Friday 1 April 2016

What Jackson Ossea Would Tell Academics Thirty Years Ago Who Declared the Book Dead Because of Digital Technologies


            Let’s go back to a few years, or even a decade before Kirschenbaum and Darnton were first writing about digital humanities and the futurology of the book, when doomsayers were declaring the print book dead because of the presence of digital technologies. It’s not important how we got there, just go with it.
            As tempting as it would be to show these skeptics my Kobo and angrily explain that we have a disagreement about what death looks like, there’s something else that I think they would be more receptive of. It would be too easy to explain to people that just because something is not on a paper page, it does not mean that it is a separate thing from a book.
            I would articulate that, not only did e-books do a very poor job of killing the book, but that it inspired a wave of avant-garde novels that could not be effectively transitioned from print to digital form without damaging the way in which the reader is supposed to experience them. Academics have tried to argue that many of the most popular instances of these experimental book-forms acted as a precursor to the ways in which readers read electronic texts, but that is not true because of the way that these texts are meant to be red.
            Apart from the obvious example that is Mark Z. Danielewski’s bibliography, several authors have written works that transcend and challenge many of our long-held notions of what a physical book is and how it is we read them. When faced with a challenge, it is the artists responsibility to become innovative or their ideas risk becoming obsolete.
            House of Leaves and Only Revolutions are books which require the reader to acknowledge the book as a physical book because the reader must rotate them in their hands in order to properly experience them. The same is true of so many other titles that have been published by these waves of writers. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes also requires the reader to become more physically involved with the book
            I would want to explain to these academic and less formal pessimists who worry about the book’s future that the book will not die because it will demand innovation, and also that electronic reading is still reading. One of Kirschenbaums’ main points was that the digital form of an object is a representation of a theory of that object. The same is true of different translations of texts as well as different editions of books.
            But even if they wouldn’t see eye to eye with me on that notion, they should be able be much more wide-eyed about the future of the book. The only difference is that the reader will not only have a selection from a library in the hands, but the whole collection between their hands.

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