Melville House Books

Bob Stein, director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, who says the book of the future is a "place."

The alteration of works of literature is always a tetchy subject. Purists and quite a lot of the general public are vehemently against it, on the fairly self-evident grounds that tampering with someone else’s immortal words is unjust, wrong and often makes things worse. Some would even argue that authors shouldn’t be allowed to revisit their own books. I reckon it’s been done throughout human history, from the Bible to the popular song. Do we really think that the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Murasaki have come down the centuries unscathed? That phrases, chapters and entire plots have not been radically revised to fit the tastes and politics of the times? As the historian Benedict Anderson puts it in the revised edition of his most famous work, “Imagined Communities is not my book any more.” He was talking about the effects of translation on content but I think his comment applies more widely that that.

What’s going on at the moment, however, is quite radical even to my philistine eyes. I was still reeling from the news that the Globe Theatre has held consultations with the London Metropolitan Police about how to portray knife crime in Romeo and Juliet, which seemed to be taking the “fiction incites violence” argument to a new level. Then I read Alex Clark’s report in The Telegraph that the Institute for the Future of the Book think tank (try saying that with a mouthful of plums) now suggests that solitary composition is outdated. The Institute’s leader, Bob Stein, recently made a speech (called “The book is a place… ” and detailed further in this Publishers Weekly report) in which he outlined his vision, which springs from the philosophy that “the printed page is giving way to the networked screen”. Writers who believe that their work is done once the damned thing is published just don’t cut it any more; instead, says Stein, they should then expect to collaborate with interested parties who will together “create a book”. In other words, when somebody reviews a book, its author might return and rewrite the aspects that failed to please. Then another review comes in, completely contradicting the first, and the poor old writer has to go back again. And again and again and again -– until he is sick with boredom and ready to murder anyone who has a single word to say about his masterpiece. It sounds like a Borgesian nightmare.

One has to question Mr Stein’s motives in all this: the timing is too suspicious. Just at a moment when all the publishers are trying to cut down their lists, along comes an apparently unbiased expert with a thesis that takes all the fun out of writing. There is a sinister cabal of money men behind him.