Why I Hate the 300-Word Review

Because two hundred words is a blurb.
Because three hundred words at an average book length of three hundred pages is one word per page and if you’ve written three hundred and twenty six pages tough luck.
Because if it’s a good book all I can say about why in three hundred words is the equivalent of umm, read it, and if it’s a bad book I haven’t done the author the courtesy of explaining why.
Because a three hundred word review forces you to make black and white yes and no judgements and what with needing a synopsis that’s about fifty words you have left over to tell the reader why.
Because I would rather write a three hundred poem, that’s a challenge, but I quit writing poetry way back in the Era of Optimism.
Because some poor chump out there has worked for two years four years six years as long as it takes to write a book in order to have it summed up in a side column that says your book isn’t important enough, so sorry, be grateful it’s in here at all.
Because the only thing worse than the three hundred review is the one hundred and eighty word review which is catching on and soon I will have to create marksheet templates for my reviews or boil them down to Yea or Nay and sign them Inscrutable.
Because I foolishly agreed to write one of these three hundred word puppies and frankly I would rather bake a chocolate cake with fudge icing and give it to the author, it would do him her and it more good and maybe we could lean back once the plates were empty and really discuss the goddamn book instead of giving it one measly ungenerous word per page.

The one about Hunter Thompson

Speaking Volumes, first published in Business Standard, February 22, 2005 Hunter S Thompson shot himself this week, before I could slide over to his “fortified farm” outside Aspen, complete with peacocks and an awesome collection of rifles, shotguns, and revolvers, and say thank you.

We used him to deprogramme impressionable young Indian journalists who’d been told to read the New York Review of Books and the TLS, and worse still, The Guardian, for pointers on style.

“You want to know what style is, ja?” we’d say to some quaking, innocent youngster who could still recite Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman, complete with clip-clop sound effects. “You want to know how REAL journalists do it? Then read this.”

And we’d roll out the first lines of the original Fear and Loathing, the one that had the Duke and his 300-pound Samoan attorney careening across America on the ultimate road trip: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

As they lapped up their first taste of gonzo journalism like starved kittens at a saucer of mescaline-laced cream, we knew that nothing in their lives would ever be the same again.

Either they would pack it in and become overpaid accountants at a white-collar corporate house or we would soon hear the faint, pitiful sounds of screaming from insomniac sub-editors faced with the prospect of cleaning up a report on changing cabotage laws written by a bright young thing who now believed in Thompson’s only-the-paranoid-survive and there-is-no-such-thing-as-objective-journalism mantras.

Thompson saw himself as the last American outlaw long before he became one. He had an early run-in with the FBI at the age of nine over the question of purloined mailboxes, which left him with a healthy paranoia and a conviction that the law could be outsmarted.

When he grew up—if he ever did—he covered the Hell’s Angels from the inside, pointed out to America that Nixon was the AntiChrist and the first sign of the US’ impending nervous breakdown, and famously, late on a deadline, sent off his beer-whisky-tequila-and-assorted-drug-fuelled notes instead of a proper article, pretty much making up gonzo journalism as he went along.

He offered to inflict grievous bodily harm on too many people to count, spawned too many fear-and-loathing inspired knock-offs to count, bust up too many parties to count—including one thrown by Rolling Stone for him, where he discovered and wielded a fire extinguisher to such effect that he was barred from the bash, despite being the guest of honour.

He remained permanently angry till the end: angry at America, at Bush, at the fact that his country had been taken over and muzzled by a combine made up of the military, the police, and government. And paranoid.

After following presidents around on the campaign trail, after exploring the counterculture and becoming its voice, after innumerable run-ins with the law (“The law changes and I don’t … I consider myself a road man for the laws of karma”), he knew that reality was stranger than paranoia.

Hunter S Thompson became something of a parody himself towards the end; by the time the Duke arrived on Garry Trudeau’s comic strip, Doonesbury, as The High Lord of Inner Space, he had descended into cariacature. Like an old bull still baited by the odd yapping dog, he could be trusted to fulminate on demand; he wrote sports columns for ESPN, and invented the game of Shotgun Golf in his last one; he had been played by Johnny Depp in the official Fear and Loathing movie.

The end he had imagined for himself was spectacular—he envisaged going down in flames in one way or another, though his favourite exit plan involved a speeding motorcycle in a crash. We thought, at 67, that he would go out snarling, grumbling, truculent; we didn’t really believe that he would put the final period himself to the swaggering, rambunctious, pugnacious sentence of his life.

