A recent Wired Magazine article poses an interesting question: Did the release of the iPad increase the volume of pirated eBooks shared over the Internet?
They went to TorrenFreak to find out. TorrentFreak is a blog that tracks BitTorrent activity. BitTorrent, in turn--as you may know--is the most commonly used peer-to-peer file-haring software on the Internet, and by extension is also the application most used to share pirated copies of music, movies, and, to some extent, books.
What Wired--with somewhat of a yawn--discovered, should not have come as a surprise. While the sharing of some pirated titles rose by as much as 78% after the iPad release, the numbers themselves are so small as to be negligible.
The lesson: BitTorrent--and by extention, piracy--deals in music and movies, not in books.
Digital Age
Which, to me, raises the real flag: the Digital Age, with all its technology (video, audio, bells, whistles) threatens to leave language--the most magical human "technology" there is--behind.
By comparison to music and films, there is no thirst for reading. And that, in my book--no pun intended--spells trouble for the human race.
No matter how well produced, a film can never reach as deeply, and move as profoundly, as can a well-written book. Language lingers close to or within the soul. Images (and sound) stimulate eye and ear and never move as deeply. To the degree that the appreciation of the magic of language evaporates among the bits-and-bytes carrying digital streams, to that degree our race heads for aesthetic, and spiritual, bankruptcy.
Sight and Sound
Yes, some films (and music) reach deeper than others, but even so, sight and sound externally provided do not compare to the visions and voices created internally as we read a captivating book. Language allows a co-creation of story by author and reader, whereas film is always a type of force-feeding of image, which may or may not reach all the way home.
A case in point: A few years ago I read about schoolchildren becoming quite upset about attempts to illustrate the Harry Potter books (this was before the films were released). These children had already created their own "Harry Potters" from the words heard or read, they did not need some external source (i.e., grownup) to tell them what he looked like; in fact, many were upset by this and refused to accept someone else's interpretation of the little wizard.
That is--in my view, anyway--also why the filmed version of a good story always, always, always falls short of the story itself: It is the directors interpretation of the story (which in turn in the author's interpretation of existence) that you watch, not your own.
Lost Art
Reading for the love of reading, for the love of language and story, is a dying art, there's no doubt about it. Literary fiction, especially--whether digital or on paper--is coming up shorter and shorter in sales each year.
If given a choice, we seem to have a predilection for taking the easier of two or more ways: we see the film rather than reading the book, we listen to the music rather than create it ourselves; striving, it seems, for having the biggest and most pleasant effect created on us, rather than creating this by our own efforts.
My prayer is that a hundred years from now it's not all pictures and sounds and no words. We need language to reach and move souls.
And the soul is not digital.
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