I didn’t catch the full debate, but I did enjoy reading this essay by Kevin Kelly, which asks if serious literature can be read online or if it should be relegated to print books. Well, that’s the gist as I understand it.

It’s a good question. I’ve noticed that there seems to be prejudice against reading online. Some of the arguments are rather compelling – ie. it’s hard on the eyes (it actually is). But smoking is hard on the lungs and people still do that. Health be damned.

Other arguments against reading online are ridiculous. I won’t detail them. You’ve probably heard them all before.

Just for the record, I do almost all of my reading online now. I say almost because some things just aren’t available in digital format. And I like to read in the bathtub, which makes electronic gadgetry a bit of an edgy subject at times. But now that I’ve shared a little too much about myself, allow me to tell you why I think online reading, or digital reading, is as necessary as print reading was 100 years ago.

First, you can’t stop a moving train by throwing a rock at it. The digital era has arrived. You’re either on, trying to get on, or you’ll never be on. If you fall into that last category you’d better be prepared to lose out on a lot of the 21st century pleasures of life because the rest of us aren’t going to wait for you.

But deeper than that shallow pool, the real issue is whether online literature is as serious as print literature. The old-time elitists say “no way.” The new elitists – I among them – say that serious literature is defined by the times. At one time, we could say Kafka was king. But what if Kafka knew HTML? What if he had YouTube? Would he have still written about a cockroach?

I don’t think literature will be defined 100 years from now the same way it is defined now. Hell, the way it is defined now isn’t the way it was defined 100 years ago. That’s as it should be. Every generation is in the process of creating its own lit. Why not ours?

To be sure, the nature of literature and the boundaries that have defined one type of literature from another are changing. We now have the technology to include audio and video in the midst of moving prose. In the past, a novel was just a novel. You might see a picture here and there, but it was mostly all words – black type on a white page. That is no more.

There are plenty of reasons besides personal preference why reading online will grow in popularity. There are environmental concerns and there are economic concerns. The cost of paper is going up. The cost of oil and the natural resources used to manufacture paper are going up. That will drive up the price of the end product. But online you can produce the same piece of literature for less money much more quickly, streamline the distribution, sell fewer copies, and make more money. That sounds like one of those famous no-brainers.

But literature is, and always has been, a personal experience. It’s between the author-creator and his reader. Even public performances are personal-subjective no matter the size of the audience.

People tend to read in the format they feel most comfortable with. At one time, I preferred print. That’s what I knew and what I expected. Today, I spend almost all of my time online. My preferences have changed. And that seems to be what Kevin Kelly is saying too.

Jeremy’s experience is much closer to mine. I think literature-space is orthogonal to cyberspace and to reading-space.  You can get deep into a book online as well as in paper, and you can skip across ideas on paper as well as online.  It is true the medium is a message itself, but what we are now inhabiting is an Intermedia, the media of medias, where one medium flows into another making it hard to define boundaries. The book can be found in cyberspace and in literature space.  The book may be bigger than we think. Or smaller than we think. For sure we are in the process of redefining it.

In that grand conclusion Kelly was responding to a letter from a reader in which the reader noted:

Your ability to concentrate on a long text is not a function of the medium of delivery, but a function of your personal discipline and your aims in reading. If you sit down to read War and Peace with the aim of enjoying yourself, whether you have paper in your hands or plastic, you expect to be focused on it — joyfully focused, one hopes — for hours on end, perhaps the entire day.

That about sums it up for me. Reading is concentration and if you’ve got the discipline to read digital literature then you’ll read digital lit. If not then you won’t. And I personally don’t think the medium is the cause of anyone’s distraction. How they perceive that medium is the cause of any distraction, or excuse, they may have in not enjoying the experience.

I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to a lot of great digital literature. I believe it’s coming. In some ways, it’s already here.