The Super Booker shortlist: Hunter Thompson never had a chance of making it onto anything as primly literary as the Man Booker International Prize—he’d have livened it up a bit. The three judges for the Booker’s answer to the Nobel are an interesting bunch: John Carey, Alberto Manguel, and Azar Nafisi—all serious readers, which is the only qualification you need in a judge.

The shortlist of 18 had a few surprises: neither Naipaul nor Rushdie made the cut, which, given the quality of their recent work, shouldn’t actually raise eyebrows. Rushdie might yet find a place on the list next year, if his novel Shalimar the Clown sets a higher standard than the previous three he’s written. Naipaul hasn’t written a decent novel in years, but I’d expect a future shortlist to include him at some stage on the basis of his early fiction and some of the non-fiction.

Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, Gunter Grass, Saul Bellow, Naguib Mahfouz, Kenzabura Oe, and Doris Lessing are incontestable choices. The inclusion of Israeli writer A B Yehoshua, Antonio Tabucchi, Ismail Kadare, and Tomas Eloy Martinez shows a definite determination to take the “Superbooker” beyond the limited circle of writers famous only in the English-speaking world.

John Updike, Philip Roth, Ian McEwan, Cynthia Ozick, and Muriel Spark are also on the list, indicating that the judges are willing to consider writers who have built up a reputation over the years without quite being in the Nobel Laureate class.

But speaking personally, I was delighted to see Stanislaw Lem on the list. He’s one of the SF greats—it’s a sign that the SuperBooker might be more amenable than most mainstream literary prizes to considering great work from the genre ghettos.

There’s plenty to quibble about, which is half the fun of literary prizes—why no Wole Soyinka, where’s Chinua Achebe, how come they left out J M Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, and some of us in the back rows are muttering that Haruki Murakami deserved the nod far more than Updike or even McEwan.

The one area where the SuperBooker performed dismally was with its People’s Choice section. Perhaps it hasn’t been publicised well enough, but the votes didn’t exactly come pouring in. Some used it to push personal agendas—I have no idea who Sean Wright or Charles De Lint are, but they’re up on the website.

It’s also far too easy to manipulate online voting lists, and the Man Booker committee might want to think about tightening screening policies—some users have cast votes several times under aliases, for instance. Or maybe I’m griping because I didn’t go out there and vote for the Duke before he exited, stage left.

The Good Doctor exits

Three things I learned from Hunter S Thompson, who killed himself today:
1) the one thing you must never overdose on is vitamin pills.
2) the only sane response to an insane world is paranoia ("there is no such thing as paranoia. It's all true"--the Good Doctor.)
3) I will never write an opening paragraph quite like this. Damn.
"‘But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right...and that's where the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms...letting off now, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge...The Edge.... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others – the living – are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.’ From Hell's Angels.

Reviews: Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta

(First appeared in the Hindustan Times, January 2005. Thoroughly enjoyed doing this one; it was a no-holds-barred hallelujah. For a more balanced but equally enthusiastic take, read Jai Arjun on Rana and Tokyo Cancelled.)

Tokyo Cancelled

HarperCollins India

Rs 395, 383 pgs

Rana Dasgupta

This is the oldest way to tell a story, and the newest. A tribe, huddled around a campfire, flames dispelling the darkness; a circle of strangers, stranded in the no-man’s-land of an airport after hours, cigarette smoke tracing wreaths around their heads.

From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Boccaccio’s Decameron to Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, this is how stories are created. Pilgrims on a journey, passing the time; a flock of people, fleeing a plague and warding off boredom; passengers, marooned on a modern-day island. The stories they have to tell are more important than the stories of their lives; their presence is just a device, a convenient way of building bridges between tales that could have stood on their own, as isolated short stories. Listen: once upon a time: in a land far away: many years ago, there lived a man who: a long, long time ago, just the other day, this is what happened.

Rana Dasgupta’s stories echo these familiar openings, classic phrases that ease you into the rites of story and urge you to settle down in a comfortable chair. Give in to these urgings. Get as comfortable as you can while you can, for Tokyo Cancelled is one of the most unsettling, discomfitting and utterly brilliant debuts you’ll encounter in 2004. Dasgupta has been compared to Borges and Calvino, tellers of tales that slipped in and out of worlds so fantastic that they were far more real than our own, which is generous—for all his obvious talent, he has a distance to go before he can match them. But he writes as though he had inherited his imagination from Cortazar with a benediction thrown in from the gods of cyberpunk.

A doll fills the empty space in the life of a Japanese salariman; as she becomes more real, she becomes more demanding, until his dreams of a business founder when he shoplifts a dress for his plastic love. In another time, another place, changelings are feared, declared outcaste, shunned for the fact that they will be ageless, relatively changeless by a human society increasingly infiltrated by their kind.

A sailor and a woman meet, arrange an ill-starred rendezvous and are rescued by an unusual, wingless bird. A German man remaps the world; in his new cartography, it is the speed at which change occurs that sends new lines arcing across the planet. None of the characters in his stories are whole; some find ways of change, of transmutation into plants, or luxury stores, some move on. In the middle of this circus of hallucinatory images, one story is told straight up, a plain tale of loss--a motorcycle accident, unlit speed bumps—just to break the flow, just to let the author remind you that some stories can be left unvarnished.

Just the images breeding in the author’s imagination are worth the price of this book: mushroom clouds of memories, a city visited by a mysterious plague of monkeys, a woman whose dreams bring forth saplings, shrubs, trees. But beyond the images, the locations shift and blur until for all their specificity, they don’t matter any more. Buenos Aires, Paris, Delhi, Tokyo; he captures each place while distorting it in a hall of mirrors of the imagination, but these stories go far beyond space and time. The central device, the group of thirteen passengers sharing cigarettes and stories, the only coins of any worth when you must pass an endless night, breaks down fairly early for the simplest of reasons. Each story here bears the author’s unmistakable stamp. Forget the comparison us reviewers can’t help making—yes, he writes a bit like Borges, yes, you can smell Calvino, and yes, that’s a hint of Murakami, perhaps even William Gibson, at the edges. It may be valid; but it’s like a wine-taster’s spiel. The point is that with just one book to his credit, a fabulous collection of short stories pretending to be a novel, Rana Dasgupta has a signature. It’s a brilliant, compelling voice, but it belongs to him, not to 13 fictional characters.

<>Where did these stories come from, then? From the netherworld of an airport in stasis, a place of transit, when the lights have been turned off, the shops shut down. From the loneliness of too much travel and a sense that the world over, people have the same stories to share, the same myths and warnings, the same sense of mystery, of awe, the same need to love, betray, cherish and kill. Once upon a time, there lived a man who moved between many worlds and wrote stories, the oldest stories ever told and the freshest, for the lonely, the homeless, the stranded. Listen to him.

The One About Arthur Miller

(Speaking Volumes; first appeared in Business Standard, February 14 2005)

I'm still feeling kind of temporary about the death of Arthur Miller, to steal one of Willy Loman's best lines from Death of a Salesman. The reaction to Miller's passing at the age of 89 from congestive heart failure varied between "I thought he was dead" and the usual tributes to one of theatre's greatest dramatists.

"I thought he was dead": no respectable obituary writer would admit to that naïve sentiment these days. But overwhelmingly, the articles and assessments of Miller's career chose to hail two of his plays--Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953). Some made passing mention of After the Fall and a few other works--all of them completed before Miller had reached his fifties. When Josh Greenfeld interviewed him for The New York Times back in 1972, he would write even then that Miller, "at the still-youthful age of fifty-six," had been cast "in the unlikely role of a relic".

For a writer who wrote every day, starting at 8:30 am and often going on for eight hours, sometimes writing as Greenfeld noted 2,000 pages of which 140 would end up as a playscript, this must have been hard. Miller wrote three plays in the 1990s, including Broken Glass--woven around Kristallnacht. All of them were reviewed respectfully. None of them made a tenth of the impact of his early work. It's hard to argue that his talents had degenerated over the years--indeed, those who've read his short story in Nadine Gordimer's recent anthology, Telling Tales, might have been surprised by the force and beauty of his writing in his eightieth decade. "I'm pretty convinced he was writing till the day of his death," Harold Pinter told the press yesterday. "He was born with a pen in his hand."

He believed passionately in the power of theatre to transform lives--even in our age, when TV and the Internet provide other forms of entertainment and involvement. "The day will come when theatre again will surmount everything for the simple reason that it is an irreducible simplicity," he told Greenfeld in 1972. "It's a man up there facing other men. Somehow or other this always has to be possible."

It's easy to forget that he started his career with a novel--Focus, which was a partial polemic about anti-Semitism, where the main character was a Gentile who faced racism because he was mistaken for a Jew. His next work was Incident at Vichy, written after he had travelled to Germany and attended the Nazi trials. Unlike Focus, it stands up to re-reading, and highlights a technique that Miller was to use through his playwright's career--the ability to isolate one incident, apparently minor, in the lives of ordinary individuals and use it as a lens to look at a much larger issue.

Most critics would agree that Miller's greatest work was Death of a Salesman, where Willy Loman, antihero, everyman, epitomised the tragedy of the little man who gives his life to a system that will inevitably betray him. And much of his work, especially the plays written before he turned fifty, tapped into the eternal struggle between father and sons with an unflinching tenderness that few other writers have matched.

