page137
eBooKs: Neither e, Nor BooKs
115
Yeah, our attention spans are
different
today, but they aren’t
necessarily
shorter
. Warren Ellis’s fans managed to hold the story-
line for
Transmetropolitan
[
Transmet
cover] in their minds for
five
years
while the story trickled out in monthly funnybook install-
ments. J. K. Rowlings’ installments on the Harry Potter series get
fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entire forests are sacri-
ficed to long-running series fiction like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of
Time books, each of which is approximately 20,000 pages long (I
may be off by an order of magnitude one way or another here).
Sure, presidential debates are conducted in soundbites today and
not the days-long oratory extravaganzas of the Lincoln-Douglas
debates, but people manage to pay attention to the 24-month-
long presidential campaigns from start to finish.
7. We need
all
the ebooks. [We need
all
the ebooks] The vast
majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one
library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no one
person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written work.
None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of human
literature. But that doesn’t mean that we can stick with just the
most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution.
For starters, we’re all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared
desire for the core canon of literature, but each of us wants to
complete that collection with different texts that are as distinctive
and individualistic as fingerprints. If we all look like we’re doing
the same thing when we read, or listen to music, or hang out in
a chatroom, that’s because we’re not looking closely enough. The
shared-ness of our experience is only present at a coarse level
of measurement: once you get into really granular observation,
there are as many differences in our “shared” experience as there
are similarities.
More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of
Content 2nd gal final.indd 115
7/4/08 9:57:05 AM