Writers debate future of books in internet age

JAIPUR: Dozens of writers visiting, hundreds pouring in for discussions, books sold and bought, the Lit Fest's abuzz with happy activity. But one session raised a rather troubling question: will the internet change it all?
Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker, novelist Vikram Chandra, poet Gulzar, author-diplomat Navtej Singh Sarna, academic Tunku Varadarajan, ad guru and lyricist Prasoon Joshi and journalist Steven Coll discussed the fate of books - the ink-and-paper variety -- in the Net age.
The freewheeling, mostly unrestricted, 'content' sharing on the Net has many takers. Brown, celebrated print journalist and former editor of top-of-the-line magazines Tatler and Vanity Fair, now runs a news aggregator and has "become a convert to editing online".
It's the speed of it, she says. The immediate reaction from readers - whether positive or negative - is like response to a "theatre performance". "I find it more intoxicating than writing for print," says Brown, currently writing a non-fiction work on Bill and Hillary Clinton.
That is exactly what Varadarajan, Gulzar and Sarna object to. It all happens too fast. "It's like blurting it out," says the lyricist. For them, quality is compromised in favour of speed, and comments are made instantly without thought or contemplation.
Only some portals have any quality control where the bad writing is "weeded out", as Brown puts it, by editors hired for the purpose. But that still leaves a huge mass of online content in the shape of blogs and social Networking sites that practically swamp cyberspace.
Describing the panic over the internet as a "pretty rotten smelling red herring," Vikram Chandra pointed out that it's not the books, or rather the stories, that need "rescuing" but the entire range of industries that rest on them - production, printing, marketing in the main. Also lost is the 'culture of reading' that tells you what to read. In the Net-age, new avenues for getting published will have to be explored and copyright and ownership issues sorted.
The Net's greatest benefit, says Coll, is the "ability to search and retrieve" and "collaborate". Information will be received and processed differently and the effect will not necessarily be "evil but distinctive".
Quality, Joshi feels, will not be the problem. It's early days yet and the Net, being the democratic, accessible medium it is, is full of writing of all kinds but eventually, he believes, quality will stand out and be chosen by the users. And as Chandra points out, there was no dearth of bad writing before the Net either.