From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
Print vs. Pixels
John Updike edits Kevin Kelly's "electronic anthill."
There's nothing like a good word fight. Better yet, a fight about the future of the written word itself.
In this corner today we have one of the reigning wordsmiths of American letters, John Updike; in that corner, the challenger, Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly? Yes, the quite famous Kevin Kelly, one of the founding editors of Wired magazine and as such a man of the future for many smart, younger, "wired" Americans who probably have only the vaguest notion of who John Updike is other than the author of books from a time past.
Mr. Updike and Mr. Kelly are both writers, but Mr. Updike's words are committed, in every sense, to paper, while Mr. Kelly prefers the pixels of the PC screen, or what Mr. Updike derisively calls "the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village." Mr. Updike's dark thoughts about the electronic sunshine occurred to him on a no-doubt quiet Sunday as he read Kevin Kelly's long article in the New York Times magazine, "Scan This Book!"
This, for instance, was among Mr. Kelly's claims for the future: "From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have 'published' at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages." Mr. Kelly proposed that we deploy scanners to "digitize" and compress "the whole lot" and that with future technologies, "it will all fit onto your iPod." This "library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet--if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords."
Mr. Updike was agog. By the time he reached the podium at the recent BookExpo in Washington, D.C., a convention of bookstore owners and publishers, he had composed a response to "Kelly's piece of prophesy."
He began by recalling trips with his mother to one of two bookstores in his hometown, a memory shared by many of us, armed with our newly acquired literacy and initiated by book-reading mothers to the local library. Let's stop here a moment to note that Scholastic, the children's publisher, released a survey on Wednesday concluding that the percentage of children who read books for fun plummets after age eight and falls steadily through the teen years. Why? The parental role model. Only 21% of their parents are daily readers.
Mr. Updike continued his reverie at BookExpo: "The world seemed to be in part a world of books. Physical, handsome, nice-smelling books." Mr. Updike defended the physicality of books, their "edges," and wondered "in the electronic anthill, where are the edges?" He ended on a defensive note: "Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits refusing to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village." He urged the booksellers to "defend your lonely forts."
It wasn't clear whether Mr. Updike quixotically wishes the whole digital ocean would recede. Tellingly, BookExpo's Web site didn't print Mr. Updike's text but made it available as a "podcast"; click the link and one may hear a digital version of the writer's kind and lovely voice venting about Mr. Kelly's vision.
Mr. Kelly is winning, so far. Microsoft announced last Friday that the University of California had agreed to let the company scan the out-of-copyright books among its 34 million volumes at the system's 100 libraries (for those wondering, humans carry the books to high-speed robot scanners). This is being done in partnership with something called the Open Content Alliance. Google's robots are scanning the libraries of Stanford and other schools. For Mr. Updike, this must seem a twisted version of Ray Bradbury's famous sci-fi dystopia, "Fahrenheit 451." But here the books are rounded up and scanned, not burned.
The copyright implications of this mass scanning is a famous legal dilemma, but my interest in the Updike-Kelly dispute is simply about reading. What is the future of how we read--print vs. pixels? Pixels almost surely will win. But I don't think the absorption of pixels should be called reading. We need another word. How about scanning?
Researchers of the way material is read on PCs will tell you that most people won't read past two or three screens of continuous text. They change subjects, or stop reading. Perhaps Mr. Updike's kids should start writing short stories that are two-screens long, or poetry. I think most people won't read past two screens because it makes them neurologically uncomfortable.
On a recent tour of the Supreme Court building in Washington, I visited the Court's hallowed library, with thousands of legal volumes dating to the 16th century. The room was empty. "It's always like this" my host said. "No one comes here anymore, not the clerks, not the Justices." Most of what they need has been scanned by LexisNexis and FindLaw. I asked him, Would you ever read an entire case or brief onscreen? "Never. We always print out."
People "always print out" because the PC screen is an abyss. Once past three or so pages of electronic text, one feels lost.
Kevin Kelly's manifesto, "Scan This Book!," is 7,900 words long. The online version in Factiva covers 13 continuous screens of snow-white glow and black, agate type. To sit at a PC and read through all 13 screens is to hammer the neural lobes. Knowing this, Mr. Kelly naturally published it in a magazine.
Yahoo, Microsoft and Adobe are members of the Open Content Alliance of book scanners. So is Hewlett-Packard, maker of printers. Smart. Migrating Mr. Kelly's "whole lot" of the world's books to an afterlife of pixels will have HP's machines print out something people can actually read 24/7, no matter how "paper-like" screens become.
The day may yet arrive when evolution has rewired the human brain to absorb screen after screen of the same text read deep in the electronic night. But not yet. And anyway, the real threat to John Updike's world isn't Kevin Kelly. It's the beloved schools of his youth, which stopped producing real readers long before anyone had say, much less spell, "digitize." That's worth an angry speech, too.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
