Diary of a Mad Editor

I was blog post by new media phobic  writer, Nicolas Carr, a guy who though he himself uses new media as a platform for his writing is nonetheless critical of everything digital. His latest target is e-books.

More specifically, he ponders whether being able to edit on-the-fly is a good things since a book is never really complete if you can constantly revise it quickly and painlessly. According to Carr:

What will be lost, or at least diminished, is the sense of a book as a finished and complete object, a self-contained work of art…

Well, this is a good one. Truly. I had to clean my cheap eyeglasses twice to make sure I was reading that correctly. Think about this: When the anti-eBook crowd initially poo-pooed the e-book, one of the criticisms was that there was no editorial process at all. Now Carr is saying that there will be too much editing. Huh?

Here’s my problem with this argument: Revision is a necessary part of writing. And many writers have published revised versions of printed “literary” books even after publication.  Jerzy Kosinski to name just one noted writers, was infamous for doing this. Walt Whitman made it his life’s work to revise and update Leaves of Grass. And what about the many editors and literary scholars who have posthumously revised and updated well-known literary works (how many different editions of Shakespeare, Homer, The Bible are there? And don’t even get me started on what The Powers That Be have done to Twain). The only difference is that it takes longer to do in print. However, for the vast majority of writers, when a book is finished it is finished. Does Carr imagine that the ability to make quick post-publication revisions will cause writers who wouldn’t normally make post-publication revisions to make post-publication revisions? Like it’s an addiction or something?

Further, is Carr suggesting that a writer doesn’t even have the right to change and update his own work if he so chooses?  This is nonsense. This whole idea that the physical form of a printed book is all that defines a book as a book  is ridiculous. Is a bound collection of blank pages a book? Or is the book the written arrangement of words and ideas?  Is The Grapes of Wrath less of a masterpiece in digital form? Because that’s the question we have to answer going forward. Not whether revision changes a piece of writing. Because is does  that’s why we call it revision. The definition doesn’t change just because a book goes from print to digital.

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