The End of Books
Summary
The general purpose of this essay, The End of Books, is to help the reader understand what is available in the world of books. Coover presents the argument that the age of print books is coming to an end due to advances in hypertext books. This leads to having to rethink the entire industry and allows writers to step out of their comfort zones and enter the new hypertext world from scratch. (707). His intended audience was the readers of the 1992 New York Times Book Review. (705). Coover is still alive today and he is a professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. (brown.edu). Coover understands what he is talking about and having studied the literary arts so critically, knows what the options are. He also is attempting to reach the audience of college students in encouraging them to try out this new field. His final point becomes that due to this continually changing field, nothing can ever truly be finished. People can always add to and adjust the world to fit their new designs.
Inquiry
First, I want to examine his title. The End of Books was written in 1992 and clearly books are still being published. However, the Kindle was just released in 2007, 15 years after the article was written. Many books are now being published online as well as in print. The realm of “hypertext” is still a foreign term to me and I greatly enjoy reading. This makes me question how much of an impact this field really is making on the industry. The second portion of his argument, which comes up towards his conclusion regarding the never ending path that books can now take I see as seriously flawed. If books can go on forever, they are going to eventually become ridiculous. He says that he uses this “hotel” where people can edit and move characters and manipulate the world inside. He wanted this to continue for “a century or two.” (708). Eventually this will cause the story to become disjointed and readers will lose interest in the story. This is similar to TV shows that run stale and are cancelled once writers run out of ideas. However, this is seen very successfully in the fan-fiction world where authors team up to write stories that could potentially never end. He asks if it is the “obligation” to continue stories for long periods of time and I find this to be not true. For example, when reading, one often just desires to know the ending and never knowing what is going to happen would eventually get old.
Questions:
What do we know/can we find out about hypertext and was it ever popular?
Have you read online books and how do you see them as compared to print books?
Would you like a never-ending book or TV show, why?
Do you think books will ever be replaced entirely, is it even feasible?
2 comments:
In response to the last question:
Do you think books will ever be replaced entirely, is it even feasible?
I think that eventually books will be replaced entirely by nonprint mediums. This isn’t to say that the style of writing that books use (linear presentation, long) will disappear, but the actual printed and bound medium itself will die. Almost one million books are published annually, and some of these are printed in the hundreds of thousands. Compare the distribution of this number of books to the distribution of the same number of books electronically, to portable devices that can be read much like books (i.e.: Kindle, etc.). A company can make more off of a $10 kindle book sold online than a $20 book sold in stores. Economically there is absolutely no comparison between print and electronic publication, and even if popular culture resists the shift to digitized books, it will be promoted by publishers to the point where the medium will overtake print. Print has almost no advantage over digital storage, other than the fact that as a culture we have been reading printed books for centuries.
Maybe my favorite argument is that the entire text contained in the U of A library could fit on an $80 portable hard drive that I could lose in my backpack. Print will die someday, starting with the generation that grows up learning to read on their parents’ Kindle.
Would you like a never-ending book or TV show, why?
Although we may be willing to receive story telling or the transport of knowledge through a new media, such as the laptop or the kindle (especially because it is easy on the eyes), as Sean mentioned in his response the style of writing (linear presentation, long) will not necessarily disappear along with the ink stained bound pages of paper. In an interview Coover shares a concern about the forecast of the future of literature (see link below). He affirms that he is a diehard literary fan and figure and is not ready to throw in the towel... however he thinks the linear author-produced plot will be given into the hands of the commoners and the graphic design artists; thus shifting literature from merely reading page on a book from left to right to a dynamic tale in which the reader faces various decisions and images that take you on a completely different plot than initially planned.But is this what the reader relaly wants? How many centuries has literature followed the linear path? and how quickly will such and engrained way of thinking be changed so quickly? Who knows?
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.providencephoenix.com/archive/books/99/04/01/image/COOVER.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.providencephoenix.com/archive/books/99/04/01/COOVER.html&usg=__0swQ6OuhiZ1c0_D3Gp2DFBFy-po=&h=220&w=220&sz=45&hl=en&start=2&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=oiNwHeviQzx74M:&tbnh=107&tbnw=107&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcoover%26hl%3Den%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox%26rlz%3D1I7ADFA_en%26um%3D1
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