Ebooks: It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

austinkleon:

Exhibit A: Jonathan Franzen

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….Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change….Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

Exhibit B: Maurice Sendak

Fuck them, I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be, I will be dead, I won‘t give a shit.

Now — who do you want to hang out with?

Uh, both of them, por favor. Franzen may be a bit long-winded, but he’s not wrong. If he were pitching me that speech over a bottle of whiskey in a bar I would nod/slam my drink down in passion/yell, “Yeah!!” at the appropriate moments. Plus he’s a mite awkward in interviews, so leave my Jonathan alone. But yeah, there’s no doubting Sendak’s badassery.