E not Evil: how to rid yourself of E-lit paranoia

As a child, reading comprised Lady Bug books of children’s fairy tales and AmarChitra Katha versions of the Ramayana. A natural progression to Enid Blyton and then Judy Blume and teen romances happened. Roald Dahl enthralled and Tolkein as well. Books held cosy comfort. Cable television had not hit India in a major way then and books were one of the few ways of escaping the drudgery of boredom and home work. All the books from that time, I still preserve, trying to preserve with them their feel and their smell and the comfort that they bring. Over the years, a bond with these books and the others that I read was cemented.

A few months back however, a friend sent me an E-snips link with e-versions of books by every conceivable author, from Salman Rushdie to Douglas Adams, and from Kaheel Gibran to Arthur Hailey. Greed gave way to worry, and I started wondering about the fate of my future reading.
Was the paperback era coming to an end? “I snuggled cozily in my arm chair with a book in my hand and a blanket on my lap”, would that phrase be relegated to colloquialism soon, and give way to the very uncomfortable sounding: “I sat rigid on my desk reading from my laptop computer”?

I searched around some more for digital libraries and came across http://www.blish.com/ and then of course there was Project Gutenberg, striking irony commemorating the father of what they were killing – the paper book. And Stephen King, of course had already written a book just for the Internet.

A few days of such worrying and then sanity struck back, as I remembered other doomsday prophecies for all things paper and how none of them really came true. Did the office become “paperless” at the end of the millennium? Did online versions of newspaper decimate their paper presence? Did tabloids sleaze …..ummm….seize to exist because of the plethora of equally trashy websites? (Well, you can’t have everything now can you!)

I searched around some more for “electronic literature”. Words like Fan fiction, e-poetry, wikis, interactive fiction, hypertext sprung up. And the sun of optimism began to shine again. This was not to be the death of literature as we have known it but an extension of its scope, I consoled myself. Techno and trance or R&B and hip-hop, these did not kill music, nor did Rock cease to exist. And so the paper back would live, even if electronic literature was here to stay.

Having made my peace with electronic literature, I decided to investigate some more…. And the results of these investigations, I shall present week after week after week.