This trailer, from the New Zealand Book Council, really gets me excited.
I was thinking about books the other day (I often do), and it occurred to me that the reason book sales haven't slumped like magazine sales have or taken the free-fall that newspapers have in the last few years is because the printed book, particularly the novel, is probably the perfect medium for the experience of reading.
A word about reading: it is more than simply consuming text. You're consuming text right now, but are you reading? The practice of reading, especially of reading fiction, has as much to do with imagining as it does with comprehension. That's why literature persists as a cultural touchstone in the Youtube era. Electronic media have specific advantages: immediacy, collaboration, and connectivity. Novels operate on a longer timeline, so they have to be different.
I'd go so far as to say the folks who fear the demise of the novel are anxious about the end of an exceptional period in human history - a minor blip in the intellectual average - we know as literacy. Literacy is a bit of misnomer, since it isn't the ability to comprehend text that's at risk, but rather a widely held fluency in the language of the written word which affects societies in some unexpected ways.
The NZBC ad above emphasizes the connection between the book as a material object and its ability to engage the imagination and produce entire worlds. It addresses the anatomy of the printed book as a medium in its spectral, ghostly sense. Books perform things for us when we read them. We get inside heads that aren't "real", but are inseparable from the subjective reality of their narrators. The book, so unassuming and invisible as a medium will probably be around a long, long time even with the Kindle clawing at the market-share. I think that because the book has already proven to be a persistent medium while other print media have languished.
But what do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment