I thought I'd send my ping into the echo chamber amplifying recent pronouncements regarding electronic books. Today a posting at the Future of the Book links to some of the resonances, and just yesterday a message came across two e-mail lists pointing to "Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules" in the New York Times. The postings pick up on recent conversations spawned by Kevin Kelly and a speech given by John Updike at the BookExpo (more on those below). I'll highlight three frequencies in these discussions. First, the key dimension for me of "Scrambling" is the analogy between book publishing and music:

Hovering above the discussion of all these technologies is the fear that the publishing industry could be subject to the same upheaval that has plagued the music industry, where digitalization has started to displace the traditional artistic and economic model of the record album with 99-cent song downloads and personalized playlists. Total album sales are down 19 percent since 2001, while CD sales have dropped 16 percent during the same period, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Sales of single digital music tracks have jumped more than 1,700 percent in just two years.

Clearly, this move to sampling snippets evokes both concern and celebration. "Scrambling" cites author Jane Hamilton:

"Does that mean 'Anna Karenina' goes hand in hand with my niece's blog of her trip to Las Vegas?" asked Jane Hamilton, author of "The Book of Ruth" and a forthcoming novel, "When Madeline Was Young." "It sounds absolutely deadly." Reading books as isolated works is precisely what she wants to do, she said. "When I read someone like Willa Cather, I feel like I'm in the presence of the divine," Ms. Hamilton said. "I don't want her mixed up with anybody else. And I certainly don't want to go to her Web site."

Geoffrey Carter, though, e-mails to suggest,

Hamilton's refusal to allow Willa Catheter a re-mix across her niece's work might be expressed as the mainlining of Willa Cather.

And yet, like the coursings of her niece's journal, W.C's work along the Platte River, might be extended into a thousand different platte.aus ... A
million tiny plattes following the dashes of dis and dat, rather than a recipe.

So, frequency one in the swirl has to do with the status of the text and the authorial voice and might be simplified along a familiar unified, linear vs. fragmented, remixed split. The response: call it a continuum not a split and let people traverse the lines as they see fit. Nothing to see here, move along.

The second frequency in my mind relates to shifting economic models. Much of the recent conversation has rolled forward from Kevin Kelly's "Scan This Book!" (now ironically sealed behind the pay-for-view archives of the New York Times). Kelly also suggests that electronic books will matter because they shift the statuses of texts and authors:

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new [e-book] library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than before. In the world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

What sets Kelly's premise apart from the continuum of fragmentation and unity is the way it is hard-coded into economics, technologies, and culture. The vision is not that different from earlier conceptions of docuverse, but is colored by its alignment with google books and search engines as its driving force. Kelly sees two competing business models, a prior model based on cheap but controlled copies (that could be sold) and an emerging model based on free copies (that must be extended with money-earning value-adds). What I find striking (and perhaps part of what worries others) about this otherwise sensible proposition is that it contains a sub-text that de-emphasizes autonomy and individuality. Yes, Kelly allows that individuals can release their remixed "bookshelves" into the network, but closes (and emphasizes) how "the technology of search will transform" what we think of as culture and knowledge.

The problem, really, is that one of the smaller transformations included among the four implications of e-books listed by Kelly--the suggestion that e-books "will cultivate a new sense of authority"-- is really one of the larger concerns for writers and teachers. Kelly aligns authority with a collective sense of complete knowledge--authority as increased truth value founded on access to a larger pool of information. For the writer, though, authority emerges in the complex of assessments, decisions, and manipulations that happen as we struggle to translate idea into expression; whether through remix or reflection, authority forms as we manage to place an identity behind the statements we create.

So, frequency three: John Updike responding to Kelly. In the podcast of Updike's speech, we catch something more than desire for economic control or exclusivity when it comes to identity and authorship (although those can be found in the file as well). As he recounts the many books stores from his past, Updike reveals a nostalgia for the concrete, for "his world of books, physical, handsome, nice-smelling books." All of these conversations about e-books touch at some point on the sense of loss that might accompany the physical engagement with the printed artifact. Too often, however, these concerns are dismissed as discussions reel toward economic or epistemologic paradigms. This early dismissal is a problem, though, because the tensions are not between "the conventions of the book and the protocols of the screen" as Kelly suggests in closing his argument.

The tensions are between reader browsing through (dusty) book store shelves and searcher googling electronic space, print and screen writ large as physical world and virtual space. It is telling that Updike misreads Kelly's contention that authors will begin interacting with readers as a physical act--more plane trips, coffee hours, late night signings. The misreading reveals the conundrum left unexplored so far in the conversation: how far are we willing to transform the self from a physical reader of tangible books, to a virtual patron of the electronic library.