“An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one,” writes Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, in the Wall Street Journal. “The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.”
Carr’s own experience with editing an e-book that has already been published allowed him to speculate on the future of publishing and what it might mean for the idea of “the book.” Text is forever maleable. “Beyond giving writers a spur to eloquence, what the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein calls “typographical fixity” served as a cultural preservative,” he writes. “It helped to protect original documents from corruption, providing a more solid foundation for the writing of history. It established a reliable record of knowledge, aiding the spread of science. It accelerated the standardization of everything from language to law. The preservative qualities of printed books, Ms. Eisenstein argues, may be the most important legacy of Gutenberg’s invention.”
How authors conceive of book topics and their approach to subject both may change in profound ways once the idea of writing for the digital page becomes fully formed. What happens to prose when it doesn’t have to be your final word? Carr writes, “Not long before he died, John Updike spoke eloquently of a book’s “edges,” the boundaries that give shape and integrity to a literary work and that for centuries have found their outward expression in the indelibility of printed pages. It’s those edges that give a book its solidity, allowing it to stand up to the vagaries of fashion and the erosions of time. And it’s those edges that seem fated to blur as the words of books go from being stamped permanently on sheets of paper to being rendered temporarily on flickering screens.”
