Fiction meets tech

I admit I am a voracious fiction reader – mostly of books my mother would not approve of me reading. While I do like a graceful writing style and am growing increasingly intolerant of clumsy novelists, I still like in large doses sex, mayhem, murder, mystery and, well, more sex, murder, mayhem and mystery. I appreciate any genre –sci fi, historical fiction, thriller, technical manual – that includes sex, mayhem, murder, and mystery.

In my article on e-books, I speculated:

From reports of developing technologies, one may safely conclude a true e-book:…
Will change the nature of “fiction.” Many writers may experiment with text that is customizable by the end user for both artistic and commercial purposes. The reader may substitute the name of his or her current inamorata or inamorato for the protagonist (or murder victim). The latest Stephen King can be set to mild, scary or terrifying, or Harold Robbins to suggestive, lurid, or … well, let’s not go there. Video games and fiction may merge and the skills and choices of the reader/player may determine the outcome of the plot. Today’s most highly rated video games are plot-driven. Metal Gear Solid: the Twin Snakes is an example, according to my gamer son.

What great fun for those of us who are not literary purists. (Although I have enough English major in my bones to think that an electronic book in which George lets Lenny live or Beowulf gets bested by Grendel’s mom would somehow lead to the eventual collapse of civilization.)

It’s fun to see a couple other folks thinking on the same lines:

Once we have cheap e-books, the medium by which we read will also be a medium by which can write and respond. Reading will cease being a solitary act and will become a social one. You can see this already with blogs. David Weinberger's JoHo the Blog

Can the Sims or Second Life be considered a work of on-going fiction? Is e-mail correspondence ever literature? Are there novels in blog form in existence? (Dickens, after all, made his fortune by serializing his novels.)

Julia  Keller in her article,  Plugged in Proust, Nov 27 Chicago Tribune, writes:

Literature, like all genres, is being reimagined and remade by the constantly unfolding extravagance of technological advances. The question of who's in charge -- the producer or the consumer -- is increasingly relevant to the literary world. The idea of the book as an inert entity is gradually giving way to the idea of the book as a fluid, formless repository for an ever-changing variety of words and ideas by a constantly modified cast of writers.

English teachers beware!

 
Are hypertext minds be more likely to read hypertext novels? How would you like your favorite recreational reading material to take advantage of electronic publication? Or would you just as soon it didn’t? 

First iTunes, now iPages? Is this end of libraries as we know them?

From the Associated Press Friday, November 4, 2005
Amazon.com to sell individual book pages
NEW YORK -- With its new Amazon Pages service, Amazon.com Inc. plans to let customers to buy portions of a book - even just one page - for online viewing. A second program, Amazon Upgrade, will offer full online access when a traditional text is purchased.
Both services are expected to begin next year.
"We see this as a win-win-win situation: good for readers, good for publishers and good for authors," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told The Associated Press on Thursday.
For Amazon Pages, Bezos said, the cost for most books would be a few cents per page, although readers would likely be charged more for specialized reference works. Under Amazon Upgrade, anybody purchasing a paper book could also look at the entire text online, at any time, for a "small" additional charge, Bezos said. For instance, a $20 book might cost an extra $1.99.

For this librarian-at-heart, this is a mindbender. And it doesn’t just rock my world, but has raised “the level of concern” among other librarians as well. This e-mail came a day or so ago:

Do you know how libraries are going to fit into this kind of plan? Will we be able to purchase the electronic version along with the print version?  Will we be able to allow our patrons access to the online version whenever they check out the real book?  Will they be able to download just a page of it?  The implications for libraries are enormous.  Do you know what gurus might be out there making sure that libraries have a place at this table, so that book information does not eventually become the exclusive domain of the wealthy?

I even got a call from School Library Journal today asking for my thoughts about this announcement. (Desperate people, there at SLJ.)

I really wish my crystal ball wasn’t at the cleaners. I am not sure how to take this.

One of the primary reasons for libraries has always been that a collection of materials shared is more economical than everybody buying their own resources. See “Common Sense Economy.”

Does being able to buy one page or chapter at a time for pennies, change the entire economic model for obtaining “print” information?

First a few of probabilities.

• Anything in the public domain or out of copyright is or soon will be available electronically. Project Gutenberg  has been running since the days when Gopher was the search engine du jour and now has 16,000 books available.
• Google Print is trying to make available every other book that it can by scanning whole libraries. (It’s running into some objections, probably futile, from publishers and authors who want to be paid for their efforts.)
• iTunes is providing an economic model that basically suggests that it is as profitable to sell a million songs for a buck as selling 50,000 albums for 20 bucks.
• The iTunes sales model may actually close the digital divide. If I am poor, I may not be able to buy a $20 album, but I can buy a $.99 iTune. I may not be able to buy a $25 book, but I might be able to afford a $2.50 chapter from a book.
• Kids and lots of adults are finding accessing information electronically more appealing than finding it in print. No, we don’t have a practical e-book reader available now, but ultra-portable laptops and handhelds are getting there. The latest iPods show video (and will, of course, play audio books). Will the next ones have a screen that makes digital reading easy on the eyes?

So what are the implications for libraries? I wish I knew. I can’t answer any of the questions above about Amazon’s licensing agreements with libraries. Does Amazon itself know? Who are the library mucky-mucks looking out for libraries? I doubt ALA's been asked to the table.

As I and others  have suggested, libraries may well need to become something other than storehouses of “free” (taxpayer purchased) information. When the majority of patrons can find or economically purchase (prices will fall for books as increased volume in purchasing lowers prices without hurting the publisher’s bottom line), what’s the use of libraries? Well,..

• Physical libraries can still be terrific places to “be.” (Coffee shops, community centers, places to work in groups.)
• Physical libraries can still be terrific place to learn how to find, understand and use information if the librarians are really teachers.
• Physical libraries can still be places to excite people about learning through events and activities.
• And, of course, the one no librarian wants to hear, libraries can still be places where children can be “contained” so parents or classroom teachers get a break.

What else can or should libraries be? What is the need for a library when the cost of information isn’t much of a factor, especially for the taxpaying and voting middle class? (Those on the wrong side of the digital divide aren't a political force, like it or not.)

 
On a side note, personally I am going to LOVE being able to buy a page of a book. Think of the convenience and economy. The LWW is currently reading Ellis’s American Sphinx : The Character of Thomas Jefferson. Let’s hypothetically say I am doing research on Lewis and Clark. I can either...

• Drive 20 miles into town to the public library (and hope it’s not a night it closes at 5PM).
• Find the book (if it is not checked out).
• Find the chapter that focuses on L&C.
• Pay $.25 per page to print the relevant pages.
• Drive home. (Think of those gas prices!)
• Retype the quotes I want into my paper.

or

• Do an Amazon search.
• Locate the pages I want from the Ellis book.
• Pay my pennies.
• Copy and paste the info into my paper (properly cited of course).
  

And this is from someone who believes in libraries! Help. I need your thoughts! What can or should ALA be doing?