Page Rage by Doc Cuddy
It's always amusing, for a short time, when dinosaurs speak. Well, Mr. Applebaum, of course we're still chopping down whole forests so we can have books to wrap our digits around. No doubt, 20 years after Gutenberg most people were still lovingly unrolling one-of-a-kind hand written and illuminated manuscripts when they needed a hit of Aristotle. It do take time for new technologies to get going. But Mr. Applebaum's shortsightedness is not the point. (Maybe that's why the original dinosaurs disappeared? Maybe they were just nearsighted, which worked fine as long as they were the only kids on the block.) You sort of expect people with a vested interest in the old technology not to see the new one clearly. What I find puzzling is that book publishers are not merely nearsighted but are totally blind to the fact that the first Internet generation is probably the most intensively print-oriented generation in history. Take away the porn and the music from the Internet (admittedly a lot!) and what you have left is... WORDS, Mr. Applebaum. Sure, there are nice graphics, even a bit of video, but the primary vehicle of information on the Internet is the written word. Newspaper publishers have already figured this out. They've seen the future, or at least a dim version of the future, and they know it ain't 10 digits holding large pages of newsprint. The universal rush to get daily journalism on-line has truly been a stampede. Magazine publishers haven't quite got it yet. Their advertisers pay very big bucks for lovely color on very expensive lovely paper pages. So the magazines are still being coy. Many of them put teaser issues on the Internet, with just a sample of the current issue, which they hope will convince you to turn off the computer, get in the car, drive to the newsstand, and actually buy a copy. But book publishers are not only denying that the sky is falling. They're in denial that there's even a sky to worry about. And the few who are not in denial are mostly horrified at the prospect of non-paper books. Like so many aging prostitutes, they resort to hedonism (!) and go on at rapturous length about the sensual pleasure of holding a paper book, the smell, the feel, the mere sight of the object lying seductively on a table or beckoning from a shelf... It's as if printed matter has suddenly become a sex toy that's been around for 500 years and we just never noticed its orgasmic potential before. People will never stop treasuring [books].
They look good and feel good and they are real things in the real world, existing in real
space. Welcome to the 19th century, folks. The print people seem not to've noticed that big chunks of art and music vamoosed from "the real world" during the 20th century. These days, Casablanca mostly exists as so many magnetized ferrous particles on long strips of vinyl or a long spiral of tiny pits on plastic disks and becomes "real" only when I put the cassette or DVD in the machine and play it. Just as Glenn Gould's Bach is only so many laser-reflecting pits on a little plastic disk and enters "the real world" only when I play the CD. Of course we will always have "books", meaning paper objects existing in "real space" (whatever THAT may turn out to be). Just as we will always have pianos. "Real" books and "real" pianos are indeed marvelous, sensual objects. But they are expensive, bulky, and in this age becoming items the luxury of whose format far exceeds their the necessity of the content. The point, as Marshall McLuhan long ago realized, is the diffusion of knowledge across the entire web of humanity. And as far as verbal knowledge is concerned, unless we find a planet somewhere that's all forest, that means e-books by the billion. END
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