Content and Contenment: Adding Value to the Book ~ by Laurie Steed [14.04.2010]

There is a strange immediacy that comes with downloading.

My most recent digital purchase was Daniel Merriweather's Love and War, purchased at a reduced price of $9.99 online through Itunes. I enjoyed the album in its digital form and it took only seconds to acquire it. That said, I may have enjoyed it more had it come as a compact disc.

Why? Well first and foremost, I like physical objects. I find their presence makes me feel safer, structured, more "real." I like when friends come around, pick up my CD's and say either "Wow, Daniel Merriweather; you've really got your finger on the pulse of today's urban youth culture", or "Laurie, you're thirty-three and you live in Melbourne's Eastern suburbs, stop acting like you're the lost cousin of Biggie Smalls.

The absence of a CD means I cannot just put the music on and drift away. I must remember if I've synced my MP3 player since I downloaded the album, and if not, I must swear, curse, and eventually listen to that same Angus and Julia Stone CD I bought because I liked the sleeve design.

My art and literature are a reflection of myself, and this reflection is hard to evoke in digital form. I know this by experience thanks to a cousin of mine who has a Terabyte of films, music and TV shows from the internet on a portable hard-drive. The hard drive itself is slick and impressive. What's on it is a whole lot of folders, distinguishable only by the folder names. With so much data, it's becoming more and more difficult to separate the trash from the treasure.

I am by no means criticising the technology here. My MP3 player enables me to take an entire collection on a tram, train or anywhere else I choose. Such capabilities have undoubtedly changed my life and will continue to do so. What's funny though, is that while my love of music remains, my respect for each individual album has greatly waned. What once was an individual item is now simply "content".

This needn't be a bad thing. Well designed content can maintain and sometimes even improve on the standards inherent in material items. The key then, is to provide exemplary content that not only engages and entertains the reader, but takes them to that next level of interactivity.

This is all the more relevant when it comes to books (or whatever you choose to define as books). In digital realms, things work differently. Not necessarily better or worse, but differently. Indeed, Digital technologies excel where books cannot (if you're in any doubt of that, see the video at the top of the page). Books, whether we like it or not, are unable to take readers into the same realm of interactivity.

Books may not have the interactivity of digital realms, but they engage us and our imaginations in a way that digital technologies cannot, due to waning batteries, eyestrain and limited power supplies. Somewhere, somehow digital technologies need to humanise their products and indeed the reading experience. How this can be done is perhaps better dealt with in another blog post.

I personally hope books live long and prosper in the digital age, but that only extends to certain books. I would not be at all upset, for example, if all the Di Morrissey, Matthew Reilly, Jodi Piccoult and Dan Brown books disappeared from bookstores and were instead replaced by a small online kiosk, preferably away from the books I loved. Why? Because to me, some books are as much about form as content, and until digital formats can properly replicate them, I don't want to see a digitally reproduced Annie Leibowitz retrospective, 1st edition JD Salinger or Folio society reprint. I like buying such books for my friends and family, I like buying such books for myself and their physical life generates as much emotion in me as the content between their pages.

All this talk about the pending digital revolution, to me at least, is focusing on the wrong topics; what's important, regardless of format, is the production of quality content. Depending on the form or genre of that content, it may be open to interactivity of all kinds; some forms may be terribly suited to such interactivity, in which case you would hope publishers would have the common sense to then revert the item back to its most sellable form.

Adding value is not attributable to only form or content, it is a combination of both... and that is what makes the books we read so open to this mind-melting, at times confusing discussion on the future of literature.

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