As Lit Fest nears, a query: What's the future of books?
Julia Keller Cultural Critic, Chicago Tribune.
June 6, 2010

A friend of mine in her early 20s managed to poke a finger through the tissue-thin argument that iPads, Kindles and Nooks are just as good as books, that reading is reading, that content is all that matters.
She and her classmates at the University of Notre Dame were invited to the home of a revered professor. It was a gleaming palace of erudition, she said: Room after room was filled with elegant floor-to-ceiling bookcases; each bookcase was filled with beautiful volumes; each volume seemed to glow with the written legacy of the world's wisdom.
It was, she recalled, breathtaking.

Reveling in all of this, my friend had a sudden, unsettling thought: What if, instead of the soaring bookcases, the professor's home had featured a card table with a Kindle on it?
The content might be the same — vast storage capacity is one of the chief selling points of new technologies — but how different it would be in terms of spiritual sustenance.

I'm glad that this anecdote comes from an undergraduate, because if it emerged from a creaky old coot — e.g., me — you'd dismiss it as the ill-tempered rant of a curmudgeon who needs to double up on the Advil and the Benefiber. The truth is, however, that many people, regardless of age, are feeling nostalgic these days for book culture. It's a sort of prenostalgia, really, because books are still here — but their days seem numbered. Or do they?

The 26th Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit Fest gets under way Saturday, the 12th, in the South Loop. As a quick spin through printersrowlitfest.org will reveal, there is a panel or presentation to suit every taste, and if you don't like listening to authors yammer on, you can stroll the streets and pick through the wondrous wares of hundreds of booksellers.

Another reason for book lovers not to throw in the towel quite yet is "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" (Norton), by Nicholas Carr, a quietly eloquent retort to those who claim that digital culture is harmless — who claim, in fact, that we're getting smarter by the minute just because we can plug in a computer and allow ourselves to get lost in the funhouse of endless hyperlinks.

"The Net," Carr muses mournfully, "is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
The greatest loss, Carr says, is the ability to engage with a book, to read deeply. We have become a culture of "chronic scatterbrains."

Read the rest of this thoughtful piece at the Chicago Tribune online.