Read You Like A Book: Literature, culture and technology

A week or so ago there was some navel-gazing going on. It was at a literary gathering known as Conversaciones de Formentor. Book publishers, Spanish and Mallorcan, were bemoaning what they see as the impoverishment of culture and lack of demand for more serious literature.

Books and their reading do not escape the obsessiveness with which statistics are presented on almost every aspect of Mallorcan life. Suffice it to say that reading is down, this in a wider Catalan society that can produce something as massive as the Sunday book market in Barcelona. There are all sorts of explanations as to why, one of them being media companies which contribute to what the publishers perceive as the increasing banality of local culture.

The publishers accept that new technologies can be enriching, but they worry - as many others worry - about children not growing up being "imbued with the experience of the book". But are they right to be so concerned? They might be right in being uneasy at the proliferation of the inane, an X Factor winner's fascinating autobiography for example, but technology might actually be the saviour of the book - serious or otherwise - and of children's (and adults') reading. At least this is what Amazon and Apple would like us to believe. When the publishers argue that "educational reform should not be limited to facilitating children's use of a computer", they overlook the potentially powerful symbiosis between technology and literature.

A recent book, assuming anyone's read it, has advanced the theory that the internet is changing the way we think. Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" has provoked a debate as it argues that the net has altered how we read and use our memories. Carr himself has said that "the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle". I can sympathise, when it comes to reading online. A mistake newspaper publishers are making in hoping for a mass migration to paid-for online newspapers is that they neglect the distractions of the internet. You can be reading something and suddenly the urge takes you elsewhere. Where do you want to go today? Why pay for something if you realise you're not going to read it?

Apple, with its iPad, offers a potentially whole brave new world for book reading. The iBooks application is but one part of the iPad, which, by coincidence or perhaps by design, an official video from the company described as feeling right "in the same way it just feels right to hold a book or magazine or newspaper". But the iPad is sold on the basis of its multiple applications; the distractions to go somewhere else, other than the book, are enormous. Amazon's Kindle is more straightforward. A promo video for the latest Kindle features a far from unattractive young lady sitting on a deckchair on a sunny beach, tucking into what may or may not be Jane Austen. Go anywhere, download anywhere, read anywhere is a seductive argument, but just how popular is it? Amazon claims millions of sales; an independent estimate suggests they are not as strong as the company would have them. Nevertheless, there may be more than just wishful thinking to Amazon's advertising which portrays the product's coolness for youngsters and for those who had never previously read a book.

But you still come back to the banality that the publishers were complaining about. The iPad or any computer hooked up to the internet doesn't overcome the greatest banalities of all - those sometimes perpetrated in the name of social networking via the likes of Facebook, recently described by the president of the Balearics' division of the Spanish consumers assocation FACUA as - and I am quoting him out of context - "the greatest evil that has been invented in the world". It isn't that (he was specifically referring to some more unpleasant aspects of Facebook), but it does contribute to a growing sense of abbreviated communication, part of a wider issue of a failure to concentrate, which is the product of what Carr is saying.

Mallorcan literary heritage is hardly a thing of international acclaim, but book reading locally has long been taken seriously. Whether what is being read is serious or not, if the publishers are concerned as to a decline in reading (and the statistics would bear this out), then they should perhaps be embracing, if they haven't already, the new technologies. Whether these really work though is still very much an unanswered question.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.