``We all spend so much time looking at screens-TVs, computers, video games, cell phones, PDAs, and now eBooks-but we don't know yet much about the negative effects of this technology on us.''
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My gut thought about ebooks, kindle, was completely economic. These assholes are trying to re-package and then control something that is already looking to be a reproduction problem for capital---that is escaping the control of scarcity.
Before ebooks, I was already able to get some whole books, if I wanted them. It was just like the digitalized music and film reproduction wars.
The university-business systems are struggling to keep their content out of mass distribution. And professors are more than a little aware of these battles over course lectures. (A lot of complicated issues of employer control, ownership, copyrights, etc.)
A model. One of the great things about the intellectual climate of Weimar was that big names in literature, philosophy, sciences and mathematics, gave public lectures. Many of these were reproduced in print for newspapers and magazines. Sometimes a series of public lectures was turned into a book. This system was carried over to the US in the 1930s and done as radio. Mann's radio lectures were redone in print, in works like Order of the Day and other essay collections. Then there are Orwell's work for the BBC. These are mostly high tone propaganda, but still worth reading.
This is the general direction I'd like to see and is already available for guys like Noam Chomski, Slavoj Zizek, etc, and my all time favorite Leonard Susskin on cosmology and relativity. Several universities have public lecture series on line, but they are a bitch to track down.
The issue is how to control and make a buck on a vast library that is already free at the public library. Except for the living, the vast bulk of our culture in print should be free and available on a mass scale. I can read a book on a screen or long journal essay (if I can find it). My screen is a 21'' CRT. I sit close and have nothing else up. But I use it for reference, non-fiction. Something like a big novel or poetry, I agree, should to be in print. I didn't want to buy Spinoza's Tractus just to reference Strauss, so I tried the Guttenberg Project, downloaded Tractus and printed it out two up, duplex. I just couldn't deal with that, so I bought it used text, for a couple of bucks. It turned out to be worth it, since the later edition had an excellant introduction. I am going to have to do the same thing with Hobbes.
Then too, many of my books are older than the whole age of the PC, and they still work just fine. My edition of Capital dates from 1906 an eleventh printing and is the oldest book I have. I paid something like fifteen bucks for it at Moe's. The pages lay down nice and flat and the binding doesn't crack. Engels wrote the editors preface. I have to wonder if anything of our world will last a 104 years and still work.
The underlying problem with poetry is there is usually not enough pages to make a print run worth the expense. For example Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind is fifteen pages, with lots of margin. After the bookstore, they had to found their own press just to get a lot of themselve into print.
I read Coney Island last night on-line (google books) and remember this thin little book for something like 1.95 back in the 60s from New Directions. New Directions used to have a lot of these off-beat paperbacks---I loved them, but they went to physical shit in a hurry. Checking, ND looks pretty much in the same mode, good for them.
CG