How dumb can you get?

According to Andrew Keen, writing in The Telegraph (17th of September) ‘Ebooks will make authors soulless, just like their product.’

The article is a little less simplistic than the title (great title though ‘taint it?). But in truth, the thesis is in complete accord with the title and is, I’m afraid, as dumb as a sack of hammers.

Let’s go highbrow and work our way down from there and look at the real world.

Jacques Derrida tackled this one pretty comprehensively in his book Paper Machine where he addressed the confusion between the book as strata and the book as the contents. He pointed out that in a digital age we better get used to books coming in a range of forms many of which won’t be in series bound with glue.

Derrida states: ’Finally, the question of the book should not be conflated with that of supports.’ And in scholarly fashion he goes on to address the manifold ways in which the function of the book has already been supported in bookless fashions: but in truth Derrida does such a lovely job of proving the Book is not the book that I would be wasting my time repeating it here. Google carries the whole text (but not the book) here; the essay is called The Book to Come.

But on a more practical level electronic texts don’t mean e-book readers. I know that Sony and Philips have been trying to say they do, but they don’t really.

What they do mean is incredibly cheap access to books on demand on potentially on any web enabled device. They mean a class in rural South Africa being able to access the Project Gutenberg’s 30000 free texts. They mean a traveller being able to take a library on a plane. They mean Danish language texts being made available to Danes when their national publishers can’t afford the production costs. They mean trees not being cut down to print books that no one ever reads and that end up being turned into domestic insulation.

The argument over access to knowledge (and narrative) has always been one of elites attempting to restrict access for ‘the good of the little people’, who, it is implied lack the wit or expertise to consume wisely or contribute positively to the pool of literature. (Look up the debates around number of presses, the origins of the print unions and government control of printing in Western Europe following Gutenberg.)

So not only does increased access to text serve the little people of the planet it also means the end to literary pseuds at book fairs in Brazil. So huzzah for the e-book!