Books

When journalists begin to wax poetic about the death of newspapers, I'm usually amongst those who shrug. Newspapers are clunky and rarely as informative as a good RSS feed (or even the Drudge Report). TV stations have successfully moved local news to the web. Local newspapers, however, have faded into the background. They want us to pay to read about news that happened yesterday? How cute.

Online news, even the dreaded aggregator's like Matt Drudge and the algorithms of Google, have surpassed even the most widespread and respected of newspapers. They've been replaced by an odd collection of page-based algorithms, hand-edited websites, and social media. Many national papers, such as The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal have successfully become staples of any online diet, but many local newspapers are feeling the pinch. The major newspaper in the Harrisburg area, The Patriot News, actually managed to become two separate entities without imploding its own customer base, dividing itself between its physical newspaper and Pennlive, a local news aggregator. When floods from Hurricane Lee hit the area a month ago, and the surging Susquehanna River was predicted to be mere feet from my front door, I certainly wasn't waiting for a messenger bike to drop off copies of the newspaper. I gave Pennlive a permanent tab on my browser, shooting over every few minutes to see if citywide evacuations were ordered for my neighborhood and whether roads were in a condition to let me go to work. I temporarily opened my WiFi to my neighbors, some of whom lacked cable Internet themselves, so they could likewise stay abreast of weather reports.

The purpose of newspapers, to provide local, relevant news to the masses at a bargain, makes it an especially ripe victim for being outdated. The Internet can do local, it can do relevant, and news sites are largely free. Most important of all, the Internet is fast. Way faster than newspapers could ever hope to be.

Books, however, are a different story. Books are perhaps the only medium other than the Internet to fulfill nearly every informational need we may have. When you read a book, you likely aren't looking for late-breaking news. The purpose of books is to be intensive, to contain information in a permanent, indictable manner. They remain the number-one source of written fiction, and, although most of what you do on the Internet is reading, a "reader" is indubitably a person who reads books. Some websites, like Project Syndicate and Longform, are attempting to bring the art of feature writing to the online masses, but this is perhaps a losing battle. The Internet is too full of distractions to really grab attention with five-pages worth of words. Also, the medium (i.e. computer screens) are physically hard to focus on for the time necessary to read anything of substantial length (the Kindle screen achieves the paper look the same way a digital watch does: black pixels onto a gray screen with no back light). Ironically, the screens of most eReaders have a similar contrast ratio to a newspaper.

While I started this  off by making fun of latter-age journalists for being sentimental about newspapers, books deserve such sentimentality. For one, books go in order; there's no flapping around pages the size of a large sweater to get where you need to be like newspapers require. Second, books hold a presence with their physical attributes. While the old adage is true, even the most elitist of the library crowd makes judgements based on the width of a book's spine. When I read a book, I find myself thumbing the pages I've gone through with my left hand, marvelling at the level of emotion and narrative crammed onto such a primitive stack of tree pulp. I once read an introduction to Anne Karenina which spoke to the power a lengthy book can have over the narrative of your life. A book that takes you weeks or even months to read can shade the memory of that period in your personal biography.

As previously mentioned, books are the main source of written fiction. Stories have a definitive beginning and end, in the same way a book has a front and back. But the Internet? The Internet is almost nonexistent as a physical entity. It exists to most people as a cloudy concept that you'll never hold in your hand. The power of holding such narratives as The Road or Freedom or Lord Of The Rings in a space smaller than a breadbox is phenomenal to feel. Books are subject to none of the problems of modern technology (my bookshelf never has an outage) and most of the benefits (or at least the benefits that would be useful to books). And it is for this reason that, despite how I consider myself a forward-thinking Internet addict, I may never, ever, ever own a Kindle. They take something I already love and enjoy and reduce it to the same frivolity most people give a blog post (oops), not to mention make it more expensive. And sure, the Kindle can hold 10,000 books in a unit, but books will never be as adaptable to this format as albums were to the iPod. Songs can be naturally shuffled the same way we hear them on the radio (the iPod only changed music in that it made every song a single). But could you imagine a random button on the Kindle? Books are the opposite of superfluous and trivial. They demand extended attention, a dwindling quantity. There can be no more doubt that the Internet is fundamentally altering the way we think. And I worry newspapers were the first victim, with books on deck.