E-Books Are Good News for the Literary World

So heralds David Ulin at the Los Angeles Times.

From the article...

The great debate of the last several years — whether readers would read book-length material onscreen — appears to have been settled with a resounding "yes." What does this mean for reading? It's too early to tell, but I see a lot of cause for optimism as the e-book experience becomes more sophisticated and more and more of us explore the world of digital literature.

I should admit here that I am not yet much of an e-book reader; I have a Kindle but I rarely use it, and I don't have an iPad, although I covet one. That doesn't matter, however, for a few reasons — the first of which is that print books aren't going anywhere. E-books may represent an exploding corner of the market, but it's a small exploding corner. Beyond the cultural question (page or screen?), it will be a long time before they displace the economies of print. Even more important, none of these media are in competition. They are complementary. The issue is not what we read on, just as the issue is not what we read. The issue is that we read, that we continue to interact with long-form writing; by altering the conditions of the conversation, e-books and e-readers have already served an essential purpose.

Of course, as the e-book continues to develop, technology will increasingly become a literary métier. Already, we have authors experimenting with software as a format, writing for the screen. Ander Monson seeded his March essay collection "Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir" with symbols that direct readers to a website featuring regularly updated augmentations as a strategy to comment on the fluidity of our relationship with text. Jennifer Egan used PowerPoint to frame a chapter of her novel "A Visit from the Goon Squad," published in June, and if it's a bit static on the page (much less so on Egan's website), it also suggests where things are likely heading as more authors blend digital and print. For some, this is scary, a blurring of the lines of bookness, a challenge to the boundaries of the form. But I prefer to see it as an enhancement, a way for literature, for reading and writing, to expand itself through direct engagement with the world.