Sherman Young

Professing to love the book, Young's prescription to save "book culture" is to eliminate books (think "burning the village to save the village"). Texts will be accessible digitally (he wrote before Kindle, but that's the kind of thing he imagined), but the physical book should be eliminated. He does accurately capture the essence of what he has termed "book culture," and even relevantly identified some of the problems. Unfortunately, his solution is foolishness and counterproductive. At the very least, by privileging the atomic unit (the book and/or text), he dismisses the possibility of any emergent values from collections of books. Hence, his discussion of libraries is brief, and dismissive: they should destroy their collections and make electronic resources available. Many have in fact done this, but it is questionable whether we're still talking about "libraries" in such cases. Bookstores fare even worse. Because there's no aftermarket for his idealized "heavenly library," reading will become the privilege of those who can afford the expensive readers (whether dedicated, or even cell phones). He essentially argues not what books are for, but what books are for, for him, and finds that all he gains from encounters with books (either individually or in the aggregate) can be attained by dealing with the eviscerated contents delivered electronically. But that's not what books are about, and he doesn't defend why his own preferences should stand as the proxy for Everyone else. Current research has shown that many of his premises are in fact mistaken. The way people approach electronic text is not interchangeable with the way they work with paper, meaning that we can only inhabit the world of no books, only ebooks, if we're prepared to be satisfied with "good enough" skimming for information, rather than, as he seemed to begin his work, reading deeply for ideas.

All in all, we well intentioned, even well-executed, but ultimately myopic meditation on the future of the book.… (mehr)

Being a huge lover of books I was immediately drawn to this title if at the very least to poo-poo the authors ideas, but I found that Sherman Young has put together some good arguments that the ‘physical’ book is dead or dying. His overview of the current state of publishing along with the costs of marketing a physical book are sobering. The inevitable improvement in the quality and useability of eReaders will clearly allow eBooks to follow a similar path to that of music and to a certain degree television & movies. I personally see both ‘old’ and ‘new’ book formats coexisting for some time to come – the physical book has been around for quite a while now and not everyone is ‘e‘ savvy. Sherman somewhat checkmates himself in an early chapter exclaiming that “nobody reads”. Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with his arguments, I struggle to see where his fondness for a holistic digital (online) approach to the provision of books will improve the malaise.… (mehr)