- I never read. I don't read books, things... Because...
What am I suppose to read, now that I'm older and that there are millions
and millions of books? I'll never make it, you know? I am one person
reading and there are millions of them writing!
Yes, of course, it is a
funny line from the movie by Troisi "I'm starting from three". Back
in 1981, in Italy, editors published close to 50,000 new titles every
year, with some reprints, true, but there were nevertheless so many new
titles, it was difficult to keep up!
And today? What would say Gaetano,
the protagonist in the film, after the arrival of Lulu.com, eBook Author,
ePub, and the general boom of electronic publication on demand?
We are
in fact at another important place on a path initiated in the sixteenth
century when Gutenberg, with the invention of printing, transformed us all
in readers.
Then in the second half of the last century, Xerox, with
its photocopiers, transformed us all in publishers. And today, with the
Internet, we can all be authors, in fact, we can be authors and publishers
at the same time, since, thanks to Stores, we can advertize next to the
last novel by Andrea Camilleri, the thriller we wrote during the holidays
or the album of pictures of our trip to India. Perfectly laid out, it can
be ordered by our friends whether in an electronic format or in an elegant
print edition on glossy paper with a skin, silk or root cover.
With
only dozens of Euros we can purchase an ISBN code in order to guarantee
our rights as an author, why not, we can even receive an email from a home
decorating magazine offering to pays us for the publication in their own
magazine of a picture we took of our living room which was seen on the
cover of our book dedicated to our grandmother's birthday.
This is the
power of the web which, after having changed with MP3s the music market,
is now having a great impact with ePub on the world of books?
In fact,
hundreds of thousands of titles each year, and soon each month, are added
to the official publications of more traditional publishing houses. But,
let us be careful, we are not simply talking about a technology
contributing to the explosion of a publishing phenomenon with all its
consequences, beginning with the quality of the offering. It is instead a
matter of change in society and the market which place next to the book a
new object with its new role and its new actors. And if authors like
Stephen King or Cory Doctorow, using their own marketing channels, are
using it to eliminate publishers from the cycle and the costs involved in
producing books, the eBook is truly
- I don't understand what my son is doing all night sitting at the computer, a colleague told me a few days ago while we were at the office coffee machine.
- Probably the same thing that you and I were doing in front of the television or with the newspaper in our hands. Just like us, he is cultivating his own myths, I answered.
And if fact, it is exactly what it is. I am in my fifties and I grew up in the shadow of icons like Rivera, Mazzola and Facchetti, like Bob Dylan and King Crimson. Myths born and grown in the global village through broadcasting technologies like the newspapers, movies and television.
Our kids have chosen instead to abandon the global village by hooking up with the social network and the personal agora where myths are not common to entire generations. They are born and they feed out of the restricted group determined by the social networking technology.
To me or my colleague, the computer is the web and the world on the desk. For our children, it is Facebook and bringing their own desk on that of their friends.
To Deep Purple or Kerouac, they prefer one of their MP3s digitalized with GarageBand, and they order from Amazon Store for 5 or 50 Euros, it depends on the cover they chose, the eBook they have laid out together to immortalize their secondary school graduation.
eBooks are not books that are easier to make from a technological point of view, or a low quality message to the world, but rather a new object for new groups where new generations are learning to get together. These are the kids to whom we have tried to teach the principle of "fidelity" to "organizations" and to "missions" with universal symbols, but that, luckily for us and for them, they are refusing to listen to in order to follow instead their "loyalty" towards the "group" and towards "projects".
Unlike their parents who were office-workers, they will have to
learn to create and sell their work. It would not be unusual then if they
began doing so right away, favouring the charismatic leader of their
class, or the enthusiastic philosophy or math professor instead of a rock
star or Goethe, and if they decided to write their emotions and adventures
in eBooks destined to Stores to be bought by friends rather than
history.
This is why I chose to begin this article citing Massimo
Troisi, the greatest, the first and probably the only one who was able to
translate the broadcasting technology of newspapers, books and movies from
the boring language of myths to the very powerful language - and at the
same time simple and beautiful - of the everyday glasses of
soda.
Allow me now, in order to find some answers to the legitimate
objections I have and you may have I am sure, to conclude with another
contrasting quote.
It is the comment that, in 1473, a Venetian copyist,
the Benedictine monk Filippo di Strada, made following the invention of
the metal mobile characters for typographical printing.
[writing] "Est
virgo haec penna, meretrix est stampificata" (is pure if done with a pen,
but an act of prostitution if done through printing).
And now in
vernacular (by fear of not being understood by "readers of printed books")
: "Printed books with lovely covers are appreciated by fools to whom they
are given as objects of little value."