Supposedly the Kindle and the iPhone Kindle application are going to kill print once and for all.
Horseshit.
Print is immortal and indestructible. Print is like that one uncle that you have who has smoked and drank heavily his whole life, has numerous health problems that should have killed him stone dead ages ago, but still lives on to eat his cholesterol-packed breakfast every day. Here’s an unpleasant truth: until the last 125 years or so, print was the property of the intellectual elite, the same people that held the reigns of computing till the mid-1990s. Books were difficult to produce in quantity, and they were handwritten before movable type. The book nerds sewed bindings together. My crowd (I count myself among the people that will never surrender their books, and a computer nerd to boot,) considered books to be very, very valuable. They were packets of data that weren’t ubiquitous and took resources to copy. Less so now, but the habits are ingrained in anyone that loves books.
Computers were the same way. The only reason that people can use them now is the massive amount of resources expended to make user interfaces that an ADHD-addled chimpanzee could use. How many people do you know that could sit down in front of a Linux system without a fancy UI and be able to use the command prompt to do things? I’m going to take a wild stab and say not many. A few minutes of that and most users would be blubbering for Big Daddy Apple to come and save them, this prompt is scary, It doesn’t even have icons!
Now remember those two things, you’re going to need them later! The third thing is that most of (the US at least) public doesn’t really read serious literature in appreciable amounts. Most of the public are semi-literate sock puppets that read a lot of People magazine and fluffy Oprah’s-Book-club-pick-of-the-week drivel, not classic or intense contemporary literature. They consume the kind of words that are custom-designed for their atrophied mental digestive tracts, like the spongy chicken nuggets that everyone has become so used to. There are vast organisms that come up with it and it’s the intellectual equivalent of processed squeeze-tube food. Or Soylent Green, depending on if it’s about some celebrity imploding. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter of this word-product is extruded into receptive minds via printed media or electronically. It’s a transient consumer good, like a candy bar.
Remember those two things that I mentioned before? Well I told you they’d be important. Because the nerds are going to preserve what needs preserving. Just like they will continue to write the operating systems that allow your computer to work under that shiny user interface, they will preserve and maintain printed media. It may be on a skeleton crew, but it will get done. If the scary piggy sniffles killed 50% of the population today, there would still be books tomorrow. Probably no Internet for a while though, ho ho. Books will still be around when the lights go out. They need no batteries and they are not subject to planned obsolescence. Most of the slush pile of modern media will slough away as new gossip mags and thriller novels shoot out of the Pez-dispenser of pop-culture marketing and straight into whatever electronic display is in vogue, and that’s fine. We didn’t need to save it anyway. If just for ourselves and those like us that will come later, we will keep the figurative lanterns lit and the important books will always be around, in immortal shelves.
Tags: books, culture crap, technology
