Time Has No Moral Qualities
Posted: December 21st, 2008 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Media And Advertising | Tags: bloggers, books, Kindle | 3 Comments »
Book lover. Bookworm. Book store. Book reading. Book festival.
The weight of soon-to-be-read books in a bag. The smell of freshly-printed books. The little kick of someone seeing a book under your arm, and, with genuine curiosity, asking “What are you reading?” It’s a book. You are book people. That’s how it works.
As a kid, I always had a book with me, reading first thing upon waking and at night, in bed, until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, under the desk in a boring class, riding on buses and in cars, holding a book in front of me while I walked to school, struggling to find a way to read a book while I rode a bicycle.
When someone exclaims, as book people often do, that they simply love books, that they are a reader, that what they really want to do is go somewhere cozy and just read and read and read, I want to hug that person and say, Yes, of course you do. I understand completely. You are one of us.
And yet… and yet. Something has happened. This culture of big-hearted people who recognized their own kind instantly has changed.
People of the book have spent so many decades uniting against bannings and burnings and censorship and ignorance that some of them have come to associate any major shift in the production and distribution of reading material as inherently Orwellian.
I can see it in the faces of such people when they ask me what I do for a living, and I answer. I find it doesn’t matter how I put it…online advertising, online publishing, “I help bloggers make money,” etc. A series of impossibly polite questions follow, like a trail of fresh-baked cookies leading to an arena where thousands of bloodthirsty English majors are waiting in the stands.
Do I spend a lot of time online? What do I think of blogging? Do I have a blog myself? Do I think the internet is a good source of information? What about books? Do I like books? What about the Kindle? Do I have one? Oh… I was involved in advertising for the Kindle?
What usually happens next is that I hear a series of statements that I’m meant to disagree with, but don’t. When my face doesn’t show concern, the statements become gradually more antagonistic:
“I love my books. Books are great. The best things in life, really. There’s nothing I like more than going to a bookstore. Or a library. Libraries are awesome. And the great thing about books is, they don’t require electricity. Can you imagine, a book that you have to turn on? There’s something disgusting about that, isn’t there? I would rather visit the independent bookstore in my neighborhood than shop at Amazon any day, wouldn’t you? Do you feel comfortable giving away so much of your personal information to corporations? Or maybe you’re okay with that, because you’re part of it? If you wanted to, could you look me up online and find out where I live? I doubt you’d find out very much. There’s probably an FBI file on me, and you probably have access to it. When was the last time you read a book? Is there even a single bookshelf in your entire apartment? Are you a Nazi? You are, aren’t you? You wish you’d been at Alexandria, burning down the library yourself? Oh, sorry, do you even know what Alexandria is? That’s a book reference. It only applies to people who read books.”
I recently met a book-loving woman who asked me about my job and then snickered when I said that it involves helping bloggers make money while maintaining their integrity. Bloggers with integrity, she asked? Have I ever blogged myself, she asked. Yes, I said. Was it a particularly dark period in my life, she wanted to know? Well, I said, doing my best to answer succinctly, it was yesterday. And then she said that she loves the smell of new books. I agreed that I love it too. And she smiled as if to say, I have a molotov cocktail with your name on it, motherfucker.
Oh, my book-loving friends. My rightfully frightened, angry, indignant friends, whose eyes well up at the thought that i might be you (you!) who will have to take a stand in that battle for the preservation of history, of learning, of art and nuanced thought.
What can I say? There will always be books. Also, there will always be plays that are not meant to be adapted into movies, and poems that are not written to be set to music, and symphony pieces written for an orchestra of acoustic instruments. Sculpture. Engraving.
The best of all these things have lasted as long as they have because their quality is timeless. And yet, each work of art carries with it, not merely the universality that makes it art, but the qualities and form of the time in which its creator lived.
There were, I’m somehow certain, those who decried the invention of the printing press because, damn it, the written word was meant for scrolls. Sure, more people would get to read each book. Sure, production would be cheaper. But think about it… if each copy no longer requires painstaking time and care, then the door has been opened for just about anybody to write a book and get a thousand copies of it printed. Besides, what about the personal touch? When you read a scroll, you can’t help but think about the human being who labored over it for countless hours, just so that you could eventually hold it, read it, cherish it. Every word, every letter, written by a person, perhaps long dead, who nevertheless was reading the book right along with you.
Okay, I’ll say it. Blogs and newspapers are not the same. Their content is different. Their form is different, and that is, in part, what makes the content different. Also: reading a book on paper and reading it on the Kindle is not the same. How could it be?
Okay, I’ll really say it: When we stop reading on paper, we lose something.
There, I said it.
Am I allowed to work in online media now?
Because it’s not going away.
I’m sorry. But it’s not.
image by Zevotron
