Tag : books

Yesterday’s Observer contained an astonishingly silly article from Tim Adams, entitled Will e-books spell the end of great writing? The short answer to that is “no”, but the confusion in Adams’s mind is such that I think his article needs to be taken apart piece by piece.

He starts with a quote from the great American novelist Don DeLillo, who says that he needs to use a typewriter to produce his prose. From this, Adams seems to deduce that without typewriters we cannot have great literature.

Basheera Khan writes that bookshops should die. Retreating slightly from her panegyric for digital readers, she falls back on the library as the alternative. I doubt that my local library stocks or is able to get hold of even a tiny fraction of the books I have next to my bed. One of her commenters points out that, without a market for book sales, there would be no libraries anyway.

Even without the library argument, I think she’s profoundly wrong.

A book is a guarantee of permanence, and of ownership. There is no DRM baked into the printed word, and nothing stopping me reading a book I own whether I am in the middle of the Sahara or on my sofa. There is nothing stopping me lending it to a friend, and I don’t need to worry whether their reader device supports ePub, or whatever format. Lord Mandleson isn’t going to be around with the heavies if I start using a site like BookCrossing to share unwanted purchases.

For all of you who are massive Hayseed fans, here’s a little pearl of a blog to add to your feeds.

A charming read, The Big Blog of Hayseed collects masses of ephemera around The Hayseed Chronicles (an obscure series of children’s books).

I’ve been amazed by these photos ever since I first saw them a couple of years ago.

They’re of an art installation in San Francisco called ‘There is Nothing Wrong in This Whole World’. Chris Cobb, a local artist, rearranged every single one of the 20,000 books in the Adobe Book shop by colour.