I wonder if Joan Brady and Jody Picoult buy the same brand of koolaid.
Okay, so I couldn’t resist. I wasn’t going to blog about this, but WTF, I quit smoking, that’s already one trauma this year to strain my willpower.
I’ve quoted James Hall, Consumer Affairs Editor of the Telegraph, from his column today.
If you haven’t read the full article I posted on my Facebook page, let me highlight a few pointers here.
Joan Brady, who won the literary prize in 1993 for Theory of War, a novel about a young boy sold into white slavery in post-Civil War America, said that paper books will never disappear because people use them to “confirm their social identity” and want to be seen carrying them.
Meanwhile lowbrow “pulp” such as “celebrity biographies, Mills & Boon and porn” will “disappear into e-books”, she said.
Ms Brady said that although e-books are convenient for holidays, they lack the social importance of real books because they can not be displayed, lent to friends or passed on as a collection when their owner dies.
She said that once an e-book has been bought, it is “more worthless than used toilet paper, which can at least end up as compost”.
Ms Brady said that e-books can not be conversational “ice-breakers” in the way that real books are.
“People look at your [real] books and say ‘I see you have the new Costa winner. What do you think of it?’ You can’t do that with an e-book.
“Well, I suppose you could pick the gadget up, turn it on and file through the home page, but that’s really like poking into your host’s bathroom cupboard. Suppose you found dirty pictures there? Porn is already sold in plain wrappers, just like the e-books you read on the Tube,” she said.
And this is my favorite part, someone please whip out the Irony Knife….
The author, whose new novel The Blue Death is released in both e-book and physical versions, said that the threat posed to real books by digital ones will keep traditional publishers on their toes.
So…does that mean, because she is having her next book released as an ebook, that she’s calling her own book low-brow porn? That it should be sold in a plain wrapper, no cover art at all? That it should be kept in the bathroom? That no one will discuss it or use it as an ice-breaker in conversation? That it lacks social importance? And that it denies her “social identity?”
Who the F* does Joan Brady think she is? I think, on occasion, I shake my head at the stupidity of some of the articles and quotes and comments I see in blogs and newspapers and on some chat boards. But this one takes a huge chunk of the cake. I am actually left pretty speechless, so no need to worry about the f-bomb falling into every other sentence. Just the big huge Irony Knife.
Sheesh.
And in case you missed the Jody Picoult reference, my blog on that is here http://marshacanham.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/i-hope-jodi-picoult-likes-worms/
