Print is Dead by Jeff Gomez

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
3.75 stars

Reading this book certainly made me feisty--Gomez writes some things that made me nearly scream in frustration. But his opinions also gave me new things to think about in the digital debate. While I'd already decided that book digitalization heralded some positive possibilities, and thus somewhat tepidly (but with some excitement too) accepted it, I hadn't really considered it as necessary to the culture of reading. Gomez points out that generations now growing up completely online will be unlikely to want to read anything in a format beyond their digital standard, and if digital books are not a fundamental part of the literary landscape, they simply will not read. Here is another reason to embrace digitalization, I suppose.

A few of his points do strike me as silly: he tends to continually compare books to music, and and while I understand that both industries may reflect some similar patterns, I don't think that they are perfectly parallel. I do not believe, as does Gomez, that just because we like to play songs in whatever order we like will mean that we will want to jumble pieces of stories in such a fashion. At least, not as a rule. I hope future generations won't be so daft.

Yet aside from a few false notes, his arguments are thoughtful and provided good material for consideration, and I'm glad I read this book.

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