Is The Book Dead?

I was fascinated by a comment (below) by Mark Booth, publishing director of Century, an imprint of Random House. He has a new book out called The Secret History of the World: As Laid Down by the Secret Societies. He presents his book as an alternate history of the cosmos and humankind, with the early chapters relating the creation of the world and later chapters devoted to all of crankdom's usual suspects: "Egyptian" hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, the Knights Templar, the pineal gland, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry -- you name it. I totally agree with Laura Miller's review of his book: "It is a mess of a book, disjointed and rambling, rife with puzzling non sequiturs that are obviously meant to be suggestive or evocative but that more often read like the symptoms of an advanced case of Attention Deficit Disorder."

As much as I found Booth's book about secret societies a bunch of drivel, I was still challenged by another comment he recently made. He says that the book is dead.:

"The evidence in 2008 ... suggests that book reading is in decline. I have worked in publishing for some 25 years and have also recently published a book of my own, conscious that it may be one of the last books. I think some people in the business don't want to admit that it's happening. To them it seems a betrayal of skills and standards that generations worked hard to maintain. They see apathy, short attention spans, illiteracy – what Auberon Waugh called the "proletarianisation" of Britain. . .

"Now the work of the novel is finished, and a new form of consciousness is emerging. It's easy to misread the signs of the times. What we're dealing with here is not a decline in reading, but a decline in reading printed books. I am fascinated to learn in The New Yorker that a recent survey in the States shows that a TV in a child's bedroom lowers academic grades, but a parallel survey shows that time spent on the internet encourages better grades!"

"Clearly interactivity is the key. Perhaps the creative things my children do on the net are less passive than reading books? If Caxton's was a revolution in reading, what we are seeing now is a revolution in reading and writing combined.

"The great new literary form that will replace the novel will, I believe, arise on the net and will take on its wild frontier spirit, its intellectual risk-taking, its two fingers at academic control-freakery. But it will also help forge a new form of consciousness in a much more fundamental way that has to do with the form of the internet.

"Because we are all plugging ourselves into one great electronic mind, we will gradually lose the sense of each being shut off in a private mental space, as esoteric philosophy has long predicted. Our mental space will be out there and, as with Facebook, everyone else will have access to it. I don't know what this new literary form will be, but I suspect it will be co-operative and as slinkily responsive to whoever is looking at it as Schroedinger's cat. I can't wait."

So much for Booth. Sorry for the extended quote. The problem is that I lean in his direction. Note the links I inserted above as examples. I found the comment by Booth by Googling. I knew nothing about the man until I stumbled (is that a good word?) upon his Blog. And then with further Googling I learned what Laura Miller had to say and I agree with her. Add to that Booth's reference to William Caxton, the 15th century British historian and printer who incredibly advanced the publishing of books. I didn't know that. Guess how I found out. The same thing is true with Schroedinger's cat. I read about that some time ago, but had forgotten about it until Booth lifted it up in his book. But now I can refer you to it with a yet another link.

And so it goes. Wonder upon wonder. We have all this immediately available to us on the Net. And add to that the email I got this morning from my granddaughter, writing from Facebook. Yup. Something is happening. Perhaps the book, as we know it, is indeed dead and is being replaced by--well--this very medium you and I are using to communicate with one another.