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Random Musings Blog archives

Protesting the literary digital revolution

April 30, 2006 by Joanne Brokaw

A recent article in BusinessWeek explored the potentials of digital publishing, where books will be downloaded to iPods and computers like music and video.

The article quotes Joni Evan, a top literary agent who was with the William Morris Agency before she left to start her own company focusing on books and technology: "Every other form of media has gone digital -- music, newspapers, movies," she is quoted as saying. “We're the only industry that hasn't lived up to the pace of technology. A revolution is around the corner."

The article also quotes Steve Kessel, vice-president for worldwide digital media, who says, "We think consumers increasingly are ready for it."

Not this consumer. In fact, I break out in a cold sweat every time someone mentions the literary digital revolution. You see, I’m a bibliophile.

I live my life surrounded by stacks and stacks of books, piles next to my bed and the living room couch, tomes stuffed into already overflowing bookcases. I buy books like some women buy shoes, my moods reflected in my bookstore receipts. I came home last week with four novels and read them in a week, curled up on the couch with the dog stretched out at my feet, immersed in stories about an autistic young man in London, women beekeepers in South Carolina, a dysfunctional family, and a traditionally built woman detective in Botswana.

I read with a pencil stuck behind my ear, and I make copious notes in the margins of my books. Smiley faces mark the paragraphs where the author has made a witty comment. Sentences that for some reason held particular meaning for me when I read the book are underlined and then underlined again the next time I read. I write questions in the margins, as if I am having a conversation with the author. “Is that what you really meant,” I ask. “Have you considered ...”

Fingerprints dot the pages, reminding me of late nights spent reading and eating snacks; watermarked covers prove that reading in the bathtub can be tricky. I can pick up a book years after I’ve read it and remember what was happening in my life or what I was feeling, based on the passages I had marked. Periods of depression are marked by dark passages marked with, “Yes! I feel that, too!”

“Haven’t you already read that book?” my husband might ask as I sit with my nose buried deep in the pages of “Winter of our Discontent.”

“Only once or twice,” I reply casually, secretly knowing it’s more like five or six times. But who’s counting?

More intriguing to me are books I’ve found at garage sales. For example, I have a small book of Longfellow’s poetry printed in 1882 that I purchased for $1 (which is about what it would have cost 100 years ago, according to the first page of the book). Inside the front cover is written the name “Wilder” and the number 22, and throughout the book are pencil marks singling out passages.

What was the reader thinking about when he or she marked the lines, “O lost days of delight, that are wasted in doubting and waiting! O lost hours and days in which we might have been happy!” Why did he or she circle the passage, “Be still, sad heart and cease repining; Behind the clouds is the sun still shining; Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life some rain much fall, Some days must be dark and dreary.”

Was this book read 100 years ago by a student or a lover, the lines marked for scholastic or romantic significance? What stories this tome could tell. And what stories the notes in my own books will someday tell.

We’d lose the romance of reading if literary works were forced into the digital age. When books become just words on a computer screen there’s nothing to pass down to the next generation, no commentary or pencil shavings or cookie crumbs hidden inside musty pages on a bookshelf to bind us with kindred hearts in the next century. We’ll just have codes on a computer screen, easily erased when hard drives are full, leaving no trace of the impact they left on the reader.

And we all know the dangers posed by reading electronic books in a bubble bath.