Sven Birkerts resists the Kindle

Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies, has an article in The Atlantic about the Kindle-izing of books. It is probably a disservice to snippet him, but here are some excerpts:

Why, then, am I so uneasy about the page-to-screen transfer—a skeptic if not a downright resister? Perhaps it is because I see in the turning of literal pages—pages bound in literal books—a compelling larger value, and perceive in the move away from the book a move away from a certain kind of cultural understanding, one that I’m not confident that we are replacing, never mind improving upon.

[...]

The Kindle is just a device and the Kindle experience is still mainly about text and reader (and convenience and cost-savings)—I know that. But we should not forget that the sum of reader-text encounters creates our cultural landscape. So if it happens that in a few decades—maybe less—we move wholesale into a world where information and texts are called onto the screen by the touch of a button, and libraries survive as information centers rather than as repositories of printed books, we will not simply have replaced one delivery system with another. We will also have modified our imagination of history, our understanding of the causal and associative relationships of ideas and their creators. We may gain an extraordinary dots-per-square-inch level of access to detail, but in the process we will lose much of our sense of the woven narrative consistency of the story. That is the trade-off. Access versus context.

Link: Resisting the Kindle.

I think he has a point, and Birkerts is a valuable voice to have on this issue, but I feel like his arguments against e-books are getting more and more tenuous. He's not so much warning us of a negative effect now as warning us about change itself and the uncertainty it brings.

Regarding the loss of context, I'm tempted to recommend George W. S. Trow's Within the Context of No Context, but honestly I haven't retained a thing from reading that book besides the title... maybe it's relevant, maybe not. I'm clearly failing at literary-luddite comprehension today.

Update: Here's a smarter post by Scott Esposito on the same topic: Sven Birkerts Still Harping on Context.

Comments

[Chris Weagel]

I've been using the internet in some for over a decade at this point, spend a large portion of my day chained to a computer and make media for a living. I'm 27 and as such am supposed to be totally hooked into this digital world and totally beyond all previous mediums.

But the opposite is true.

Working so much on a screen and online has given me a greater appreciation for the strengths of other, older media. The permanence, the stillness, the ease of use, the durability of even Newsprint really impresses me after years of making pixels dance.

I love the feel, craftsmanship, and finiteness of a book. I love holding them and nothing else. They are a fantastic escape and relief from this relentless online geyser.

There's endless fretting about everything online being recorded and stored for all time and readily available for call up and how this will haunt each of us til the grave. I don't worry about it much, though, during a black out or when I look at a pile of Zip disks in my drawer.

A few years ago, I was part of a group of video makers that met online that eventually began sending one another postcards and handwritten letters.

I don't hate online media, I just recognize its limitations. I also recognize that all the supposed limitations of existing media are instead strengths. If my local newspaper printed the amazing full page, lavish comic strips they did 100 years ago, I'd buy it everyday. All the online comics and animation can't top the experience of holding something like that in front of you, covering the table and your meal at once. Plus I can draw on it or wrap it around a gift or wad it up and throw it at someone's face.

I love that my radio has one on/off switch and a volume dial. I won't ever have to download some damn software patch or plugin. I just wish they'd broadcast some interesting programming.

Each has its place in my life. I don't understand the impulse to centralize everything into one media that erases all others.

[Josh]

I am not a blind fan of technology, but I found Birkerts' arguments weak.

Birkerts’ reference to Gutenberg in the title of his book is fitting. As I read his article, I couldn’t help but thinking of a story Clay Shirky tells in his book Here Comes Everybody. Shirky writes about the scribes - an elite group of literate monks - whose job it was, for many centuries, to hand-copy books. That is, until the 1400’s when Gutenberg came along. “Suddenly,” writes Josh Benton, describing the scene, “scribes were no longer a necessary link between knowledge and learner.” And as the printing press spread across Europe, the scribes sounded remarkably like Birkerts, warning of all that we will lose if we allow technology to reshape reading.

I wrote a longer piece on this issue:
http://stearns.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/on-not-resisting-the-kindle/