fiction rather than a hindrance. It’s bringing literature back to the masses. I can’t think of any other time in history when fiction has been so dynamic and interesting than right now.
#5Although Roth says that the Kindle doesn’t make a difference in people’s reading habits, I think it does. Despite my own qualms about losing the experience of reading a paperbound book, the Kindle and other digital readers do satisfy our need for instant gratification. We are a lazy species, and maybe without digital readers many people couldn’t be bothered to make the effort to get a book from the bookstore or the library. But thanks to digital readers we can browse, buy, and read new books all in the span of just a few clicks.
So is the novel really a dying medium? Good God, I hope not. I have yet to publish my first novel, and when it finally comes out I want people to, you know, read it. Things are just changing so fast right now that I think it’s difficult to make any well-informed predictions about where we’ll be in the near future. I think the best thing we can do right now is to sit back, watch what happens, and keep reading.
from: LitDrift
No comments:
Post a Comment