In today's New York Times, Motoko Rich continues the less-than-pretty news stream regarding the future of publishing. Less-than-pretty? No. Let's just call it what it is: Wholly distressing. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has announced that, "with rare exceptions," editors won't be acquiring anything new. Indefinitely, that is. Indefinitely. All those stories authors have been working and reworking for years, all that hope, all that passion, all that possibility will have to find another home, a door that will open when it is knocked upon. And good luck, too, if that book is quiet, or literary, a work of art as opposed to a commercial venture, for, as Rich reports:
Once upon a time, some publishers suggested, they could cultivate under-the-radar authors and slowly build an audience for them over several books. Now, with few exceptions, books tend to come out of the gate at the top of the best-seller list or be deemed failures.
“It is seriously going to be a time for known commodities,” said Esther Newberg, a literary agent who represents blockbuster authors like the thriller writers Patricia Cornwell and Linda Fairstein and Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for The Times. “I would hate to be starting out in the business.”
There is, of course, only one fix to this, and that's us consumers proving the publishing houses wrong. Proving that we are a civilization that needs more than vampire stories and thrillers and beach books to survive. That expects more from books than made-for-movie plots. We have just elected a tremendously literary president—a man who both reads and writes. He's calling for programs designed not just to fix a broken economy but to redress a spoiled, mucked-over planet. We have before us a new generation of young people who care so much about their country that they campaigned for change in force.
There's got to be more for them to read than books a publishing house declares a blockbuster.
There has to be more for all of us.
Keep books alive by buying them. Keep culture breathing in, breathing out.
How are we to feel, then, today, about the ways in which video games are now being used to 'bait' young readers? Is gaming our new reading? Is it our new gate to reading? Is it the essential path in a digital world? Some words from today's NYT story:
... doubtful teachers and literacy experts question how effective it is to use an overwhelmingly visual medium to connect youngsters to the written word. They suggest that while a handful of players might be motivated to pick up a book, many more will skip the text and go straight to the game. Others suggest that video games detract from the experience of being wholly immersed in a book.
Some researchers, though, say that even when children don’t read much text, they are picking up skills that can help them thrive in a visually oriented digital world. And some educational experts suggest that video games still stimulate reading in blogs and strategy guides for players.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/books/06games.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=books
Certainly gamers are required to attend to plot and to latch onto words, to follow the thread, to notion in. But is it also possible that knowing and feeling are two different things—and that books prepare us like nothing else can for the heartbreak, confusion, mystery, joy—the outright complexity—that constitutes living day to day? Books without gadgets, books without gimmicks, books in which characters can't be surmised at a glance and stories take time to unfold? We aren't in control when we read another's book; the author is. We are forced to go under, deep, to submit, and when we emerge we aren't precisely who we were; something ineluctable has changed. We have in our head new ideas not just about the ways in which stories get made, but about how lives—for better, for worse—get lived.
Good books square us up against complexities and consequences; they force the issues. And I suspect that in the days to come, we'll need leaders who can manage both, leaders who read. Games have their place; of course they do. But in our zeal to please, let us not sweep aside our book-bound stories.
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