My Heart is Breaking through the Demise of my Beloved Book
I haven’t written here for a while. It’s not because I haven’t been reading – I have. In fact, I have read as much, if not more than usual but I haven’t found the heart to write about it. But I have returned to the blog because there are several things which are happening at the moment which I feel so passionately about that it hurts. The first is the loss of the well thought out text. And the second is the demise of the paper book as eBook readers become the latest technology to have.
The Well Thought Out Text
One of the things I love about reading is to immerse myself in the language of a book, poem or article. I love reading works which have clearly taken time to produce. I love reading works which have been researched, mulled over, rewritten, edited, researched further and have genuinely come from the intellectual heart of the author. Unfortunately, due to the ease of production both online and offline, and the fact that the world as I know it is getting faster and faster, demands on time are greater and greater, and the drive to produce content before the next person does is greater than ever, there is a lot of writing out there which is truly awful.
Sadly, it isn’t just on the internet, although I would hazard a guess that around 80% of the writing on the internet is utter crap. Trying to filter the decent writing from the rubbish is a challenge in itself. The beauty of the printed word is that it should have seen the pen of an editor, although scanning newspapers nowadays, even print is not immune to slapdash content production. Sadly, many self-published books fall into the same category. Had they actually been in front of an editor, they too would have been scrapped or relegated to someone’s personal diary space or the old exercise books on the shelf which never saw the light of day.
Which is one of the reasons I haven’t been reviewing. Honestly, if I value the time and effort that people put in to proper reviews (which I do) then I have no right to just throw something out there, whether it is my blog or not. I have mentioned before how dissatisfied I often feel with my writing, and part of that is down to the fact that I haven’t spent the time on it that I should. I am currently trying my hand at writing an actual book, and I have given myself time – time to research, plan, think, experiment, and research more. Unless I can do that with my book reviewing, then I don’t think I am ever going to find true satisfaction with it.
I don’t want well thought out writing to vanish the same way that handwritten letters have. So I feel I need to be part of the dwindling crusade to retain it…
Which leads me on to the other thing I am passionate about, and which I want to explore further in this blog.
The Demise of the Paper Book
If all of the stories on the internet are to be believed, by the time I am an old lady, I will no longer be able to enjoy the pleasure of reading a book in any other form than on a mini computer, pressing buttons or swiping screens rather than turning pages. Apparently, paper books are going to disappear in 5 years, 10 years or 50 years (depending on which futurist you care to listen to). The virtues of the eBook reader are being touted everywhere and I don’t doubt that technology will win out. I am not so deluded to believe that progress won’t continue. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
The thought of not being able to flick through the pages of a book, smell the paper, feel it in my hands, pick it off my bookshelf or discover it in a little second-hand shop truly breaks my heart. All of the benefits of ‘sharing’ and ‘collaborating’ and ‘changing the text on the fly’ and ‘carrying a million books around at once’ (all well and good, but remember we still only exist on this planet for 70 or 80 years and in that time we can still only read several thousand books) are great, but they do nothing to ease my heartache. I adore books and I always will. I adore the feel of a new book when it arrives. I love holding books of 500 pages or more. I love hunting bookshelves whether in a library, in my own house or in a shop. I love the peace that comes from sitting with myself and a book knowing that nothing can get in the way – no-one can intrude, no-one can demand anything of me, I don’t have to chat to anyone or justify anything. The battery won’t go flat, there is no ‘collaboration’ or ‘conversation’ (I will choose when I want that), the words will always be there without ever going obsolete or demanding me to upgrade or buy a new device. The publisher can’t take my pages from me, or change what they say. I can close the book and hand it to someone, or leave it somewhere for someone else to enjoy. Perhaps these things that I love so much are going to be things of the past, but that doesn’t mean I can’t lament them. I constantly lament the loss of the letter even though I know that all we have now (and I suspect all we will have from now) is the impersonal, dashed-off email. And I will lament the loss of the book.
Yes, I am getting old. This is the first time I have felt it – the first time I have looked at a new technology and thought ‘I can’t do this’. This is the first time I have felt myself resisting not because it isn’t practical, but because emotionally, I don’t want to be forced to give up the thing I love. I know people far older than me who think I am being ridiculous. That is their opinion. I know people far older than me who have told me to ‘get with it’ but I just won’t. Technology is inevitable. It gives you a lot, but it also takes a lot away. I am only on this planet for another, maybe 50 years. It isn’t long. In that time, I want to maintain at least one of the things which makes me happy. Destroy the last paper book the day after I die (or better still, bury it with me) but I for one will still be reading them as long as I possibly can, even if I am the only person in the world to do so.
[...] what I was producing. I talked a little bit about why I hadn’t been keeping my book blog up to date here and some of the sentiments are just as applicable on this blog. Mediocrity annoys me, particularly [...]