Technology and Literature

In reviewing Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night for The Observer, Peter Conrad ponders the effect of the internet revolution on literature, and seems to accept Manguel's premise that the effect of ebooks will be negative:

A book read on a screen has dematerialised; we can neither own nor love it, and if we can't hold it in our hands how can we absorb it into our minds?

It's an interesting point which connects with Will Self's recent rejection of the computer as a tool for writing. Earlier this week I made fun of the way Self talked about this, but there's some serious matter here: Self was saying, I think, that the computer and the manual typewriter make for different ways of thinking, and that the latter, more physical tool makes for a more rigorous way and one that he can better 'own'. Personally, I can't even use a typewriter for a first draft of fiction: rightly or wrongly I feel like many writers that those dreams in my head can only come out first through my wrist and my fountain pen onto those lovely smooth Pukka pads.

But it's not true for all writers. And though it's true that historically as readers our experience of books and their contents has been inextricably bound up with the physical - with their feel and look and smell - how can we say with any certainty that things can't change, that we won't find a new way of 'owning' and loving and absorbing books?

I've written before about the potential for the web - in particular digitization - to prolong the life of books and revive those which may have been forgotten, but this book sounds a note of warning:

Manguel is old, wise and sad enough to know that the future belongs to the users of the Kindle reading device and to oafish librarians who discard books as landfill after transferring their contents to disks or CD-Roms that may be illegible in a decade.

Funny, only yesterday my eye happened to land on the stacks of cassettes in my study, my own plays for Radio 4, and it hit me forcibly me that that technology is now so out of date that my plays, some of them prize-winning, a body of several years' busy work, are in danger of fading away for ever. I have no idea whether the BBC has converted its archive into new technology - I stopped writing radio plays when 'heart-warming' became a prime commissioning requirement - but it wouldn't surprise me if it hasn't.

Google Book Search

In yesterday's Guardian John Lanchester tackles the issue of copyright and Google Book Search in a wide-ranging and thoughtful article which counterbalances the alarmed views of publisher Nigel Newton expressed in the same paper a year ago. Lanchester points out that there is no breach of copyright in GBS: if publishers do not join the book-scanning programme then only a tiny snippet of text of any of their books in print is available, yet the books are drawn to public attention and links provided to shops and libraries where they are available - which seems to me more like a service and free advertising than anything, as Kate Hyde points out on her blog. And if publishers do opt in, then only 20% of a book is available online, and you have to buy it or borrow it from a library to read the rest.

The real area of contention, says Lanchester, is those books which are still in copyright but out of print, and which 'Google wants to make available online.' His implication seems to be that Google wants to make them available online in their entirety: 'It seems to me this would mean, in some crucial sense, Google was actually the publisher of the book.'

When I recently discovered on Google Book Search two out-of-print short-story anthologies in which my work had appeared (courtesy of the participating Library of the University of Michigan) I was delighted - work which had been seemed to slip off the face of the earth was suddenly current again! - and when they disappeared off GBS a week or so later (as a result of the ongoing dispute?) I was disappointed. How many people will come across those publications if they are not reinstated on Google? In fact the books appeared in the usual Google formula: only a tiny snippet of the contents page of one was readable, and nothing of the other. Personally, though, I wouldn't have cared a fig if they had appeared whole. Actually, I'd have been happier: one of those stories of mine is not available to read anywhere else, the publishers are never going to reprint those books, and I can find only one used copy of one book and four of the other for sale on the web. Neither the publishers nor we contributors are going to make any more money out of those books, and I for one would rather those stories were still being read.