For Whom the Digital Bell Tolls

I’m a big fan of institutions. Not the mental ones you understand. The traditional ones that serve to remind you that all is well when everything around you has gone doollaly-tap.

One of those institutions is an uninterupted reading of The Sunday Times once the children have ceased screaming for justice from their cots. As my dear friend Laurence Percival once penned, the Sunday Times is the Sunday papers and they remain so despite ludicrously becoming “for all that you are”

The other institution I hold in high-esteem is (or are) books. I cherish my book collection above most things and would probably rush to save them in a fire after the family but before the cats.

So I was surprised yesterday to read Andrew Sullivans piece in the ST Review section, which has hitherto been reserved for his always objective take on the cut and slice of American politics, opining the rise of the electronic book reader The Kindle. Here was one of my favourite insitutions being attacked in another.

I have been wary of the electronic book for some time and see it as the next bellweather in the relentless march of digital into the very fabric of our lives, so I read Sullivan with excitement and trepidation.

He comes straight out as a book-lover and as someone who would show no qualms in stepping over a choking cat to rescue his first edition of the House at Pooh Corner. He is also an Internet junkie, blogger and of course journalist. Thus his credentials are quite strong.

He articulates from long-experience the different dynamics between the instant gratification of internet use, the sound-bite and the scroll-bar, and the pleasure of curling up on the sofa with a good book. He tells us of the Kindle’s lack of glow (you can’t read it in the dark) and how it can be easily read anywhere with one hand.

Now I rarely make notes in books, but I assume due to his journalistic calling, he does. And when I think back to the slog of reading Anthony Beevor’s opus “Stalingrad” which was second only in torture as being there, and realising a few months after the battle had finally fallen silent that I couldn’t recall a single fact except that an awful lot of people died, then maybe making notes would be a good thing. The Kindle allows for highlights, notes and some level of email functionality.

And so Sullivan, a Kindle convert, concludes that books won’t dissappear but, like newspapers, will be “displaced”. He cites the huge rise of the amateur publisher and without saying it, is espousing the Internet theory of “The Long Tail” as well as the very soul of The Internet – discovery.

The ringing in my ears this morning as our train sidles into Waterloo is the sound of a tolling bellweather. I’ve long given up the dinner party pretension of “oh do just pick something from my (enormous) CD collection, they’re alphabeticised” in favour of a green Ipod nano behind the fruit bowl. Before long I shall be reading the riot act in my bare-walled study to my errant son and tanning his hide with a fully-loaded Kindle. Now that’s what I call an institution.

Filed by sam.brownfield on June 15th, 2009 under Uncategorized