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Susie Wild is a poet, writer, journalist, critic, lecturer, festival organiser and editor with 25 years of editorial experience. She is the author of poetry collections 'Windfalls' (2021) and 'Better Houses' (2017). Her debut short story collection 'The Art of Contraception' was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2011. Her ebook novella 'Arrivals' was released in 2011. She edited the illustrated short story anthology 'Rarebit' for Parthian's 21st birthday. (All available via Parthian Books). She lives by a mountain in South Wales @Soozerama

Sunday 14 August 2011

Is this the end for books?

Do you know what wilfing is? Have you heard of keitai shosetsus? Sam Leith on what to expect if the Kindle really does kill off the printed book...


"In 1996, the US computer entrepreneur Brewster Kahle set up the Internet Archive, its mission being to provide "universal access to all knowledge". This admirable project strives to store copies of every single web page ever posted: a ghostly archive of the virtual. [...] Kahle has set up a series of converted shipping containers in California where he hopes to create another archive – one that contains a copy of every book ever published."


[...]


"Sci-fi author Cory Doctorow has called the internet "an ecosystem of interruption technologies". TS Eliot's line "distracted from distraction by distraction" seems apt."


"Already, there's evidence of this. If it really were the case that our attention spans are shortening, you might expect to see a wholesale revival of interest in short stories, or even lyric poems, and a tendency for full-length books to shrink. But we're not seeing that. Instead we're seeing Wolf Hall, Fingersmith, The Crimson Petal and the White, The Corrections, Underworld, Infinite Jest, Tree of Smoke, and fat Stephen King after fat Stephen King."


MORE: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/14/kindle-books

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