The Digital Sphere: Opportunity for Growth or Existential Threat?

The International Conference on the Book has long served as an inclusive forum for a wide range interests and concerns. It welcomes people from a breadth of academic disciplines and professional areas and continues this spirit of openness at the 2010 Book Conference in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

At the same time, the conference also highlights especially important issues facing the book in this era of flux. Consequently, this year’s Book Conference will feature a panel session focusing on the publishing industry and its relationship to the growing influence of digital technologies. The panel will feature distinguished experts on publishing who will consider the key question: The Digital Sphere: Opportunity for Growth or Existential Threat? More…

From n+1 magazine…

This essay is forthcoming in The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. Soft Skull. March 2011.

Much of your life is now spent traveling along the American Northeast, from Baltimore to Boston. Like many who’ve plowed back and forth along this route, you’ve grown overly familiar with the spectacle of ruined industry. The railroad runs past hundreds of abandoned factories. Their graffiti-covered brickwork, their broken windows, the rusted hulks of machinery displayed in their fissured and weed-strewn vacant lots summon a sense of an age gone missing. Gone the glovers of Newark, the machinists of North Philadelphia, the arms manufacturers of Connecticut; gone the textile mills, tanneries, and foundries. In their place rose up salvage shops, junkyards, crack dens, slag piles, allegories of post-industrial American despair. Journeys along these lines can make you feel a bit like Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” facing backwards, into the past, while blown forward by “the storm called progress,” the divine wind the Japanese call “kamikaze,” which heaps ruin on ruin, disaster on disaster. Except you are not moving forward, really, but back and forth, along the same tracks, past, present, and future strung in tension like all the wires, once visible, above ground, now running below. One person’s progress is another’s downfall, an opportunity taken is an opportunity taken from someone else. Those injuns didn’t even know what it was to own land. More…

From Claire Cain Miller at The New York Times…

Monday was a day for the history books — if those will even exist in the future.

Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.

In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

The pace of change is quickening, too, Amazon said. In the last four weeks sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. Amazon has 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of books sold on the site.

Book lovers mourning the demise of hardcover books with their heft and their musty smell need a reality check, said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “This was a day that was going to come, a day that had to come,” he said. He predicts that within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions. More…

From n+1 magazine…

In response or in addition to the two essays on the future of reading and writing, we’ve asked the authors, as well as editor Mark Greif, to answer us two questions.

1. Along with everyone else, n+1 seems to have grown increasingly gloomy about the “future of the book.” How is the current bout of gloom similar to past worries about the destruction of mind by technology and other entertainments (the railroads, TV)?

2. How is it different?

Answers below.

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Benjamin Kunkel:

I think probably people’s fears about the intellectual effects of TV and even the railroads were justified enough: TV would cause you to zone out and the railroad journey would mean you didn’t notice the same things about the countryside that Goethe did when he traveled to Italy by carriage. For that matter I think cheap printing was in its way a destructive technology, in that people presumably read less epic and lyric poetry and more novels, mostly bad ones, and certainly a lot more newspapers. They’d already entered the shallows. More…