Musings

Went to my buddy Kev’s book event in B-more last night and had a thought as we discussed how books were surviving in an increasingly on-demand environment. In a way, it’s kind of obvious. Books are already on-demand.

There is no other art form/entertainment (with the possible exception of painting and sculpture) that is not time-dependent. That is to say, in olden times, if you wanted to see a play, listen to music, watch television, you had to do it at a scheduled time and place. As technology advanced, some of those restrictions were lifted, but any piece of music or film still exacts a specific time commitment, even if that commitment is split up over time.

Long story short, books have never been like this, and never will be. Everyone reads at a different rate, so there is no set time (there is perhaps a lower limit, but that’s all) for completion, and certainly no scheduled time to begin or end, and portability (with the exception of, say, The Complete Works of Shakespeare) has always been easy to achieve. This may be part of the reason that books have been able to compete with increasingly mutable media, because they inherently possess all of the physical and chronological advantages for which entertainment technology has been striving.