The unstable text

In an interview widely reported today, the American novelist, Jonathan Franzen, reveals his preference for the pbook (the physical book) as opposed to the ebook. He comments: "Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that’s reassuring. Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9047981/Jonathan-Franzen-e-books-are-damaging-society.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter). Here, Franzen seems to suggest that the literary afficionado functions best through the printed book, particularly because of its place in time and place (close to how Walter Benjamin describes 'aura'). But, contrary to Franzen's belief in the fragility and impermanence of the digital medium, Matt Kirschenbaum, and others, have concluded that the digital--in each individual instantiation of a 'text'--is as permanent or 'fixed', as 'fixable', as anything printed (see Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination [MIT Press, 2007]).

This may well, at the level of the byte, say, be true, but it is also to assume, as Franzen does here, that print itself is unchanging, irrevocably the same each time the printed book is encountered. This cannot be true, particularly with regard to a book's materiality which inevitably degrades, or is altered through being handled, or collects dust. For the 'text' itself (which I would regard as inseparable from the artefact's materiality)--widely understood as the words or images on the page--these change, of course. They change from imprint to imprint and from edition to edition, even if only through an updated paratext, a newly designed cover, the emendation of an earlier error, or, on a grander scale, multiple editorial interventions.

The distinction between the digital and the physical artefact ('analogue') as a distinction between the transient and the fixed, the impermanent and the stable, the immaterial and the material is not a useful one. And, just a reminder for all the post-1500 readers: it is through a detailed understanding of manuscript culture that one might better understand the nature of TEXT in its broadest sense. It is there that the idea of the eventful text is most easily investigated and analysed and there that the efforts to make human endeavour permanent can most clearly and poignantly be seen.

The pbook

I was privileged to spend time yesterday with Gary Frost, the University of Iowa's book conservation specialist, and a quite exceptional thinker. We discussed the future of the print book ahead of this afternoon's roundtable on that subject, at which we are both participants. Gary talked about the need to maintain an 'authentic witness' to the book even as we busily digitise and remove books from the shelves of the libraries at our institutions. He suggested that as we whittle down physical collections on our campuses, all the remainders will, effectively, become 'Special Collections'. The pbook (the 'physical book' as opposed to the ebook: see http://frontofstore.org/) will eventually become an object of curiosity to be looked at in a glass case. I can barely bring myself to believe this could be true, but the time for considering what we are doing as a world of readers and users of books is now. Technological inevitablism--a passivity in the face of the dramatic changes to the way we do our intellectual business--is simply not an option. Who controls what happens? Who can say 'Stop! Let's think about what we're doing?' I have no idea, but this is a start. So, to the 'think tanks' and the Digital obsessors and space savers, I would insist we hang on just a sec while we work out what it is that we think we're doing, and more to the point, why? The decisions that are made now are significant: whether or not to move the book from the shelf to storage; whether or not to join the Big 12 Universities and agree to share one copy of the real book retained and stored in Indiana, and digitise the rest. Libraries then reinvent themselves as 'Learning Commons', or, as at FSU, 'Scholars Commons' (an ironic vacuous space filled with nothing at all to aid the scholar, and where even the name with its absent apostrophe suggests the demise of traditional intellectualism). At this point, two thousand years of learning through libraries becomes something different, and while different doesn't always mean 'worse', what will the end result be? I'm not a prophet, so I don't know. But I do know that moving books to remote storage and replacing them with space-saving ebooks (force-feeding students by loaning ebook-readers) is not the answer to the current demands of technology and financial constraints. Why not? Simple, really. An ebook is NOT a book; it is something different--a simulacrum at best, a contextless mimic at worst--and it is thus not a case of replacing like-with-like. As Gary commented to me, the University Libraries are the gatekeepers of knowledge, and the guardians of traditional scholarship. Are any of them really thinking about the consequences of their knee-jerk strategies? What they choose to do now matters more than most of them realise, I suspect.