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I wrote in the relevant weblog entry how I bought this book at Rue Cottage Books in Southwest Harbor, Maine, probably the last summer that Nichols Fox had the store in the square there, before she moved her stock back to Bass Harbor to have more time to write.
I enjoyed the first part of the book, as I said back then, where Birkerts talks about his own life with books, his love of reading, his history as a reader and a bookseller and so on. And I enjoyed the second part, too, where he expresses his fears of what electronic media are doing to reading, even though I think he's pretty much entirely wrong.
Birkerts is, in something like the sense that Buckley meant it back in 1955, standing athwart history, yelling "stop!". He likes the way things are, and especially the way things used to be, and he suspects that they're going to change, and that's bad. Now I also like lots of the things that Birkerts likes, both as they are and as they used to be, and I also think that they're likely to change; but I don't think they're all that likely to change in the ways that Birkerts thinks that they are, and I don't think it's going to be all that bad (or even net-bad, all things considered).
What changes in particular is Birkerts afraid of? He thinks (roughly) that because electrons move fast, and computer networks communicate quickly, people will no longer pay attention to long periods of time, but only to very short ones. He says things like "All circuit-driven communications... are predicated upon instantaneousness"; this in contrast to true aesthetic experiences with books, music, or paintings, in which "we surrender our awareness of the present as a coordinate on a grid". This dichotomy seems so obviously wrong it's hard to comment subtly on: losing oneself in a long chain of Wikipedia articles and web pages and old technical reports about Bose statistics, or the evolution of tree-frog venom, or French surrealism, feels enough like losing oneself in a good book that my immediate reaction to the distinctions that Birkerts wants to draw (and for that matter much of the rest of what he says in this half of the book) is simply "no, it isn't; what do you mean?".
Which perhaps doesn't advance the discussion all that much.
In spots Birkerts shows what seems to be rather blatant bias for the old, per se, over the new. He describes in terms of praise the personal library of ancient days, where a householder might have only two or three books, but know each one intimately, even obsessively, from repeated readings. On the other hand his description of a modern child's obsession with a particular book or tape or licensed product is negative, almost horrified. It's hard to think of any reason that the latter obsession (which is likely not to last more than a week or two, and be replaced by a much wider field of interests over time) would be worse than the former one (which leads inevitably to a cramped worldview, and all too often to fanaticism and war), except that the one is modern and the other ancient.
(The earlier bit where he bemoans the fact that a classroom full of undergraduates in 1992 for some unaccountable reason couldn't get into Henry James' "Brooksmith" is even more of a howler; if James' morose story of sorrow and suicide was ever popular with strapping 19-year-olds, I'll eat my Cliff Notes!)
But in general Birkerts is subtler than this. And he's quite right that there is richness and joy to be found in some of the barriers (of distance, of time, of connectedness) that electronic media are pulling down. There was richness and joy to be found in the barriers that electric lighting pulled down as well, and probably the same for canned food, the written word, and fire. That doesn't mean that those innovations were net losses; on the other hand it's right and proper that someone point out that we do, pretty much inevitably, lose things as we advance.
I disagree with Birkerts' claims that electronic media somehow are by nature shallow and fast and without real duration. They can be, of course, but so can printed media, so can paintings. Trying to tie the nature of the underlying technology to the ideas that it is used to express seems to be illegitimate; like claiming that thoughts printed on cellulose-based paper are inevitably long and stringy, unlike those printed on (I don't know) good old horn, which are more spread-out and multi-dimensional. It's a metaphor that just doesn't bear the weight, and Birkerts uses it all too often: electronic media are fast, so we won't use them to talk about long durations; computer screens are all surface, so we won't use them to communicate deep thoughts; words stored on disks can be erased, so we won't use them to express permanent things. All, I think, pretty much entirely baseless; a grasping at metaphor to support his really mostly inchoate fears about change.
So anyway. I think it's true and important that electronic media are changing our relationship to literature and the written word in lots of ways. We need to look at what those ways are, what those changes are likely to be, and decide how to react to them. I don't think that Birkerts has, in this book, correctly identified the changes, or offered any particularly useful advice about how to react to or try to control them. On the other hand, I think he does us a good service in pointing out that there will be changes, and that some of them might deserve a certain amount of bemoaning...
So read it. And see what you think.
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