Tomes or Tombs?

James Crouch examines the future of books and why he thinks they will survive…

Photo Credits: Flickr user DrabikPany

If you’re an author and you’re sitting on a first-class train leaving any London terminus, you’ll probably be expecting a P45 form from your publisher sometime soon. Every journey I’ve gone on all I see are people scoffing their free coffee, tea and biscuits while looking at Kindle or another device for electronically reading books.

Even for newspapers, if you are a Times reader you are often offered a digital package alongside the standard package, where no paper is involved at all. When you think about how expensive books probably are to make compared to merely pulling together a few hundred e-pages and creating an ‘Add To Basket’ button, no wonder people are worried about the death of books.

Fortunately though, the world is not always as it seems. Although it may seem like e-books are the new easy-to- get thing, let’s remember all the things real books still have going for them. For a start, Kindles are a decently heavy investment before you actually get anything to read. This is something I think most people will regard as a waste of money – as I do quite frankly. Especially because of how easy and cheap books have become – and I mean that as a compliment!

Amazon has become an Aladdin’s cave for almost any book you could possibly want. Big, small, thin, fat, used, new, hardback, paperback, they have the book for you. Used Twilight Saga? One whole penny? Go on, why not. Brand new prints of the classics such as the brick-like War and Peace for only two quid? Sure thing! Books have never been so cheap or so easily available.

Photo Credits: Flickr user geishaboy500

Then there are the personal things, such as gifts. A book I got from my Nan had a lovely handwritten message that you just couldn’t put on an e-book – without ruining the screen that is. And of course, nothing beats a good hardback book. Just looking at some leather-bound old books forces you to believe that they’ll be around forever.

And if that’s not enough to restore your faith in humanity’s faithful relationship with the printed and published word, just think about universities. Considering how long it takes to photocopy a chapter of some obscure thinker on the topic of methodological philosophy or some such nonsense, how long do you really think it’s going to be until the Forum Library is digitised? You’ll be waiting until kingdom come, which is, coincidentally, roughly speaking how long I think books will still be a part of our lives for.

James Crouch

Egan leads digital modernism with new Black Box

Egan’s Black Box is one to watch…

The digital book has received its strongest endorsement yet in the form of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jennifer Egan’s new book Black Box. Released in a digital-only format on 6 September, it was originally tweeted over the course of a week by The New Yorker. Egan has experimented before, for example in A Visit from the Goon Squad, where she wrote a whole chapter in the form of Powerpoint slides, but this is another level of literary invention.

So what is Black Box exactly? Structured like a poem with the concrete narrative of a short story, but built, tweet upon tweet, and broadcast online, each sentence a mere fragment in the chaos that is the Twitter timeline. One thing is certain: it is big, brave, and thrillingly new.

Inevitably the accusation of novelty lingers around Black Box. The crass triviality of a Twitter novel seems a foregone conclusion to some and an unfair presumption to others. Yes, Twitter has its fair share of ignorance, illiteracy and idiocy but that’s down to its users, not the form itself. Size matters, but in literature it’s the smaller the better. George Bernard Shaw famously wrote, “I’m sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter”, proving that the skill of concise writing should be at the top of every writer’s checklist.

Egan’s chosen form does have weaknesses and lends itself to a certain style. She is hampered by vague, simple statements like “The goal is to be both irresistible and invisible” which have a disconcerting air of the office motivational slogan about them. Impressively, Egan manages to turn this into a strength.

She validates the declarative language through her use of narrator, the words forming a kind of mission log of advice, found in the eponymous black box. This black box is stored in the mind of the unamed female narrator and tracks her progress as a futuristic spy. Don’t expect jetpacks and lasers though, this dystopian espionage is a domestic, medieval kind of female subjugation. Egan sculpts a world where countless ordinary women do their duty by temporarily surrendering their settled lives, often leaving behind a partner and kids, to seduce powerful men and obtain vital information from them.

As with any sci-fi the author’s targets are contemporary: the objectification of women, the spread of technology, social responsibility. Egan tackles all of these themes with an inspiring gusto, each simple tweet building on the last to create an unexpectedly vivid and intricate story. The digital revolution has been hailed as many things, most notably the death knell of the book as we know it. With Black Box Jennifer Egan proves that it should be grasped as a golden opportunity to reconstruct everything we thought we knew about books. Egan’s experimentation puts her at the front of a new kind of modernism, revolutionising not just the words and language but the way they are used. Ignore Black Box at your peril. It might just be the future of books.

 

Taken from Exepose print freshers edition, September 2012. Written by Tom Bond – Exepose Print Books Editor.