{"id":301,"date":"2014-01-15T10:34:12","date_gmt":"2014-01-15T15:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.montclair.edu\/creativeresearch\/?p=301"},"modified":"2019-01-10T12:32:45","modified_gmt":"2019-01-10T17:32:45","slug":"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","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/2014\/01\/15\/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\/","title":{"rendered":"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"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em><\/strong> take a nonfiction book and reorganize its ideas onto \u201cdigital cards\u201d that can be read on different devices and sent through social networks…\u201dThe ability to commit 10 or 15 hours to a book is going to be an increasingly fraught decision,\u201d<\/strong><\/em> said Peter Meyers<\/strong>, author of Breaking the Page <\/em>and Citia\u2019s VP for editorial and content innovation, \u201cso we need ways to liberate the ideas trapped inside them.\u201d<\/strong><\/em> — \u201cOut of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind.”\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>, 12\/1\/13.<\/p>\n

Technology is starting to give authors data that is more precise and thus potentially more helpful: \u201cIf you write as a business, you have to sell books,\u201d<\/strong><\/em> said Quinn Loftis<\/strong>, a successful self-published writer for teenagers. \u201cTo do that, you have to cater to the market. I don\u2019t want to write a novel because I want to write it. I want to write it because people will enjoy it.\u201d<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0— \u201cTailoring Their Books to Readers.”\u00a0The New York Times,<\/em> 1\/6\/14.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As followers of The Creative Research Center<\/a> <\/strong>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 \u00a0have 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.<\/p>\n

That said, as a lifelong biographer and nonfiction author [on Facebook at Neil Baldwin Books<\/a><\/strong>] 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.<\/p>\n

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?”<\/p>\n

Then the other contrarian readerly voice says in response to Mr. Meyers: \u00a0“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<\/em> it is continuous, to follow a story made up of words set down in a certain order for thousands of certain reasons?”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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 — <\/em>literacy in our fragmented world.<\/p>\n

What do you<\/em><\/strong> think? Where do we go from here — as writers and readers?<\/p>\n

Please let me and others know — click on the response icon at the top of the page.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cdigital cards\u201d that can be read on different devices and sent through social networks…\u201dThe ability to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creative-research-center-guest-essay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":989,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions\/989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}