Much ado about Jonathan Franzen’s appearance at the Hay Festival in Cartegna, where he sounded-off against eBooks, technology and corporate capitalism. The Guardian reports that Franzen said:
‘Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring.
‘Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.’
This is well-trodden ground: the permanence of print versus the transience of digital.
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