Two big pieces of digital publishing news this week: first, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle Fire – the ‘iPad killer’. Then yesterday, the launch of Bloomsbury Reader: a new digital imprint resurrecting hundreds of out-of-print titles by HRF Keating, Storm Jameson, VS Pritchett and other writers that used to be famous.
It has never been a better time to be a reader. Why then is there still an underlying suspicion of digital publishing? You can understand the wariness from some in the book trade, which was late to digital and is now terrified of getting a raw deal.
What I don’t get is the facetious luddism of the anti-ereader brigade, whose arguments range from the boringly practical (‘you can’t read a Kindle in the bath/in the sun /on a bicycle’) to the faintly fetishistic (‘nothing can replace the earthy smell, the velvety touch…’).
Because what they ignore, and the technologically jaded forget, is the wondrous power of technology to connect us to hundreds, thousands of years of civilization. Thanks to Project Gutenberg and now the opening up of publishers’ backlists, an internet connection gives you access to tens of millions of books in the palm of your hand, at the touch of a button.
How sad it’s impossible to celebrate ereading without sounding like a poor man’s Don Draper. We could all do with stepping back and looking at the bigger picture. Literally. Go to the V&A and stand in front of their reproduction of The School of Athens: imagine stepping inside there and whipping out a Kindle. Aristotle, Plato and Socrates would fall at your feet and worship you like a god.
The digital revolution (what a tired-sounding phrase for something so colossally important) is not just about the future, it’s a gateway to our entire cultural heritage.
And it couldn’t have come at a better time. Publishing, like everything really, is dangerously obsessed with the new. Read a blurb nowadays, or, heaven forbid, follow a book publicist on Twitter, and you will start to believe that X really is ‘the most outstanding, groundbreaking, revolutionary book ever published’ until you actually read it and hurl it at the wall in frustration, vowing never to read anything published after 1985.
Digital publishing, by unlocking the door to two millennia of artistic and intellectual thought, means that new storeys, or stories, can be built on steadier foundations.
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