Libros que no terminan de escribirse

Nicholas Carr, autor del debatido y controversial libro The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, vuelve a la carga sobre un tema que ya había tratado en un capítulo de este libro: la maleabilidad y fácil alteración de los textos digitales; una “cualidad” que se puede prestar al abuso, la corrupción y la intervención política autoritaria en el contenido de los libros, nos advierte. Partiendo de una experiencia personal, en la que el propio Carr edita y publica su libro electrónico mediante un servicio del Kindle de Amazon, percibe la diferencia entre el nuevo formato del libro y el antiguo: la posibilidad de modificarlo. Luego se le ocurre cambiar un par de oraciones y lo hace con toda libertad; Amazon registra con rapidez el cambio y pone a la venta la nueva versión del e-book. Y todo en un par de días.

A diferencia del libro impreso, que fija y mantiene las palabras, en el libro electrónico las palabras pueden ser sometidas a constantes cambios y revisiones. Digitalizadas, las palabras pierden su fijeza, su quietud; pueden convertirse en algo tan dinámico como una página Web. La invención de Gutenberg creó artefactos que sirvieron, sirven, como depósitos de cultura e historia. A pesar de todas las ventajas que la mencionada maleabilidad de la página electrónica ofrece tanto a escritores (para corregir), periodistas (para actualizar noticias y mejorar notas) y lectores (para dialogar más activamente con el texto), estas cualidades de preservación de los libros impresos, afirma Carr, se desvanecen en textos que pueden ser intervenidos, supuestamente, con cierta facilidad. Yo no lo creo así. El mismo Paul Valéry, quien habitaba en el reino de lo impreso, llegó a decir que un poema nunca se termina, sólo se abandona; vive y evoluciona por las lecturas y las réplicas. Sólo que ahora tenemos la posibilidad de corregir, ampliar y actualizar nuestros libros con mayor facilidad y menos costo. Siempre con ayuda, hay que decirlo, de los editores, los buenos editores (no creo en la autoedición).

Que hable (escriba) Nicholas Carr:

I recently got a glimpse into the future of books. A few months ago, I dug out a handful of old essays I’d written about innovation, combined them into a single document, and uploaded the file to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. Two days later, my little e-book was on sale at Amazon’s site. The whole process couldn’t have been simpler.

Then I got the urge to tweak a couple of sentences in one of the essays. I made the edits on my computer and sent the revised file back to Amazon. The company quickly swapped out the old version for the new one. I felt a little guilty about changing a book after it had been published, knowing that different readers would see different versions of what appeared to be the same edition. But I also knew that the readers would be oblivious to the alterations.

An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.

When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text. Before Gutenberg, books were handwritten by scribes, and no two copies were exactly the same. Scribes weren’t machines; they made mistakes. With the arrival of the letterpress, thousands of identical copies could enter the marketplace simultaneously. The publication of a book, once a nebulous process, became an event.

A new set of literary workers coalesced in publishing houses, collaborating with writers to perfect texts before they went on press. The verb “to finalize” became common in literary circles, expressing the permanence of printed words. Different editions still had textual variations, introduced either intentionally as revisions or inadvertently through sloppy editing or typesetting, but books still came to be viewed, by writer and reader alike, as immutable objects. They were written for posterity.

Beyond giving writers a spur to eloquence, what the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein calls “typographical fixity” served as a cultural preservative. It helped to protect original documents from corruption, providing a more solid foundation for the writing of history. It established a reliable record of knowledge, aiding the spread of science. It accelerated the standardization of everything from language to law. The preservative qualities of printed books, Ms. Eisenstein argues, may be the most important legacy of Gutenberg’s invention…