Reading in a Time of Change

To open the Meanland blog, I’ll borrow the words of Overland editor Jeff Sparrow as he launched Reading in a Time of Change last Thursday at the Wheeler Centre with guests Sherman Young, Margaret Simons, Marieke Hardy and Peter Craven – today, we are using a level of technology that our grandparents would have found simply magical.

This rings quite true once we pause to consider how far things have come, and how far they have yet to go. What might have seemed a mere fancy, living only between the covers of an old science fiction novel or video cassette, is now a real and impending possibility. The debate over ebooks and digital publishing has been threshed out for a long while now, but it seems to me that only recently are we finally beginning to square up and ask not ‘what if’ but ‘what now?’

The general consensus on this seems to be increasingly clear. Digital publishing, via blogs, ebooks, social networking, iPads and so on will only continue to rise. While it is true that ebooks have not yet caught on in Australia, Margaret Simons predicted that this would only be a matter of time, and that we would all be reading off screens in the years to come. In the midst of all this though, there was still room for an attachment to the printed word. Both Simons and Hardy argued that books would become more of a fetishised or collectible object in their own right – a thing that one buys purely for the visual and sensory pleasure of having, feeling and turning. McSweeneys were early frontrunners in this trend, and more recently Penguin have also followed suit, releasing a set of beautiful hardback Classics, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.

With regards to the extent to which digital publishing will affect our reading habits, opinion was varied. Margaret Simons made an interesting observation that as we move increasingly online, we may begin to lose our ‘dark and private spaces’ to digital noise. Namely, the more that authors rely on blogs or other community-based programs to write and workshop drafts, or even the twitterverse to begin research, the less insular writing and reading becomes. This follows on from much of Bob Stein’s philosophy that what will matter in the future is not the individual writer or reader, but the community.

Marieke Hardy, who published a 7000 word mobile phone novel, Vigilante Virgin, with the Age last year, spoke on how digital publishing would make room for more experimentation with short form text. The inspiration for the m-book came from the mobile phone serials craze that is currently sweeping Japan – where millions of users download short, cheap SMS novels almost daily on the topics of romance, horror, science fiction and erotica. Despite her ongoing curiosity with new media, Hardy maintained that she still preferred to engage with longer books in print form. She couldn’t, for example, imagine reading The Great Gatsby on screen. Thus ‘it is still possible to have a foot in both camps without betraying either’.

Sherman Young was more forthright, arguing that we will all be reading from screens in time, and that this could easily include long form text (case in point, he read his entire talk from his iPhone). I particularly agreed with his point that we should not take a deterministic view of the medium. Instead of claiming that screens ‘make’ us do things, for example shortening out attention spans, straining our eyes etc, we should think of them as being as blank and malleable and paper. I’m inclined to agree that the threshold is simply the level of familiarity to which we are used. With any form of new technology, whether email, DVDs, iPods, what seems outlandish and unusable at first can easily become second nature over time.

Peter Craven was the final speaker and though he admitted he harked from the crowd that still ‘writes with a Mont Blanc pen’, he too pointed out that a book is not so much a physical object, but more an order of words. Rather than focusing on what ebooks would bring, Craven placed his faith in the technology of spoken word and recordings, arguing that it was far easier to lose yourself to a downloaded reading of Proust than it was to read him.

Regardless of where you stand, it seems clear that we are on the brink of something. The next Meanland event, Reading in a Time of Technology, seeks to take these questions a step further, asking how technology, in place of books, can serve to deliver the narrative (bookings here). But to cap off, I’ll requote Sherman requoting Douglas Adams, who gives us some humorous perspective in The Salmon of Doubt:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Update: Here are some other thoughts on Meanland by Benjamin Solah and Matthia Dempsey of Fancy Goods