This was the provocative title of BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves programme yesterday evening. Philip Dodd chaired a panel in Alnwick made up of novelists David Almond and Louise Welsh, historian Sheila Hingley, and Chris Meade, co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, which discussed the rising popularity of e-readers and the consequences of this new technology for readers, writers, and publishers.
Amongst the panel and the audience there was widespread agreement that reading books is a multi-sensory experience involving more than ‘reading text’. Hingley commented that a book is ‘more than a vehicle for text’, and we wouldn’t want to ‘curl up in bed with a piece of plastic’. Many audience members shared personal stories illustrating the importance of the physical as well as the intellectual and emotional pleasure of the book as a distinctive object to be shared and treasured – elements of reading which are absent from the experience of the e-reader.
Louise Welsh insisted on the democracy of the book in contrast with the expensive e-reader. She reminded us that a history of reading involves a history of access to knowledge, and suggested that because it costs hundreds times more than a cheap paperback, the e-reader is a less democratic medium for reading. As Jason’s most recent post here highlighted however, other manifestations of digital media have been responsible on an immeasurable scale for the democratisation of knowledge and writing. The panel praised the possibilities of the internet, such as fan fiction sites, through which readers can increasingly become writers themselves. David Almond pointed out that children and young people are a significant constituency of this democracy of reading and writing. While he said it was patronising to suggest that young people today are so familiar with screen technologies that books do not appeal to them, he noted that children’s literature in particular has been creative and experimental with different forms of and beyond the printed book, and should not be overlooked in this kind of debate.
Most enthusiastic about digital books was Chris Meade, who suggested that Dickens or Blake would have been excited by the opportunities offered by the e-reader. To be suspicious of the e-book on aesthetic terms is to succumb to nostalgia, he said; rather, we should resist defining ‘literature’ as something only found printed on paper, and embrace the possibilities of collaborative writing, print-on-demand, and new flexible boundaries of publication. Members of the audience drew attention to some valuable practical uses of the e-reader – a librarian from Newcastle commented that it could have significant benefits for borrowers who are limited by the size of print in books, and that with an e-reader housebound borrowers could potentially gain access to many more books than previously.
No matter how sleek and clever new screen technologies might be, the printed book is a ‘design classic’, someone put it. The e-reader looks as though it is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, and the panel agreed that we should think of this new relationship between the book and the e-book as not antagonistic and ‘either/or’, but as potentially mutually beneficial…
If you’re interested in hearing the whole debate, the programme is available to ‘listen again’ on BBC iplayer until 22 October 2010.