Melville House Books

Let me start off by explaining that I am not a technophobe. Far from it.  In some cases, I’ve even been an early adopter.  My Blackberry is always on and I can’t go anywhere without my iPod playing in the background–in fact, I can’t imagine a commute without either of those devices, whether I’m walking to work or taking the subway.  My Macbook is the first thing I turn on when I get home at night, usually to watch a movie or catch up on the TV shows I missed (I admit to not having cable, but there’s a long story behind that).  I use Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Google maps, and Urbanspoon daily, both at work and at home.  My digital camera sits on a shelf in the living room where its easily accessible, whether I’m taking pictures at a party or sending an image of that night’s dinner to my parents.  I even picture-text with my parents.  I’m definitely not a technophobe.

But I do not have a Sony E-Reader, a Kindle, or a Nook (although I will drop most of my spending money on an iPad when they’re finally out).  I still read books.  I still keep a notebook in my purse.  I still write longhand when taking notes.  While I am a firm believer in technology, I am also a firm believer that just because something is there, doesn’t mean I have to use it.  Just because I have credit cards doesn’t mean it isn’t smarter to use cash sometimes. Just because I can have my email, phone, music, movies, TV, calendar, etc. on one device, doesn’t mean that that’s going to keep me more organized or make me more efficient.

This has been on my mind these past few days because it seems that everyone in the industry is focusing on the digital future, whether at the Digital Book World or Tools of Change conferences, or even at Melville House tonight (see here for more details on tonight’s “Book Reportage in the Age of Blah Blah Blah” panel).

It seems to me that while everyone is very keen to adopt the newest gadget, very few people are interested in looking at the social, cultural, and especially physiological changes these new technologies instigate–and I mean seriously looking, like Maryanne Wolf, a childhood development professor who wrote the book “Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” Wolf researches how children learn to read and the circuits that develop in their brains as a result. Her concern is that if children learn to read on electronic devices, whether they be readers, computers, or iPhones, that they might be “short-circuited, figuratively and physiologically.” Her research isn’t based on the type of device or screen the child is reading from (although for young eyes, long exposure to these screens has proved to be somewhat damaging), but rather the process of reading from a screen and how that is different than reading from a book (less tactile, more distracting, etc). Learning to read on a digital device may ultimately leave our children hindered in the areas of deep, long-form thought. For me and many more of us, that’s worrisome for a number of reasons, but it would also deal a huge blow to the book publishing industry–a much more serious issue than whether or not people will be still reading physical books. Will they still be reading, or want to read, longer-format material, like books?

What will our reading life look like in ten years? In twenty? As much as it seems like we don’t have a choice in that future, we do. We can adapt to new technologies and invent our own without letting it drive the industry, or even the way we lead our lives. Why have your children read from e-books when a physical book offers more benefits? Just because you can read your child a story from your iPad doesn’t mean that you should. What will happen to the books that teach our kids what different textures feel like? What will happen to the pop-up books and their role in developing finger dexterity? What will drive our children’s curiosity when there is no page to turn? These are the questions we need to be asking while we simultaneously try to adapt our industry. Why else are we in it in the first place? Ask any children’s publisher and they will tell you that kids books are definitely not only concerned with entertainment value (its different in adult trade). We need to make changes to publishing without turning our eyes away from the audiences that we serve.

Since this is a (relatively) short-format blog, I’m going to leave the next half of this post for tomorrow (the educational consequences that have yet to be discussed in the context of university Kindle-adoptions and Macmillan’s new Dynamicbooks program).