Does Anybody Else Out There in the ‘Blogosphere’ Feel Uneasy After Reading These Two Quotes from The New York Times About Books and Reading? – By Neil Baldwin

Some start-ups choose an ambitious approach to the notion that books require too much time to read. Working in collaboration with an author, editors at the New York start-up Citia take a nonfiction book and reorganize its ideas onto “digital cards” that can be read on different devices and sent through social networks…”The ability to commit 10 or 15 hours to a book is going to be an increasingly fraught decision,” said Peter Meyers, author of Breaking the Page and Citia’s VP for editorial and content innovation, “so we need ways to liberate the ideas trapped inside them.” — “Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind.” The New York Times, 12/1/13.

Technology is starting to give authors data that is more precise and thus potentially more helpful: “If you write as a business, you have to sell books,” said Quinn Loftis, a successful self-published writer for teenagers. “To do that, you have to cater to the market. I don’t want to write a novel because I want to write it. I want to write it because people will enjoy it.”    — “Tailoring Their Books to Readers.” The New York Times, 1/6/14.

As followers of The Creative Research Center know, we are all about giving over this platform to colleagues in academia and the arts here at Montclair State University and around the world, students, like-minded friends. I  have not “blogged” as much as I thought I would when I launched this site nearly four years ago because I’ve so enjoyed soliciting and publishing the ideas of others.

That said, as a lifelong biographer and nonfiction author [on Facebook at Neil Baldwin Books] I woke up this morning with the intense need to post these two brief excerpts that I clipped from The New York Times in the past six weeks.

One inner voice is saying: “Get with the program, NB. All media have changed and will continue to change — and to atomize. Stop clinging to your old literary ethos. As long as people keep reading, what difference does it make how, why, or when?”

Then the other contrarian readerly voice says in response to Mr. Meyers:  “But isn’t part of the joy of reading to enter into a sustained world where you are not so much ‘forced’ as induced to slow down and avert distraction, to pick up a narrative because it is continuous, to follow a story made up of words set down in a certain order for thousands of certain reasons?”

Further, the stubborn authorial voice says to Mr. Loftis: “Certainly I want my books to sell! However, if that were the leading edge of my motivation, I know myself well enough to realize that the writing will suffer. I have learned the hard way (there is no other way) that when I let my voice come forth in a structure and form that are constructed over a span of months and years the result is a book I can stand by and that stands for me.”

Like I said…it took me a while to decide to add to the multitude of discourse flying around the Web about the matter of — or the matter with — literacy in our fragmented world.

What do you think? Where do we go from here — as writers and readers?

Please let me and others know — click on the response icon at the top of the page.