Who's Sitting in Birkert's Tub?

In response to the early brouhaha over etext, Sven Birkerts wrote The Gutenberg Elegies, a sensitive and interesting argument against the dominance of etext. Birkerts romanticizes sensual elements like reading in the tub that (judging by the lack of steam-ruffled pages in friends' literary collections) make familiar but not overwhelmingly relevant criticisms of etext.

(You can't comment on etext, he claims, but with the proper software one can and could when he went to press, and rather easily. You can't lay across a sofa and deal with electronic screens -- a comment which conveniently ignores our old pal the TV.)

However, certain objections do hold, and these particularly militate against the long, meditative, fluid reads that seem to have made Birkerts nostalgic: They particularly militate against novels.

I'd identify these:

1. Plain, undifferentiated 10 or 12-point font that goes c l e a r across a thousand pixels causes grief. Readers track across lines. So text must either be huge or squeezed into a narrower field.
2. Scrolling's a pain. In a mess of flickering, shifting text, one must refind one's place every paragraph or two.
3. Paging down's a bit better, but somehow one never seems to exactly catch the shift from bottom to top of the screen, and the movement of the lights onscreen seems far more distracting

These points, taken together, means that little text can be put together in one place without losing the clarity gained by a smoothly flowing read.

In practice, 200 words stretches the point, often to breaking. Yet how many decent essays or short stories can get by on 200 words?

As soon as a single text (gee, what's that anymore?) gets split into lexia with links, visual layout begins to shift. Specifically, visually undifferentiated text becomes disturbing. Instead of promoting the nice, smoothly linear read that produced novelistic fireworks, it obfuscates what should have been the smooth forward motion of simple, intuitive link-decision.

So the unilinear read and the regular appearance of print ceased to function.

I can't tell you how confused I was. All kinds of things I thought I knew about writing suddenly did not work. And for some reason, the bite came worse in fiction than in nonfiction.