Smokler, Kevin, ed. Bookmark Now: Writing in the Age of Information Overload. New York: MJF Books, 2005.

A collection of essays by young, contemporary writers all trying to write about how the book isn't dead and that reading is still vital. Much of the book is worthless, in that about 75 percent of the writers inside are more interested in telling their own dull stories than they are in connecting these stories to the issue at hand. One writer actually spends pages and pages writing about all the sex and booze she enjoyed during her MFA program. She actually does this and probably got paid for it. This, in an essay about whether or not one needs an MFA to become a writer.

It's called, the essay, "No, You Don't Need One But the Getting of It Sure Is Fun, If You're Horny, Or Need Social Lubrication". No, it's not actually called that, and no, I've never heard of Michelle Richmond either, and looking through he contributor's bio it doesn't seem as though many people have. So if you find yourself trolling a bookstore's remainder aisles while visiting, say, your parents one week, and choose to pick this up because it's half the cost of the issue of Dissent you picked up through some weird self-improvement urge that hit you like a bad smell, then just skip all the essays by the nobodies. Turns out one's writing career's success can be seen in direct proportion to the amount of genuinely valid things one has to say.

But Adam Johnson's essay on collaboration is what struck my eye when scanning the contents, and it didn't disappoint. Nor did Tom Bissell's defense of the importance of reading in the era of video games (which I may assign to my Intro to Lit students the opening day of classes), or Benjamin Nugent's essay on writing and job security.

Douglas Rushkoff has a lot of smart things to say about the way the Internet can not only increase readership for books but actually help increase sales. It'd a great defense of those who cry Napster!!! when confronted with the possibility of Internet distribution of texts. It was enough to convince me that, if I ever write a book and then sell it, to have this book's initial chapter available for free reading/download on some Web site.

From Rushkoff:

[Publishers'] dire predictions [about the end of publishing in the age of the Internet] are not unlike those made by silly record executives in the 1930s who, so fearful of the effects of radio broadcasting on their sales, actually forbade their recordings to be played over the radio! [. . .] Within a couple of decades, of course, record companies were paying DJs to get their records on the radio.

That's because media don't actually steal from each other. They feed each other. Just as hearing a song on the radio might provoke a person to buy a CD, reading test by authors online can motivate people to buy their actual books. (235)

It's that "might" I guess that makes people nervous, because why buy a CD when you can download one for free if you're clever enough? But whereas speakers are speakers, a computer screen is not a printed page, so I think, as Rushkoff does, that books can survive more open access.