IT WAS quite amusing to read recently, via ‘old-fashioned’ printed words on paper in popular newspapers, about the surmised impending end of traditional Trade (or book) Publishing, due to the recent upsurge of electronic E-books where texts on disks can be inserted in your average computer/laptop, however small, and read by scrolling up and down.
First of all, if millions of readers around the world wish to read books this way — even though it could be because we already spend so much time before computer screens, we might as well do ALL our reading there — then electronic books will no doubt serve and satisfy them, regardless of the drawbacks, or better creative and aesthetic pleasures they will be losing unknowingly.
Also, to be fair to traditional book publishers, and fairness should be a permanent social and civilized human value uncompromised to any wish for ‘competitive markets’, electronic books should be priced and sold in the same way that printed and bound books are. In addition, it makes no sense in this madly inventive world to hear that paper still cannot be produced from recycled materials, or the increasing use of electronic gadgets will not overload energy grids.
Where does this justification for believing that humans are ‘naturally’ inclined to move further away from words on paper with each technological invention, and closer to video-based image communication, come from? From societies trying to achieve such an objective, of course, and also trying to convince everyone that they want that too.
The whole ‘revelation’ of such a microchip of predestination embedded in our ‘collective unconscious’ reeks of  the same dogmatic 18th Century scientific belief that language is just a pre-packaged given, like an unquestionable product which completely pre-exists whatever we want to write, or how we want it to be read, therefore we can keep changing its mode of visible presentation because the product is already decided, and is always the same, anyway.
But this is simply not so. And the development of creative literature has been showing and proving this fact since the mid-19th Century at least, with the descriptive, self-questioning and structural use of language in the novels of Flaubert, then the early 20th Century novels of Proust, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
Some of the major discoveries and innovations of these original creative writers are that outer and inner descriptions can project visual images on the screen of our minds via the movement of sentences across pages, and that creative literature exists within the continuous exploration of language, and is not about a reality that already exists outside of language, which words simply tell us about, as though they represented an infallible, unquestionable, omnipotent being.
These writers, by the way, were considered unusual, or ‘difficult’, precisely because they did not behave like unquestioning school children for whom language had already been permanently defined, classified and used to uphold disguised social prejudices and the critical stagnation of education in society.
What these writers began to develop was the literary or linguistic act, where the movement of written images (which the cinema and TV later utilised and thrived on) became the nucleus or centre of described observations of human beings, objects, environments, nature, etc, together with the very thought process within the narrator writing, if the writing was presented in the first-person tense.
The most common type of creative writing as stories, novels etc.,  is not like this (given the platitude that variety is the spice of life, and we are not all the same), but rather expresses commentaries (rather than descriptions) or tells stories where characters, even whole nations or societies or communities are spoken of like puppet stereotypes, completely known, as though manufactured similarly on a factory line, or made by a human deity whose voice speaks through the comfortable, know-it-all Third-Person tense, like the voice of a formula language.
It seems more obvious that this sort of traditional and commercial creative writing (along with informational writings, speeches, pep-talks, sermons, etc) where words, sentences, are forever controlled by some ‘story’ we’re voraciously following, and are excited to reach its ‘climax’, would be more suited to E-book formats.
Yet, we may still wonder if the public, who usually read these disposable types of hardcover or paperback novels to probably pass the time, would now prefer to experience them by pressing buttons instead of turning pages.
On the other hand, it appears difficult to conceive of E-books representing great works of literary fiction, where sentences convey time structures, viewpoints, and descriptions of visual imagery, engage readers by asking for their critical participation not just spectatorship, and therefore considerably SLOW DOWN their reading pace and easy comprehension, while prolonging reading as pleasure on various levels.
For example, how suitable would Proust’s great thousand-page contemplative novel, ‘IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME’, or James Joyce’s energetic and hilarious ‘ULYSSES’, or Virginia Woolf’s poetic ‘THE WAVES’ and ‘BETWEEN THE ACTS’, or Faulkner’s spellbinding ‘ABSALOM ABSALOM’, or Claude Simon’s  detailed cinematic ‘THE GEORGICS’ and THE ACACIA’, among numerous other first-class works of literary fiction, be for E-book consumption?
The very nature of such writing, crammed with visual images, linguistic puzzles, artistic references, and highly mobile narratives, already demonstrate a concept of mobile video-band visual communication, which it would be an embarrassing faux pas not to realize, and even damage by removing it from the singular printed-book format which acts as a sort of necessary modern paradox suggested by the presentation of visual writing in such a traditional format.
But to decide that such writing, precisely because of its suggestion of a mobile cinematic style, therefore suits the new technological electronic screen reading format would be a literal deduction of calculated denseness.
However, another dimension to this technological versus literary format comes to mind when we admit the temptation and possibility of abridging, shaping, or editing of texts to suit a more broad and simple, quick and easy commercial absorption of language for the E-book reader who is eager to get to the bottom-line of ‘stories’, rather than satisfy any desire to savor the very texture and mystery of sentence structures.
The point is that new processes of transferring and accessing creative literature, or even film, can alter the original intention and effect of the writer’s work. One young reporter recently told me she wanted to read Flaubert’s ‘MADAME BOVARY’ and Maupassant’s ‘BEL-AMI’ electronically and conveniently on the Internet because she could not easily locate book editions of these two outstanding novels.
However, after reading the two novels electronically, she happened to be lent the 1960s Penguin Classics editions of both novels, Flaubert’s with the superb, accurate translation by Alan Russell. Reading these printed and bound book editions, she realized how longer and more satisfyingly detailed they were than their electronic editions. It is possible also that the electronic editions simply decided that the gist of the ‘story’ of these novels was all that mattered, or was essential, and a précised approach would suffice for those readers who, in any case, would never know the difference if they no longer, or never read ‘old-fashioned’ and originally printed and bound books.
Behind this sort of technical adjustment to how we consume artistic products today survives perhaps an old competitive rivalry, or relationship, between Science and Art. The world has developed technologically to such an extent that highly technical or scientific processes and formats are now capable of technically absorbing quite competent original artistic formats of presentation, and even compromising their original quality as a result.