Books set to live on in triumph of the quill

Malcolm Knox, Sydney Morning Herald, May 21, 2011

Bullish on the book's future ... author James Gleick is the closing speaker at the Sydney Writers' Festival tomorrow. Photo: Nick Moir

JAMES Gleick is aware of the oddity: coming to a readers' and writers' festival to deliver a speech titled ''Perish the Thought: the death (and/or resurrection) of the book''. Aptly, he has been given the Sydney Writers' Festival's closing-night slot.
But Gleick, the New York author of international bestsellers such as Chaos and his latest, The Information, forecasts continuing relevance for the printed word, albeit with ''a certain amount of insecure hopefulness''.
Technology has taken the book through various formats but Gleick says that for readers a book exists independently of the technological form that carries it. ''The book, for many of us, has nothing to do with the physical object. It's the thing that came out of the writer's head.''

Gleick's new book traces a history of increased global connectivity. Yet he does not fear that multiple distractions will destroy humans' capacity to read messages longer than 140 characters.
''I have to admit I spend some time on Twitter myself, but the whole history of the last century has been one distraction after another - the phonograph, radio, television - and reading has survived them all,'' he said.
''The bottom line is that some people are always going to have the ability and the desire to focus on one thing at a time and they will find things in books that they can't get in any other way.''

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/books-set-to-live-on-in-triumph-of-the-quill-20110520-1ewlh.html#ixzz1MxsCSVkG