Jonathan Franzen seems to think so.

Andrew Sullivan’s readers ponder the issue.  Some of their points are relevant to my post Is the Internet Forever? One of them says:

I don’t know that I buy Jonanthan Franzen’s argument that the future of democracy depends on the survival of the physical book and I understand the great utility of ebooks. However, there is a great deal to be said for keeping the printed page alive.  If its language is English, I can pick up a 400-year-old book and read it. A floppy disc from ten years ago is useless to me.  Your assumption that the cloud will somehow always be there to provide continuity of knowledge strikes me as naïve.  Technological failures on a grand scale do not seem all that improbable, given the history of the world and of mankind. Too, if we are left to rely on others to keep the knowledge intact for us, then they have control over what is kept and what is erased and to what we have access.  I say, long live the book.

An issue not raised in the discussion is disintermediation (one of my favorite words).  With printed books, there is the publisher (at least) between the author and his or her potential readers (unless you want to self-publish, at great cost and with no obvious form of distribution).  Amazon and friends will publish just about any damn thing, as long as it’s not pornography and it’s formatted properly.  That’s got to be a good thing.

There are two reasons to turn your old print books into e-books:

1. The e-book world is thriving, and adding your books to it will make you wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.
2. The Internet will make your books live forever.

I’ll be able to test reason 1, and I’ll be sure to let you know the result.  But what about reason 2?

Most of the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides are gone forever.  After just a few years some of my paperbacks had faded covers and yellowed and crumbling pages.  The Internet would have saved Aeschylus!  The Internet will save me!

In the short run, I’m sure this is true.  Pages don’t turn yellow on the Internet. But still . . . The Internet has been around for 20 years or so.  Print books have been around for half a millennium.  Most print books are gone forever, but some aren’t.  Shakespeare’s First Folio had a print run of about 750 in 1623, and there are still a couple hundred left.  Where is the Internet going to be in 500 years?  Where will .mobi and .epub files be?

If you want to last, you’re probably better off writing like Shakespeare or Aeschylus.

Cover Page of the First Folio

RIP.

I don’t know much about Weissenberg, but Wikipedia says he took a decade off at the height of his career to study and teach. Like Horowitz and Gould (Gould took a permanent vacation, more or less). Classical pianists of this sort seem to me to be a breed apart. The pianist in Summit is based on my research into these guys.

Readers (at least, this reader) will put up with a lot of improbability in reading fiction (as they will in watching movies and plays).  Someone (Ben Bova?) once said you’re allowed one coincidence in a plot, but that’s certainly not a rule that Shakespeare or Dickens followed.  All plots have some degree of improbability, because life doesn’t have a plot.  Psychic spy thrillers like Summit and uncategorizable novels like 1Q84 just have a different kind of improbability from that of novels that purport to be realistic and don’t rely on psychic powers or parallel universes (or hobbits or warp drives).

But when you move outside the everyday world, you need to make an extra effort to ensure that your improbabilities are consistent and, at least at some level, believable.  That has a lot to do with the texture you give to the characters and their world.  Murakami has 900 pages to play with, so he can put in a huge amount of texture.  But you also have to be sure that your world is pretty darn interesting if you’re going to ask readers to spend that much time in it.

“If this were play’d upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”  So says Fabian in Twelfth Night, going all meta on us.

Bill Cunningham New York is a documentary, but if Bill Cunningham were a character in a novel, critics would condemn him as an improbable fiction.  Who could come up with the idea of an 80-year-old guy who lives in a tiny apartment without a bathroom or a kitchen, pedaling around New York taking photos of the fashion of the moment for publication in the New York Times?  Beloved by everyone who knows him, he’s never had a girlfriend or a boyfriend. He lives only for clothes, a humble monk in the religion of Fashion, but he himself wears the same serviceable outfit day in and day out.  At Fashion Week in Paris, there is some trouble with his credentials; finally a man appears out of nowhere and escorts him in, saying, “You don’t understand.  This is the most important person in the world.”

J.B.S. Haldane said “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” The same is true of human beings, I suspect.

Spellcheckers can pick up most typos, but not all.

Turning a published novel written before the word processing era into an e-book involves scanning the physical book, then using OCR software to turn the scan into editable text. The company that did this for Summit (eBook Prep) did a fine job scanning and cleaning up the text, but things slip through. This one tickled me. The original sentence was:

He looked at the faces of his fans.

The scanning/OCR process turned this into:

He looked at the feces of his fans.

The spellchecker liked this just fine!

The other night I was watching a video of Kenneth Branagh’s version of Twelfth Night:

Pretty good, although without the star power and heavier on the bleakness, I think, than the big-budget Trevor Nunn version.  What struck me, though, was that Branagh decided to set the play in winter; he even includes a Christmas tree in one scene — it’s the prop behind which the conspirators hide during the Malvolio letter scene.  This connected the play to its title, at least a little bit.  The text itself has nothing to do with Christmas, or the Epiphany, or wintertime.  There are theories as to why the play has its title, but, as with most theories about Shakespeare, there’s nothing much to back them up.

Shakespeare didn’t do much with titles.  His tragedies and histories are uniformly named after their protagonists.  His comedies seem to have throwaway titles — As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing.  It’s almost as if he scribbled a few words on top of the manuscript before he took it to the Globe for the first rehearsal.

Titles for literary works are often problematic.  How do you summarize a novel in a few words?  How do you find the words that will make the book saleable?  I have had editors change two of my titles — one of them for the better.

The best title ever was Great Expectations (most of Dickens’s titles were also just the names of his protagonists).

1Q84 also seems like a pretty good title, but that may only be because I haven’t heaved the book across the room yet.

The main rationale behind starting this enterprise is to backstop the release of the e-book versions of my many fine novels. I expect these releases to take place over the next year or so.  (Of course, this place also gives me a forum for my many fine opinions about various things — stop by often to find out what they are! I’ll be interested in finding out what they are myself.)

I’m starting off my e-pub career with Summit, which should be available in a few weeks.  Why Summit? I’ve been asked.  The answer, I think, is that its mainstream publisher left it exposed on a hillside to die shortly after its birth — not through any fault of its own, but because its older brother, Dover Beach, hadn’t met Bantam’s high sales expectations.  It was published, but with no attempt to market it, no attempt to solicit reviews . . .  So this is something of a rescue effort.

Here’s what Summit looked like:

More on Summit to come.