Cheating the prophets

Technological progress is having no effect on one constant of society: the book. Ken Wright celebrates

THE amiably subversive anarchist G K Chesterton, a natural born technophobe in spirit despite living in a time when there was very little technology about which to be phobic, liked to encourage “The human race, to which so many of my readers belong …” to play a game called Cheat the Prophet. Here are the rules:

‘The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun …’

I think it’s a shame that Cheat the Prophet seems to have fallen out of fashion. Nowadays, in almost everything, we seem to take what the clever men tell us as gospel: at work we get flexible; in economics we go global; in public services we accept what is humorously known as reform; in private life we stock up on toys to do things that were either being done perfectly well already or don’t need doing at all.

Perhaps this is because, in a future-shocked age, the “generation” Chesterton mentions translates to about five minutes, which doesn’t leave time for the clever men to die and be buried nicely, and we feel decently uncomfortable about ignoring them while they’re still alive. The possibility of accelerating the process may yet occur to anarchists less amiable than GKC. Be that as it may, it is pleasing to note that one crucial and hugely symbolic aspect of civilisation remains serenely unspoiled by progress: the book.

It may be news to you that anyone has even tried to bring those comfortingly changeless/contemptibly antiquated (delete according to taste) lumps of fun and learning up to date, which is a cheerful marker of how miserably the attempt has failed. But the masters of the information universe have actually been trying for about a decade to persuade us to abandon the smelly old mediaeval technology of paper and print and, like good little neophiliacs, take our reading in virtual form.

Typical of the first generation of library replacements was the Rocket E-Reader, a weighty but fragile and unreliable device with the image quality of a 1977 punk fanzine and the brightness of a mildly depressed firefly, handicapped further by there being hardly any virtual books available to download on to it and it costing enough to buy a couple of hundred out-of-copyright classics in paperback. It would be enjoyable to say that it rose like a rocket and fell like its stick, but it hardly got off the ground at all.

Several similar devices shared the same fate in the 1990s, but it was not to be expected that the clever men in publishing and IT would tolerate for long the horror of otherwise modern citizens reading thoroughly obsolete paper books. Sony and a subsidiary of Philips last year launched new, improved e-readers that are almost as small and light as a real book and, apparently, can be comfortably read without drawing the curtains and turning all the lights out. Although these were thrown down the well most energetically, the world is still waiting for the faintest sound of a splash. Gutenberg still rules. Latest of all is ICUE, which uses mobile telephones screens as its medium. Mobile telephone screens. Jesus.

But why, actually, have the world’s readers failed to get with the program? Perhaps it’s best to answer that by imagining that the book as we know it came into the world only recently, after the virtual book rather than before. Think how easily the marketing folks could sell its many up-to-date features. It’s cheap (e-books of copyright titles, despite costing zero per extra copy to “produce”, cost about the same as the real book). You can take it with you anywhere. It lasts a lifetime. It has an intuitively simple user interface (open; read; turn; repeat).

Barring sheer physical destruction, it never breaks down. It comes in one universal format accessible to all users with standard-issue human equipment (beware, early technology adoptors; the e-book equivalent of the Betamax/VHS wars is already in its early skirmishes.) Literally millions of titles are available. It requires no energy input beyond the light you’re already using, indoors or out - the most priggish Guardianista can enjoy it guiltlessly, smug in the knowledge of its minimal carbon footprint. As a set of Unique Selling Points I’d say these would leave the e-book languishing in the remainder bin for the even distantly foreseeable future.

And there are, of course, less crudely utilitarian advantages. An e-book can never have a handsome, aged binding; it can never be a relic of period style in illustration and design. It can have no eccentric annotations scribbled down the margin by previous owners – no previous owners, either, and hence no second-hand bookshops, thereby depriving their customers of recherch_ pleasures and their idiosyncratic proprietors of their only possible vocation. You will not find on its flyleaf a faded inscription that links your life to that of strangers you will never know, or reminds you of someone you used to know very well. An e-book, in short, has no cultural or social baggage; it’s a cold form of communication against the paper book’s musty human heat.

The really interesting difference between the two forms, however, is in their modes of consumption. Rifling through the internet in search of puffs and propaganda for the e-book, it’s significant how often one comes across phrases like “the on-the-go modern reader” and “today’s 24-7 lifestyles”. As for the available, paid-for software, it’s almost all the most miserable schlock, falling mostly into the dismal categories of beach-blockbuster thrillers and romances, self-improvement, and career/management smarts. A representative compound title would be something like Ravished By The New Age SAS During My Annual Job Appraisal . Whole catalogues seem to have been compiled from titles left behind in Business Class airline cabins.

This is, of course, the only kind of book suitable for on-the-go, 24-7 modern reading: books that insist, like Mr Gradgrind, that facts are what is wanted in life, leavened with an allowance of trash that can be guaranteed not to make anyone think twice about Mr Gradgrind and the truthfulness of his facts. Books worth reading can’t be read like that, but then the whole point of books worth reading is that they presume in the reader a reasonable amount of leisure, an inner life, openness to the pleasures of the text.

You can’t read Shakespeare, Swift or the Sherlock Holmes stories on a mobile telephone. You need time and peace; time to think, peace in which to explore other worlds, like Keats on first looking into Chapman’s Homer. Which is why real books on print and paper remain so amiably subversive, like Mr Chesterton. He’d be pleased to know that in his own line of business, at least, the prophets are still being cheated.