Entertainment / Books

Digitization: The last word? No. But the last book readers?

For those who still read for pleasure in the future — and it won't be everyone — a new strategy has yet to fully emerge.


I'm in the foyer of the Shaw Festival Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake. This is where the biannual Niagara District School Board Written Word Festival is being held this year.

The event ships kids in from schools around the district who have a special knack for reading and writing — two skills the digital revolution of the 21st century is supposed to have edged to oblivion. They come here to meet writers — I'm a guest speaker —and be encouraged to keep up the good fight.

Admittedly, the Written Word Festival is not the best place to find kids who don't read, who are presumably those kids so neurally corrupted by Facebook and cellphones that reading is beyond them.

However, it's a terrific place not only to meet kids who do read but to learn how they read.

Katherine Drotos is 17. She says she'll read “pretty much anything” as long as it grabs her, and if it does she's hooked to the last page. She finds the stuff most likely to grab her on lists: online lists at Indigo and Amazon, and favourite lists posted by avid readers. As for e-books, there's no way. “I can't stand looking at a screen when I read.”

Not uncommon is this sort of sentiment, found in the 2008 book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future by Mark Bauerlein: “Young (Internet) users have learned a thousand new things, no doubt. They upload and download, surf and chat, post and design, but they haven't learned to analyze a complex test, store facts in their heads, comprehend a foreign policy decision, take lessons from history, or spell correctly.”

Or this, from Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009): “We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level.”

And later: “We have transformed our culture into a vast replica of Pinocchio's Pleasure Island, where boys were lured with the promise of no school and endless fun. They were all, however, turned into donkeys — a symbol, in Italian culture, of ignorance and stupidity.”

Can a new, donkey-herding Il Duce be far behind? It seems not: “In this precipitous decline of values and literacy, among those who cannot read and those who have given up reading, fertile ground for a new totalitarianism is being seeded.”

Note that Pinocchio first appeared in 1881, and boys were apparently already vulnerable to distractions outside of school.

In direct response to Bauerlein, Tapscott calls Netgeners “the smartest generation in history.” But the claim comes with a clarification:

“I think it's fair to say they're the smartest generation but it's bifurcated,” Tapscott explains. “The top third are spectacular. SAT scores, all-time high. Never been tougher to get into the best universities. Kids are graduating more than ever before from university, in terms of raw numbers and as a per cent of the population. And the middle third are doing well compared to previous generations. But the bottom third in Canada are dropping out of school. They don't finish high school.

“Some people blame the Internet for this, but it's sort of like blaming the library for ignorance.”

He believes there's no question that being raised in digital culture — which makes you a “digital native” — is altering our neurological structure, and therefore the way people think, read, write. He says we live in a state of “partial continuous attention,” always waiting for the next call, text, email or general digital poke. Concentration is perpetually compromised, which would seem to make reading a novel a challenge.

But he's reluctant to say that reading or writing is doomed. “We don't know. I still love holding a book.

“If it's on a Kindle or an iPad it's almost as though it's not there. Not the same experience. But that may change and books may just be things we see in museums.”

“At one of my first meetings I was looking at the number of majors enrolled in our English department over about a 20-year period,” Beaty says, “and it was an unbelievable steady attrition. Like 5 per cent a year, every year. I said, ‘What's happened?' They said students just don't want to read. Nobody wants to sit and read Chaucer anymore. It's too difficult for them, it's too old and it seems kind of useless.”

“And they all want to take courses on film and television because that's what they're immersed in. These are the new kind of liberal art choices for students.”

Although he's in the English department, Beaty still teaches courses in popular culture.

“All my classes are over-enrolled,” he told me. “In one class I'm teaching students have to sit on the floor because they don't have enough seats for them. Whereas I look at my colleagues that are teaching difficult fiction and difficult poetry and they struggle to get the 12 students that they need to mount the course without losing money.”

“I'm probably on the cranky old guy side of that thing,” says Duggan, also a novelist (Cherry Electra).

“There's a feeling — you'll see it in high school libraries and such — that as long as they're reading anything, that's good,” Duggan says. “I would never discourage a kid from reading anything at all. But in terms of teaching there's got to be something substantial there. There's so much just absolute crap in the culture, you don't need to bring in more rubbish into the room. They're floating in that stuff . . .

“It's a responsibility,” he explains. “Part of being educated is being cultured in a certain way. There's certain things they should just know about to be able to participate and understand what's going on.

“A lot of people would disagree, but I really think there's just no point in teaching stuff just because it's current or popular. A lot of people say why are you teaching these old books and authors like Shakespeare? Or some of the novels that have been kicking around for decades?

“Well, there's a reason why. It's because they're great. Why not teach them the best?”

Duggan has heard all the doom-speak about digitally wrought Netgen ignorance, but from where he stands, things are pretty much as they always were. Reading-wise, that is: girls tend to read more (and more readily) than boys do, kids who read read avidly, and those who don't are almost impossible to convince otherwise.

“That's a constant thing,” he says. “The kids who read read and those who don't don't, and it's very hard to get to the ones who don't. I can read something a kid has written and within two sentences can tell if they're a reader. It's in how fluid they are, how confidently they use language. It's all about exposure to language, and kids who read are just so much more proficient in so many ways.”

If Duggan has noticed one significant change, it's in the disappearance of a certain kind of boys' reading. “What's missing for boys — and that's the hard market right there in terms of motivating readers — is a kind of reading that was appealing because it was almost subversive,” he explains.

