Due to the keen interest in John Updike‘s speech at the Saturday Book & Author Breakfast, we are releasing it as a separate podcast. Mr. Updike abandoned a speech about his new book, Terrorist, in favor of a passionate discussion of books and booksellers — whom he called “the citadels of light.” We will podcast the Book & Author Breakfast in its entirety including Barack Obama, Amy Sedaris and Marie Arana later on.
BEA #2 – John Updike Speech
14 Responses to “BEA #2 – John Updike Speech”
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May 26, 2006
Updike’s speech…
Sid Steward, a Rough Type reader, alerted me to the fact that BookExpo America has just released an audio recording of John Updike’s speech from last weekend, in which he responds to Kevin Kelly’s New York Times article “Scan This Book!” (I discuss…
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May 31, 2006
[...] Who’d a thunkit? The BEA is officially making podcasts of its sessions publicly available – under creative commons! They’ll be waiving copyright next. Don’t anybody tell John Updike. Or Nigel Newton. [...]
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May 31, 2006
[...] Chip McGrath talks with John Updike. While the results are certainly better than, say, a sycophantic and humorless conversation with Sam Tanenhaus, one reads this Updike interview wondering whether McGrath was operating on auto pilot. After all, how many times does one get to talk with Updike at length? Okay, so he’s no fan of the Internet, but shouldn’t you give the man some space to ramble at length? [...]
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June 5, 2006
[...] John Updike, making the rounds promoting his new novel, Terrorist, raised eyebrows with his passionate warnings at BEA about digital publishing. That much-discussed speech, by the way, is available as a podcast here. [...]
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June 7, 2006
E-Books and Physical Education…
I thought I’d send my ping into the echo chamber amplifying recent pronouncements regarding electronic books. Today a posting at the Future of the Book links to some of the resonances, and just yesterday a message come across two e-mail……
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August 3, 2008
[...] John Updike [...]
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January 28, 2009
[...] will become one very big book. (This vision seemed to John Updike a terrifying nightmare. You can listen to his speech made about this article just days after it was [...]
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November 22, 2009
[...] down on the “yes” side of that question. John Updike’s now famous diatribe at Book Expo American a few years ago cast the electronic book as the enemy of the practice of writing (and book [...]
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May 14, 2010
[...] Listen to the 20 minute podcast here. [...]
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January 2, 2012
[...] We should notice that this is a rather specific problem with the ‘ebook’ paradigm now dominant: EPUB, mobi etc, the malleable file formats in which digital books are currently published. Such ebooks are designedly books without heavy design, they are mostly books with linear text, which can ‘reflow’ to meet the needs of different ereading devices and the preferences of individual readers. Highly designed books, newspapers and magazines which are published as apps, or as digital editions (cf the page-faithful format favoured by Google Books or the magazines in Exact Editions) will have significant design and editorial costs accruing from major changes in an existing text. Its not a simple matter to mess with the content in an app. The process will be much less expensive than with print and it will be much easier or more feasible to update the existing user base, through systems of ‘version control’, but there will be costs: pages may have to be redesigned, illustrations may need to be reconsidered or rearranged, pagination altered. Publishers do sometimes ask for a few pages to be changed or corrected in the Exact Editions version, and we are generally able to do this. But a complete re-write or a ‘new edition’ is another matter. The ‘external’ costs even of moderate changes will also be non-negligible to the extent that pagination and format is used by bookmarks, databases and citations. Its one thing to ‘stealthily’ push out an upgrade to a text through an overnight upload, its another matter to require third parties to ‘correct’ the references or quotations that they may have made from an earlier version. There is still much value in the idea of an edition and of a dateable publication moment. So, ebooks may need to recover the stability and certainty that goes with this. Nicholas Carr also cites the rather marvellous short speech that John Updike made at BEA in 2006. A speech in which he made plain his alarm and disdain for a culture in which the unity and integrity of the book might be lost: Books traditionally have edges, some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few at least at my extravagent publishing house are even top-stained. In the electronic anthill where are the edges? The book revolution which from the renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets. So, booksellers defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity. BookExpo America 2006 John Updike speech – Podcast [...]
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George Aristidos: Nothing new said about writing a sex scene here. ...
Thanks for making this available!
John Updike doesn’t want to be involved in orgies. I don’t think it was Kelly’s suggestion that he would.
Kelly was answering an unasked question, one he knew would be asked by some of his readers, as it is asked time and time again: won’t anybody think of the poor starving author? I think it was a weak bid of Kelly to try and answer the question, but wholly understandable that he did. The rethoric employed by the pro-copyright lobby is cheap and flawed, but effective.
Updike doesn’t have to engage in orgies, and he will not be forced to. As long as he doesn’t try and stop the dissemination of these “snippets” of “his” books.
Anyway, he got a couple of laughs out of playing with that particular part of Kelly’s essay, which in my mind adequately shows how much he trusted his main argument. Which is a pity, because although I disagree with it, I thought his main argument was worth listening to.
For clarification, we have asked for and received permission from every publisher, speaker and author — including Mr. Updike and his publishing company — whom we are podcasting. Anyone who did not give us permission will not be podcast.
- Rob Simon, Editor, BookExpoCast.com
John Updike é o Balzac da classe média americana
http://www.revistabula.com/
http://www.revistabula.com/materia/john-updike-e-o-balzac-da-classe-media-americana-/950