As much as us hand-wringing traditionalists may want to deny it, some form of marriage between the book and the microchip is inevitable. Will printed-and-bound books eventually be reduced to the status of a fetish item or art object? Will the novel, which relies so heavily on sustained concentration and time commitment, survive the supporting culture’s transition to the instant-access, sound-bite future?
An article in the New York Times on a new literary magazine that serializes very short stories in Tweet may offer a glimpse of that future, with wired hipsters sitting down to a minute’s worth of reading and Soylent Green sandwiches before zipping off to the local Electropalace in their virtual car (or whatever). Electric Literature, a literary quarterly, has jumped feet first into new media by making each issue available as a Kindle, e-book or iPhone application and commissioning visual components such as cartoons and short films to complement the magazine’s written content. “Everyone is reading short-form text,” says Andy Hunter, the editor in chief. “Literature has not made that jump.” To those of us who still love to actually…er…read, the only response to such an assertion is, “THANK GOD.”
