E-books could be end of great writing

Two unrelated observations about writing have snagged at my attention in the past couple of days and refused to go away.

The first was a quote from Don DeLillo, the author of the great modern epic, Underworld.

DeLillo was talking about how he continues to write on a typewriter, and suggested that: "I need the sound of the keys, the keys of a manual typewriter. The hammers striking the page. I like to see the words, the sentences, as they take shape. It's an aesthetic issue: when I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making."

The second was an advert for a "game" for the Nintendo DS console that features 100 classic books.

The cartridge packaged itself as: "100 Classic Book Collection turns your Nintendo DS into a portable library containing must-read novels from iconic authors such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare and many more.

Hold the DS like a book and use the touch screen to turn the pages. 100 Classic Book Collection allows various search methods such as searching for a book that suits your mood."

The soundtrack that can accompany the reading of these classics includes the canned effect of a crackling log fire.

Somewhere inbetween these two observations there seemed to be a disconnect, a kind of paradox, but it took me a while to work out where it lay.

It had something, of course, to do with the fact that Don DeLillo, the pre-eminent American novelist of the present moment was holding tight to the technology of the past, while the Nintendo technology of the present moment was appropriating the old-fashioned printed world of the novel.

It was more about different understandings of the physicality of the act of writing and of reading.

The makers of the bestselling Nintendo package may believe Shakespeare to be an "iconic author" of "must-read novels" but in describing him as such they betray some of the side-effects of their product - it treats all writing as if it were simply text, content, something else to scroll on a screen to suit your mood.

DeLillo, who knows a good deal about the difference between writing and content, clearly resists this idea. Writing for him is a highly physical act; meaning is discovered and shaped in individual words and sentences, and their external form is fundamental to what they are communicating.

This Christmas may well mark the moment when the Nintendo idea of writing - and reading - takes precedence over the DeLillo idea of it.

The growth in sales of the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader - which can store thousands of texts, classic and otherwise, and which may eventually provide digital access to every book ever written - suggests that we are at an iPod moment: books, in particular novels, may well be about to face the fate of records and CDs.

In America, Google is fighting a multi-million dollar lawsuit for the rights to 10 million digital editions of books - a suit being countered by the French and German Governments among others - which if successful will grant it a virtual monopoly over distribution of the digital word.

This prompts a couple of questions: is reading from a screen the same experience as reading from a page? And further, is writing for a digital medium the same thing as writing for print?

One consequence of the digitisation of nearly all aspects of our lives is the increasing sense that we live through our computers, that they are extensions of our selves. Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been examining this phenomenon for nearly 30 years.

In Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the internet, written as long ago as 1995, she suggested that our relationship with our laptops and hand-held devices gave us a Freudian sense of the uncanny.

"Like dreams and beasts, the computer stands on the margins," she wrote. "It is a mind that is not yet a mind. It is inanimate, yet interactive. It does not think, yet neither is it external to thought. It is an object, ultimately a mechanism, but it behaves, interacts and seems in a certain sense to know."

All our engagement with the digital world carries elements of this mostly subconscious relationship. The spaces computers open up for us are in a real sense part of our personal space; we make them our own; they share our secrets, house our memories; they are our intimates. We would be bereft if we were to lose them.

Slowly all the aspects of the world that were formerly external to us, out there - friends, shops, newspapers and now books - are being accommodated into this space, so that they can be contained on our personalised screens: aspects of our selves, part of our understanding of who we are.

It has widely been assumed, given that the progress of technology is generally thought to be a one-way street, that all information, all "content" will eventually migrate to one digital medium or another - the Kindles and Nintendos are the latest milestone in that progress. But what effect might that have on writing itself?

There has recently been something of a backlash in the conventional publishing world against the "tyranny" of online conversion. Several of these books have argued that the feature of the digital universe that threatens to overwhelm us is that we are, in the phrase of Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at Washington, "always on", which is to say we are so consistently wirelessed to blogs and Blackberries and Twittering and Facebook that we are losing our capacity to think in the "real" world.

Moreover, the capacity for rigorous sentence construction, of the kind explored by Don DeLillo, is being replaced in online communication by a lazy and hasty "whateverism", where nothing has to adhere to the rationalities of syntax or argument, and where no time is given to clarifying thought.

Lee Siegel author of Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, extends this argument into an entertaining and sustained rant against the imprisoning internet and the rhetoric of "blogfascism".

"In the pre-internet age ... ," he observes, "there came a moment when you turned off the TV or the stereo, or put down the book or magazine ... You stopped doing culture and you withdrew - or advanced - into your solitude. You used the phone. You went for a walk. You went to the corner bar for a drink. You made love ... You wrote a letter. Now, more often than not, you go to the computer and online. There you log on to a social networking site, make an entry on your blog, buy something, try to meet a romantic partner ... You might send an email, but no one ever just sends an email. Every online activity leads to another online activity ..."

It is telling that DeLillo has succeeded in finding the connections between all the multiple strands of his attention through the hard labour of putting one word down next to another and having each of his thoughts make sense with reference to the observable world.

DeLillo is a brilliant example, but that's what writers do. It is impossible to judge whether the 800 pages of Underworld could have been written on a computer, with all its inbuilt distractions and dead ends, but I'm guessing not.

For the time being the Kindles and the rest are standalone devices, but it will surely not be long before they and the thousands of books they contain are bundled up with all the other must-have applications into a single computer which will mediate our lives: more undifferentiated text to match our mood.

"Technologies," Sherry Turkle points out, "are never just tools, they are evocative objects. "They cause us to see ourselves, and our world, differently."

Will anyone who is "always on" have the concentration to read the great social novels - those ultimate "interactions" with the world - on a screen? Will anyone be able to see far enough beyond themselves to write one?

- OBSERVER

DIGITAL MELTDOWN

Books that warn of a culture shift

* Snark: A Polemic in Seven Fits

By David Denby (Picador)

Attack on the growth of anonymous slander and the culture of online bullying.

* Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World

By Naomi S. Baron (OUP)

How digital media gets in the way of our relationships and our capacity for clear thought.

* The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy

By Andrew Keen (Nicholas Brealey)

How "user-generated nonsense" is undermining excellence in the creative media.

* The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

By Mark Bauerlein (Tarcher)

"Despite the information superhighway, the emerging generation is more self-absorbed than any which preceded it."

* The Future of the internet and How to Stop It

By Jonathan Zittrain (Penguin)

How the web is inevitably moving toward corporate control.