“When I was in high school there were writers around, like Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Carlos Castaneda, who were kind of underground and that's who you'd read. There's no way my high school teachers knew about these writers at the time or this kind of stuff, and that's why we read it.”

“There's no room in the culture for it today,” Duggan adds; you have to work harder to introduce boys to stuff they're likely to find interesting. But if you do, Duggan says, they'll read all right. Forget blaming the Internet, ADD, video games or the reconfiguring of the nuclear family. It's about content.

“Look at the event fiction,” Duggan observes. “Those kids plow through those books — the hot vampire stories, Harry Potter . . . It's unbelievable. Those are massive, huge, pulpy books and they rip through them.

“If it's the right kind of narrative, they'll read it. Obviously there's all kinds of distractions for them. Much more sophisticated kinds of distractions than when I was their age. But if the stuff's compelling enough, if it's appealing to them, they'll sit and read.”

“I read books on the Internet that I probably would have never have discovered in any other way,” he says. “Like I was reading a book of philosophy by Soren Kierkegaard when I was 13 on the Internet. I could barely understand it, but I don't think you can find any other generation where they weren't taught by a private tutor who would have been exposed to that sort of thing at such a young age.”

I ask him a question. He carefully mulls it over.

“Is the Internet positive or negative? I don't think either answer is correct because the Internet isn't anything but what we make it.”

He remembers how e-books were supposed to revolutionize publishing about a decade ago and didn't. He's certainly noticed that they're back: the introduction of easy-use reading devices like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader have put the subject back on the table for publishers, but this time they're playing it more cautiously.

Revolution? Maybe not. Re-position? Big time.

The impact of digitization of the publishing industry has been profound and complex, although not in the ways one might think. E-books and e-readers are one manifestation of that transformation, but that's only what we see on the surface. Beneath that lie a host of issues that are unprecedented in the history of printing: what happens to things like copyright and marketing when content — the words — becomes independent of form — the books? What happens to backlists? Who sets prices for digital content? And, most crucially after a recession that caused widespread downsizing in the book publishing trade, who's going to do all that transitional labour?

For Pepper, this massive structural re-engineering, if done cautiously and effectively, can get publishing back to the business it's always been in: providing the right content to the right reader. And the Internet, with its vast potential for reaching readers and building communities of shared enthusiasm, is perhaps the greatest tool ever devised to hook up books and readers who might not otherwise ever meet.

“If we can do that, I think there's great hope for book publishing,” Pepper says. “Far more hope than a lot of people give it.

“I think people are reading and I think the content that we provide, for lack of a better word, is more in demand than it's probably ever been. There's so many portals for it, and there's so many people out there that are hungry for it in all different kinds of forms.”

“We're just seeing such incredible innovation when it comes to this stuff,” he says. “. . . It's tremendously exciting. Incredibly exciting. And I really do not care whether people read our books on a computer or read them as a hard book or a soft book or a mass market paperback. I do not care.”

Is Pepper at all worried that young kids have stopped reading? Or might?

No. Like Matt Duggan, he believes kids will read something that engages them, so the task is finding that something and getting it to them.

Like Duggan, he mentions Harry Potter: “And those books are like doorstops. And they don't just read them once, they read them three times. And they buy them.”

But he's realistic.

“There are a lot of people out there that are just probably never going to pick up a book and read it. I know people that just don't read books and no matter what happens technologically or any other way they're just not going to be book buyers and book readers. We have to face that.”

There are people, he says, who “could not live in this world without books. They're passionate about them. And there are those that say, ‘I read every new book on my Kindle,' and there are those that say, ‘I would never buy a Kindle in a billion years.'

“What we need to do as publishers is to make sure that we deal with both of those people.”

As for e-books and e-readers, he begs to differ with the common wisdom that that's how kids will read.

“It's actually the older generation that's reading on these things more than the new generation: (a) they have more money, and (b) their eyesight isn't as good.”

Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim was handed to Hanna Milliken, who's 16, by her dad. It was great. “I really look up to my parents,” she says. “My dad's really intelligent and whatever he says I kind of follow. And I think it's good to have your parents taking things that they like and passing it on.”

Those years have been transformative, the University of Cambridge sociology professor says, citing “a long and complex process of social and economic change which has transformed the industry beyond recognition.”

Several factors have been instrumental in this: the annexation of publishing houses by media corporations, the retail shift from independent booksellers to mega-chains, and digitization of content.

Add to this the financial crisis of 2008, the apparent surge of consumer interest in e-books and e-readers, the uncertainty of books-and-mortar retailing in the Amazonian era, and you've got one seriously nervous business.

While all of these factors have been profoundly unsettling in terms of the traditional way the industry had done business — and had done so for more or less 200 years — it is digitization that Thompson sees as most critical in terms of how the business will fare in the coming decades.

When words become bits, the question of who controls them and how they are disseminated is essential. And who profits?

“The question of value is the question of trying to ensure that value does not hemorrhage out of the industry in the way that it did the music industry,” Thompson says over the phone from England.

Technology companies and retailers, he says, “want to sell devices, they want to maximize their revenues to the sale of devices and other things, and for them content is a means of selling devices. They have to have content available to drive the sale of their technologies.”

“For them book content is cannon fodder in that process” and the danger “is the massive devaluation of content.”

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