It’s “Just Product Dude?” Uh, no.
Tags: books, e-books, kindle, Publishing, reading, steve jobs, timothy egan
A few days ago Timothy Egan of the NY Times responded to Steve Jobs’ statement about Amazon’s Kindle:
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” Jobs told the Times. “the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”
I’m one of the people who found this statement really disappointing. I believe Apple is a company that could make an e-book reader work, make it compatible with several other programs on the market and make it sexy. Hell, it could be as easy as giving the iPhone book-reading capabilities.
Anyways, back to Egan. In his refute of Jobs and his declaration of his love of books, he had the following to say:
The Mac, Pixar, the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes. This stuff is cool. Lighter than air. iGetit. But it’s just product, dude.
Just product? Maybe so. But these products revolutionized the way we consume things. Apple has changed how we interact with technology, with creative industries, and, to some extent, with each other. How can it be “just product” if it’s doing that?
Egan’s statement comes from a desire to demonstrate that reading is above being “just product.” “Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience,” he writes. “It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.”
Egan is confusing “reading” with “books”. iTunes and iPods are products, listening is not. The Mac is a product, everything we use it for is not. iPhone is a product, interacting with friends and surfing the internet is not.
If we had a device that had inter-active cross-references and indices, that let us immediately hook up to others reading the same book, that gave us access to secondary and outside resources through the very book we were reading, that gave us the ability to instantly store and save passages we found moving or thought-provoking, wouldn’t that change how we read?
Yes, reading is more than product.
But, just as with those other products, the right e-reader will be more than “just product.”
We just need to get Steve Jobs on board.
Image by Dave & Bry. Licensed through Creative Commons.
It would be great if the ibook was invented, but I still think that it wouldn’t make a difference when it comes the facts about reading and the general population.
john,
it’s sad but true isn’t it?
I’d love to hear theories on getting more people reading!
erin.
I wasn’t expecting such a quick response!
Reading has become more of a tool and less of a hobby. People really need reading only for understanding more concepts and reading books for pleasure is a dying joy. Mainstream culture will never really embrace reading books again because we have other things like movies, video games and the internet to entertain us. Look at all the books that have become movies. I can’t really think of a movie that became a book. We like the idea that we can sit down watch a 2 hour movie and get the “jist” of what the book is about without even reading it. It’s sad but true.
It’s hard to create an excitment over books anymore, books like Harry Potter are the exception, where years ago, reading was mainstream among those who could do so. Now everyone who can read would rather watch the movie for a price that would be cheaper in both time and money and be happey to just get the jist of it.
haha, yeah I was just checking my email as you commented
I think that while reading is declining, there will always be a place for books. it’s a venue of creation that can then lend itself to movies and videogames, etc.
we can only hope that having so many mediums will allow a new audience to come to books. books may become movies, but how many more people pick up the book because of the movie?
I’m holding out hope. Harry Potter may be the exception, but maybe there’ll be more Harry Potters to come.
[…] and my pal Erin Balser responds to that, writing “Egan is confusing “reading” with “books”. iTunes and iPods are products, […]
“Egan is confusing “reading” with “books”. iTunes and iPods are products, listening is not. The Mac is a product, everything we use it for is not. iPhone is a product, interacting with friends and surfing the internet is not.”
That’s a great distinction.
I also think the way we read has changed. This doesn’t mean doom and gloom for the long form. It just means packaging it differently. For example, it could be possible to digest Joyce’s Ulysses every day by a few paragraphs via Twitter (that would actually be really cool).
Let’s face it, the further you go back in time the more time people had for reading books. And our information diets were much simpler. For many, the luxury of reading is a luxury of time - in the global info economy western culture is “time poor”.
One of the reasons Harper’s Magazine started offering tiny digest items (like the index and shorter “readings” sections) was to provide an alternative to the more time consuming format of magazines like the Altantic. Not too many people have the time or patience to enjoy a 15 page article - and what if it’s the bulk of that issue and the topic isn’t too interesting? At least with Harpers, you’ve got lots of different content to choose from.
I don’t think reading is the past. I think the way we once read (and our paradigms of reading) have changed due to a changed world.