Is Digital Killing Literature?
eBooks and e-ink have been heralded as the modern saviour of literature but can anything replace the smell and feel of paper?
Like many people on this earth, I am an avid reader and love to ‘waste’ my time reading books. Science fiction, philosophy, action, horror, … anything goes! But does it actually matter how you read it? Can e-ink and eBooks have their place or is that special sensory experience of holding a book just irreplaceable?
And, as an added bonus, if you are wise and read my entire article, I will give you my top five books at the end of the article — something for you to enjoy in the format of your choice! And don’t miss the tenth paragraph of this article, I’m really proud of it…
To answer the question about the physical format, you must first ask yourself some others. The first question must be about the dematerialization of the text and its now virtual character.
1. Can there be written literature without a fixed material support, without books, without pages and without paper?
If I had to answer this question subjectively, I would say that no, we cannot have virtual literature on a screen. What I like most when I read a book is to feel it in my hands, to smell the pages (old or new, even if I have a preference for the old pages. Those old pages are the soul of a story, a story that the new ones do not have yet. I want to hear the sound of the pages turning, it’s a real pleasure! Moreover, the eyes do not hurt as they inevitably do on a screen. It is a very different experience.
2. What can digital technology bring to literature?
Depending on your point of view, you may find that digital technology is a positive point in literature or not. I would say that authors can find new ways to write, in a more interactive way with images, for example. But is it still pure literature? Is it not multimedia? Literature risks becoming an industrial product and, yielding to the vertigo of the multiple and the repetitive, to be reduced to an infinitely engravable text, to an uninterrupted flow of words without an author.
It is important to recognise, however, that digital can also have benefits for literature. It has made literature more accessible to people by helping them discover new books, allowing easy access to e-books, and providing the ability to read books in different languages. It has also made it easier for authors to publish their work and connect with their audience in a more direct way.
3. What is the reality today?
From now on, texts are not only in books and libraries, nor on a hard disk or in one’s computer… They circulate on the networks, they have become “nomadic”. We can copy and paste them, send them, share them, modify them… Taking away the unique and physical side of literature. But then one might think that nobody reads with physical books anymore. Indeed, it’s cheaper to collect your books in a tablet, it takes less space, you can carry them everywhere, you can’t damage them etc. And yet… Libraries have never been as full as they are today! Incredible and not logical, isn’t it? Note for example that in 2021 after covid, there was an increase of +35% than in 2019 before COVID… It seems that people are still human (and not robots) and still enjoy going to libraries.
4. What about digital humanities?
We must take a metatheoretical look at the digital humanities, the cold, serial, algorithmic humanities, heavily equipped and financed, largely oriented towards neoliberalism, based on an unpleasant idea of reading, quickly dispatched.
Digital reading would only serve our knowledge and must therefore, like all learning, go through an unpleasant moment, demonstrating an undesirable form of scientism.
It’s sort of an abyss. It is the books that have enabled advances in technology. Because before being technical, technology is above all a fantasy, a utopian idea of a reality created by the magic brain of writers. Technologies have always existed first in fiction books before existing in real life.
So today, if we talk about digital literature, it is above all because (physical) books have thought of this idea. And if, logically, digital is killing literature, that means that it is literature that has killed itself!
I will end (this is the tenth paragraph!!) by saying that literature has changed my life in many areas. Nothing strikes a reader quite like the first book that truly cuts to their hearts. These first images, the echo of his words that we believe we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt in our memory a palace to which, sooner or later — and no matter how many books we read, how many universes we discover — we will return to one day. For me, these bewitched pages will always be those I encountered in the galleries of Anne Robillard’s Knights of Emerald.
To conclude, Is digital killing literature? is a very complex question. For some people (like me, you will have understood), digital technology kills (has already killed) literature which has lost its aura and its sublime. While others think that digital has opened new perspectives in literary creation, more visual and accessible. It is important to keep a balance and to continue to promote reading and literature, whether it is in print or digital form.
As promised, here are my top 5 literary works. If you haven’t read them, go for it! No risk that you won’t like them. There is something for everyone…
5. The Wind Walkers by Alain Damasio
4. Perfume: the story of a murderer by Patrick Suskind
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminating the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
