Are books bound for an electrifying future?

BOB Stein says some silly things. He's the American who was in Australia last year talking about his Institute for the Future of the Book, which he claims, in a nutshell, is extinction.

BOB Stein says some silly things. He's the American who was in Australia last year talking about his Institute for the Future of the Book, which he claims, in a nutshell, is extinction.

"The age of pure linear content is going to pass with the rise of digital network content," he told The Washington Post recently, in the context of a discussion about the new book-video hybrid called a vook. You have to wonder why Stein is so afraid of text, the "pure linear content" that yields meaning to a reader with such seductive power. Vooks are fine, for what they are, with the text interspersed with click-on videos, but fancy interrupting your reading of something wonderful to see a video, or listen to another voice besides that one singing in your head. Text doesn't need trivial bits attached. It's potent in its simplest form.

WHEN an author as wonderful - and a person as wise - as Ursula K. Le Guin makes a stand against the Google Book settlement, it seems sensible to pause and consider why. Le Guin resigned last month from the American Authors Guild, saying she could no longer be a member of an organisation that "decided to deal with the devil". At issue is "the whole concept of copyright", Le Guin says, which has been developed as a system (Le Guin calls it a "principle") that protects the creator of a work against exploitation. Google, of course, makes much of the fact that millions of in-copyright but out-of-print books have now become available to anyone with computer access, and that is true and exciting. A pessimist might wonder how long before the monopoly brilliantly built by Google begins to increase costs to users, once the system has become so widespread it seems normal. But the devil works in mysterious ways: despite the size of Google and the power it is amassing, and despite Le Guin's concerns about authors' rights, this revolution will potentially put more "books" in many more hands.

BOOKS Alive, run by the Australia Council, for the federal government, will be managed for the next four years by Cheryl Akle, following what they say is a successful 2009 campaign. Booksellers report selling 233,013 copies of the "50 books you can't put down"; so the $1.8 million campaign resulted in sales totalling, according to Books Alive, $5.4 million. Hard work, this book promoting. How about a "book night"? In Buenos Aires, just before Christmas each year, the government sponsors a Noche de las Librerias in the city centre, closing off a couple of streets and opening the bookshops until midnight. We have events such as the Clunes "Back to Booktown" event (in May, with second-hand booksellers converging on the Victorian country town), but a book night in a city capital would be interesting.