pfft. the dramatics.
This link has been bookmarked by 9 people . It was first bookmarked on 15 Sep 2008, by someone privately.
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25 Sep 08
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23 Sep 08
Tania ShekoBooks special: Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age?
books reading digital digital_age intelligent literature question survive
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16 Sep 08
see conversation with Kevin Kelly and Sven Bikerts
literacy reading literature academia fiction e-books publishing_industry interview
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Birkerts found that, as watchers of TV and videos, "they had difficulty slowing down enough to concentrate on prose of any density; they had problems with what they thought of as archaic diction, with allusions, with vocabulary that seemed 'pretentious'; they were especially uncomfortable with indirect or interior passages, indeed with any deviations from straight plot; and they were put off by an ironic tone, because it flaunted superiority and made them feel they were missing something." It dawned on Birkerts that a whole generation of young American readers were becoming gradually decoupled from the whole culture of the written word.
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Twenty-five years ago, when the Amis-Barnes-Rushdie generation was getting under way, readers seemed to have no problem ' being steered towards experimental, inward-looking, linguistically challenging fiction. Flaubert's Parrot sold well, despite its metafictional games with biography, as did Amis's Money, despite its torrentially exhausting Amer-English prose style. Graham Swift's Waterland, now on school English syllabuses, flew out of bookshops in its Picador paperback livery, as did One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight's Children.
Now, many serious writers complain, challenging fiction doesn't appeal; "difficult" novels don't sell. Adam Mars-Jones's massive, and beautifully-written novel Pilcrow, published earlier this year, sold only a few hundred copies, and there have been several similar casualties. Although, traditionally, every Booker winner invariably becomes a world bestseller, the 2008 winner, Anne Enright's The Gathering, made the briefest appearance in the top 10 before disappearing.
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To sell now, books evidently need to be big on plot and incident, short on interior monologue – the sort of titles that the Richard & Judy Book Club strenuously promotes. "Most literary programmes, which are on late at night and concerned with 'literature', intimidate lots of people," said Judy Finnegan last year. "For some, that a book has been Booker-nominated is actually a turn-off." Can this, then, be the future of reading: an increasing number of low-brow, plot-driven works will flood the market, consigning works of literary merit to a watery grave, while the low-brows vie with each other for the attention of readers so badly affected by the moving stream of internet info-processing, that they can no longer focus their attention for longer than a few pages?
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The instructions tell you, "One battery charge is equal to 6,800 page turns (that's enough to read War and Peace five times over on a single charge!)" Yeah, right. But it's not going to happen on the Sony Reader. Nobody is ever going to read Tolstoy on this fatuous device. It's an electronic simulation of a page, but it'll never convince you it's a book, to be read by your sentient eyes and brain. It doesn't have the solidity, the pages, the tactile companionship of a book. You'll never know where you are in the story, or how much of it is left. You won't have the cover artwork, to steal inside your head and become a lifelong reminder of the book it encased.
And you can't turn the pages. I spent half an hour reading Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (the first book to be installed) with my fingers itching to turn a page; "turn" one electronically, and the screen goes blank before the next page is displayed. It's a nasty moment, the screen going blank and interrupting your train of thought; but it's a good metaphor for the blankness to which our minds are tending, as we gradually lose the ability to interpret the old world of sequential thoughts in the new blizzard of information retrieval.
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The agent : Clare Alexander
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doesn't get it
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Our reading rooms are still as busy as ever: the most high-quality digitisation does not replace the power of seeing the original artefact. However, people are now more aware of what we've got
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The publisher: Jeremy Ettinghausen
"Penguin is the publisher that invented the paperback: innovation is in our DNA.
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"Could you compare a blog or a story told via Twitter to Dickens? Well, Dickens wrote in soap opera-like episodes. It's always easier to decide where the cultural action has been, but hard to spot it at the time. These things are happening and we need to adjust."
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"Their interest is in the books reviewed in the broadsheets and the ones that win the Booker. Their ambition is to be on sale in high-street bookshops and published in book form by a mainstream publisher. That is, to them, a badge, because it measures the value of their writing against the writing they admire.
"Ahead of this interview, I talked to them about digitisation and not one of them had heard of Twitter, and they were all hostile to the idea of e-books.
"They're not immersed in digital fiction, either – some have been published online, but feel it's second-best; they're concerned about the lack of editorial control on the Net and only pursue it because there is a dearth of [print] outlets for short stories.
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crappy personalities
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15 Sep 08
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14 Sep 08
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