JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

British Library, London, 2011

Several years ago, I met with gaming guru Kevin Slavin, a man who could be assumed to be an enemy, one who might ridicule the stasis of the book. At the end of our coffee, he fell quiet for a second and then said that what books have in common with games is that they reward iteration. The more you play, the more you read, the better you get at it, the more fun you have. The way I have integrated that into my own mode of thinking is: In games you get to wonder what door to walk through; in books you get to wonder what the character was thinking, walking through that door. You get to imagine the color of the door, the material, the kind of doorknob, whether it was warm or cold to the opener’s touch.

The lack of video, the lack of audio, the lack of ways to change the forking outcomes of plot (what is rather crudely referred to as “interactivity”) is a feature of literature, not a bug. And, as it turns out, books are interactive. They’re recipes for the imagination. Conversely, video is restrictive—it tells you what things look like, what they sound like.

Books withstood the disruption of new modes of storytelling—the cinema, the TV set. And books have been the disruptor themselves many times, disrupting the Roman Church and upending the French aristocracy, the medieval medical establishment, then the nineteenth-century medical establishment. So the assumption at one extreme end of the Silicon Valley cosmology, that long-form text-only narrative is ripe for disruption (witness Tim O’Reilly’s skepticism in his Charlie Rose talk, see the continual framing of the book as akin to the horse-drawn carriage, see any number of start-ups offering multimedia platforms designed to replace books), is borderline foolish.

A business born out of the invention of mechanical reproduction transforms and transcends the very circumstances of its inception, and again has the potential to continue to transform and transcend itself—to disrupt industries like education, to drive the movie industry, to empower the gaming industry. Book culture is in far less peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of an imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarefied, and fragile than it actually is. By defining books as against technology, we deny our true selves, we deny the power of the book. Let’s restore to publishing its true reputation—not as a hedge against the future, not as a bulwark against radical change, not as a citadel amidst the barbarians, but rather as the future at hand, as the radical agent of change, as the barbarian. The business of literature is blowing shit up.

This is wonderful. On the business of literature by Richard Nash in VQR. Via Boing Boing.

Speaking of literature, we’re waiting for our volunteer book reviewers to cough up. Deadline’s over, we’re sending waves of guilt in your general direction.