Penelope Lively Says We’re “Bloodless Nerds” (or An Old Hypocrite Speaks)

If you haven’t heard, Booker Prize winner Penelop Lively, age 78, believes people who read books in electronic form are “bloodless nerds.”  The article continues with the following:

She said that Kindles and other devices to which you can download novels are no substitute for real books and no self-respecting bibliophile should want one. 

“I have an iPad but I wouldn’t dream of reading a book on it,” she told the Telegraph Ways With Words Festival.

She makes a number of other typical arguments (how kids don’t read like they used to and so on), but I think the above is really the crux of the matter.  Here is a person who has an iPad, which we can assume she uses to read things like online newspapers and magazines, blogs, and other forms of content, which at one point were provided to the public in print format.  This same person thinks reading ebooks is bad news…

So excuse me, Ms. Lively, if I treat your holier-than-thou assault on those of us who use eReaders with contempt.  The fact that you benefit from the very shifts in reading formats you deride for the book form is laughably ironic and hypocritical.  You can’t say “I use an iPad” in the same breath as “reading electronic books is for bloodless nerds.”  Reading is not exclusive to the book, and the shift in reading habits has been going on for decades.  For whatever reason, we’re more concerned about the death of the “book” than we are about the death of the print newspaper or the print magazine or whatever other prints have been subverted by online “printing” practices.

Hell, you might as well bitch about all those stupid blogs out there and how in the old days you only got heard by your friends or if your local newspaper printed your letter to the editor.  Those were such good days when you didn’t have much of a say in the way things ran beyond your vote.  Screw Tunisia and Egypt and all that social networking and online newspaper-ing and what not…

For the record, I quite like the “book” as we understand it in print form.  I still buy lots of books.  But I don’t disparage people who have become readers via eReaders or converted to electronic reading.  It serves a social function as much as an economic and literary one.  In a strange way, that timeless phrase (“don’t just a book by its cover”) has a double meaning now.  Nothing wrong with that in my book…