Brian Burns

Alan Kaufman’s article entitled, ‘The Electronic Book Burning’, in the most recent issue (No. 120) of the Evergreen Review, provides a hard-hitting assessment of digital publishing from the prospective of a Jewish-American novelist, memoirist and poet.

As a progressive, I’m never going to see eye to eye with Kaufman’s conservative stance regarding (and resistance towards) where the publishing industry is inevitably heading. I embrace technological advancements in publishing; that’s not to say that I’m a book-basher. I appreciate the printed word for all that it has enabled man-kind to achieve. Therefore, I’m saddened to read that so many book stores in San Francisco’s Bay Area have had to close.

It’s getting increasingly hard to find a decent bookstore that stocks a selection of titles that appeal to designers such as myself. Nowadays, I rarely get an opportunity to browse through a book before buying it.

On a recent trip to the Design Museum in London, I found myself surrounded by an array of distinguished titles. Having a second or two to flick through chapters allowed me to decide if the books were worth buying. While online-features such as Amazon’s “Look Inside” and the Kindle’s “Samples” attempt to replicate this process, they can never hope to mimic the experience of having a tangible object to examine.

It isn’t hard to see why book stores are shutting-up shop though. I could have walked out of the Design Museum with a bundle of books. I didn’t. They’re cheaper to buy online and they get delivered to my doorstep. Some are even cheaper to purchase and download as a PDF.

I’m more than willing to pay the going rate for top-quality literature. I’m staunchly against the idea of introducing a $10 cap for all ebook titles. However, with that taken into account, if I’m presented with an option to pay less for the exact same content in digital format (removing printing costs from the equation), I’d select that option more often than not. For my generation, surrendering the hands-on experience is a price worth paying. Screen based alternatives suffice. While a young Kaufman aspired to see his work printed and bound, today a budding-author will have an equally burning desire to one day, see her published prose in pixel format on a Kindle or in an iPhone app.

It’s a heart-wrenching state of affairs when cultural institutions (especially those with emotional & reminiscential attachments) are forced to make way for the modern, innovative and more-efficient. Alas, it’s a sign of changing times. Just as Gutenberg was unpopular at the scriptorium, innovators of our age are ruffling more than a few pages at the bookstore.