I spent yesterday, September 26th, at the Word on the Street Festival, the annual celebration of books and publishing.  As always, I saw people crowding around the library, bookstore and publisher displays, pitching their book ideas in the Pitch the Publisher event, listening to authors read from their latest books on the various festival stages, and carrying away shopping bags full of…books.  Book culture appears to be alive and flourishing in Halifax, but is traditional book culture fundamentally changing?  In his 2007 book provocatively titled The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book), Sherman Young writes:

“For anyone brought up with a 21st C digital mindset, the printed book is an anachronism; books are everything that the new media technologies are not.  There is no motion, there is no noise.  There is no way to interact with the characters or the story.  There is no-one else involved.  Reading is a solitary experience.  You can’t talk back.  It’s just you and the words on the page.  And all you can do with those words is read them; apparently there is no other way to engage.  For a generation raised on newer media forms, the apparent one-sided conversation of a book defies logic.” (p. 66).  He concludes his book with the statement that “the immediate future of the book can be assured (long live the book) by disconnecting the ideas from the object, removing the physical constraints of dead trees and building a future without the codex.” (p. 166).

With the growing popularity of e-books, are we moving into a new book ecosystem…and what will this new ecosystem look like?  These are questions we will be discussing in INFO 6070 (Reading and Reading Practices) next term, but I’d welcome your comments now.