Firstly, let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed the Doctorow
article. His writing style is great, which makes getting through and
understanding his ideas much easier. I appreciate his acceptance of the reality
of eBooks and technologies of the like (as opposed to the “hide your head in
the sand” approach many authors/artists take), and I am curious to know how his
re-licensing experiment went with his novel.
Anyways, I found myself agreeing with most of what he had to
say. I do find myself more and more reading things off a screen, as opposed to
a hard copy. I was only required to purchase a single textbook for my classes
this semester, all other materials were to be made available online.
Furthermore, I find it less and less important that I have a physical text that
I can hold, smell, and spill curry on.
His most intriguing piece of analysis was his analogy to
Napster. He says that Napster wasn’t appealing because we could track down and
possess a Top 40 song we heard earlier that day on the radio, it was for the
exact opposite reason: so we could find songs that we couldn’t hear on the radio. And I think this point is a potent one.
The mission of eBooks, along with other forms of media translated into online
formats is not to deliver everyone an electronic copy of Harry Potter, it is to
unearth possibilities that would never be possible otherwise. As Doctorow says,
no library can hold all literature that has ever been created, nor would it
want to. It could not supply the minority of the content to the majority of the
population. The ability to find the minority is what makes the digital
valuable, and makes this eBook “problem” very real.
Blake, glad you enjoyed the Doctorow (though we were hoping everyone would post on the Eisenstein this week). I confess that I actually have an electronic copy of one of Doctorow's novels sitting on the hard drive of my laptop, even as we speak (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). As for his analogy between eBooks and Napster, thanks for pointing this out... I assume you meant to omit the "not" in the penultimate sentence of your post, right? Doctorow's focus on the "minority" or quirky, less canonical forms that are most amenable to alternative distribution makes a very different case for eBooks and eReaders than many have made. Instead of advocating them on the basis of the dissemination of "classics" like Jane Austen or Shakespeare's plays, he seems to be saying that eBooks are best when used to experiment, both as readers and writers.
ReplyDelete