Laura Miller's discussion of video-book hybrids, found here, made me laugh. Her summary of the critiquing of new 'book' technologies is pretty accurate:
"Someone is called upon to say the sky is falling and to scold book publishers for being behind the times ... Then someone stuffier is summoned to detect the imminent fall of Western Civilization presaged by people's unwillingness to read great literature anymore. ... And, finally, the geek punditocracy steps in to sniffily announce that although printed books are indeed doomed, this particular alternative is hopelessly lame, created by clueless print-oriented geezers who can't see that the real future lies in some yet-to-be-imagined, fantastically entertaining fusion of emerging media that our poor, reeling, post-adolescent brains can't hope to conceptualize."
She also makes a good point about the Twilight saga: it appears that 'digital natives' are quite capable of reading good, old-fashioned printed text if the story is appealing enough to them.
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Personally, I'm not a huge fan of them. I read about them in the Japanese Times magazine (obviously the english version) about 2 years ago-how far are we behind??- and thought the same. The aesthetics just aren't there.
ReplyDeleteThe bit about the geek was funny. I read a lot of technology blogs, and you would not beleive how much geeks complain about everything (in the comment section). They feel that because they watch sci-fi movies, and can imagine some sort of technological future, that anything which is released today - no matter how spectacular or amazing - is in fact terribe, outdated and lame.
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