I’ve been meaning to write about the blog-to-book phenomenon but the A.V. Club has saved me the trouble. Their delightful roundup/rundown “Why buy the cow? 27 popular websites that became books” shows that while there is much to be maligned, there is also much to be celebrated.
Yes, some of the sites (and their subsequent books) cited in the article are shallow, infantile, unessential and perhaps even contributing to the decline of our culture. (I’m looking at you, Stuff on My Cat.)
But there are also examples of writers and artists who used the Web to find an audience for otherwise unmarketable projects. If you’re not an established writer (and increasingly if you are) it’s getting harder and harder to sell projects that are perceived as too small, too quirky or even too voice-driven. It’s encouraging to see that the Web can provide a back door.
Still, there is a larger question behind the A.V. Club’s feature. What do we want out of books?
Is a book just a shape an idea can come in? Or are books a form whose unique qualities need to be articulated, respected and perhaps even fought for?
Do we reject books that aren’t sufficiently book-like (whatever we decide that is)? Or do we embrace anyone and everyone in the hopes that a healthy book industry will ultimately take care of the good even as it tolerates the bad?
Tags: books, internet, publishing
yep, interesting questions…
-bowerbird
Interesting to me that The Onion’s AV Club made a seemingly utterly arbitrary distinction between “websites” and “zines,” haughtily discounting the latter. This got The Onion itself off the hook for consideration, by coincidence. (And where would, say, McSweeney’s fall?)
I think my frame of mind while reading on the Web (er, not counting DCWYTBMA, of course) closely resembles that while reading a book of trivia, or of lists, or quotations. Which is one reason why (just speaking of electronic media) I think I’ll prefer Kindles and such over the Web — fewer distractions (especially of the bogus attention-getting “interactive” “Web 2.0″ kind). Just me and the text, happy again.
I read so much on-screen that it’s getting tough for me to discern the differences in expectation from different media. I think my expectations are wide open online but more refined in books. (Though defining that might take more time than I have right now.)
I do think online content must be simplified though, in comparison to books. It’d make an interesting study to explore why this is.
And I do so love to curl on the couch or bed with my paperbacks. No kindle or laptop can quite replace it. I think books provide a tactile connection that electric formats just can’t duplicate. It almost feels as if the author typed up the book and bound it just for me.
@bets: I too an reading more and more online and finding it hard to make distinctions. Still, I hope that the book as an art form is more than just the tactile experience of holding its sweet pages. It would be like saying that what makes a movie a movie is the movie theater experience.
The book conveys more authority. It has a history. A team of people sweated over it for a long time before it reached me. Online content, who knows? Maybe someone sweated and worried and fretted. Maybe someone banged it out in 5 minutes. My expectations are much higher for books. I expect books to deliver a more thoughtful message and a more complete experience. Online, I expect to see the easy stuff for the short attention span… and the occasional thoughtful piece (which is frequently excerpted from a printed publication). I would never read a novel online, and I would never buy a coffee table book about lolcats.
I’ve just recently read two (awesome!) books online. I read my fellow critters’ books on-screen. I read my OWN books on-screen all the time.
I still think the tactile experience is important, just like all those folks who say “Oh I got to see that one in the theater” even though they’ve got a $30K one down in the basement. Or like those folks who do final proofs on paper (like me).
There are different ways to experience art and media, but some are obviously inferior. Reading a book online or watching a movie on TV might be a bit like seeing a print of an Impressionism painting. You can appreciate the beauty, but without seeing it in person, you can’t experience it the way the artist intended.
P.S. Reading Lars’s and bets’s comments, and then going back to my own, I realized a possible point of confusion, in this: “I think I’ll prefer Kindles and such over the Web.”
That does NOT mean I’ll prefer reading “over [i.e., on] the Web”; it means, like, in the sense of “I prefer this over [i.e., rather than] that other thing.”
Frankly can’t stand the thought of reading a book within a Web browser, sitting at a computer. But I don’t think Kindle-ized reading is all that far off, and I think it will resemble reading plain-old books much more than browsing the Web.
@JES: Or is the Kindle-ized reading its own form? Do books become more like games???