For some of us, though, the great Miller play remains The Crucible, of which he remarked in an essay written in 2000: "The Crucible is my most-produced play. It seems to be one of the few surviving shards of the so-called McCarthy period. And it is part of the play's history that, to people in so many parts of the world, its story seems to be their own. I used to think, half seriously, that you could tell when a dictator was about to take power, or had been overthrown, in a Latin American country, if The Crucible was suddenly being produced in that country."

The resonance of The Crucible goes far beyond the Salem witchcraft trials or even Miller's own experiences. That play was written after Miller had gone through his own trials by fire in the McCarthy era--been hauled up by the notorious HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee), had an offer to let him off the hook if his then-wife, Marilyn Monroe, posed for a photograph with a certain committee member, been blacklisted in Hollywood, suffered persecution and questioning.

"Turning to Salem was like looking into a petri dish, an embalmed stasis with its principal moving forces caught in stillness," Miller wrote in retrospect. "One had to wonder what the human imagination fed on that could inspire neighbours and old friends to emerge overnight as furies secretly bent on the torture and destruction of Christians. More than a political metaphor, more than a moral tale, The Crucible, as it developed over more than a year, became the awesome evidence of the power of human imagination inflamed, the poetry of suggestion, and the tragedy of heroic resistance to a society possessed to the point of ruin."

A few days before Miller's death was announced, Salman Rushdie wrote an impassioned article titled: "Defend the right to be offended." Rushdie, along with a band of writers, actors, intellectuals and artists in Britain, has been arguing fiercely against a new law that would ban the "incitement of hatred on religious grounds".

Rushdie writes, "It seems we need to fight the battle for the Enlightenment all over again in Europe as well as in the United States….People have the fundamental right to take an argument to the point where somebody is offended by what they say. It’s no trick to support the free speech of somebody you agree with or to whose opinion you are indifferent. The defence of free speech begins at the point when people say something you can’t stand. If you can’t defend their right to say it, then you don’t believe in free speech. You only believe in free speech as long as it doesn’t get up your nose. But free speech does get up people’s noses. Friedrich Nietzsche called Christianity “the one great curse” and “the one immortal blemish on mankind”. Would he now be prosecuted?"

I remember a phrase from childhood, a playground shrug of sorts: "It's a free country, yaar." It was employed as the final closure to arguments, as shorthand for saying that you didn't agree with the other guy, but he was entitled to his point of view. This is the principle that Miller fought for, through his words as a dramatist, through his stint as head of the American chapter of PEN in the 1960s. This is what Rushdie and his colleagues are fighting for now, the right to allow people in the US and India and the UK to continue saying, well, it's a free country. One of those countries isn't free, any more; one has been perpetually beleagured even as it uneasily lays claims to freedom; one is in the process of sacrificing its freedoms.

<> And I'm wondering how many productions of The Crucible we'll see in the next few years.<>

Shameless self-promotion: A Matter of Taste

Very strange when your first book turns out to have absolutely nothing to do with you--all the hard work was done by about 30 other extremely talented writers. I spent two-and-a-half years intermittently editing (read: "driving my editor bats") an anthology of Indian writing on food for Penguin. A Matter of Taste was soft-launched at the start of 2005 and all I can say is that it was so much fun to put together. This is what I said in the introduction:
"Even an anthology has to begin somewhere, and this one eventually found its moorings in memory. Fictional ones, drawn from books we've read, loved and been challenged by; and more personal ones, the kind we all carry, of meals eaten and new tastes, of times of deprivation and moments of sharp, new pleasures."
The Kolkata Telegraph did a piece on the spurt in food writing, which makes me optimistic that there will be more collections of this kind: "The focus is on story-telling. Those who have something to say about food do so with an anecdote, in a travelogue, a historical reference, a literary allusion or a regional context."
Reading the reviews was hugely entertaining--this is where the time that passes between handing manuscript in and seeing it emerge as a book really helps. You have distance, and you know you've done your best, after which it's up to reviewers and readers to make a call. Can't locate too many of them online, but opinions were divided. Tehelka's Sonia Faleiro, the Indian Express review and foodie and restaurateur Ritu Dalmia (in the Hindustan Times) seemed to think it was a Good Idea and loved the range of writing. The pink papers--Business Standard and Economic Times--seemed to think it was more about writing than about food, which is fair enough: it was, unapologetically, meant to be about good writing. Loved those reviews, though, because they came up with very interesting arguments. Anita Nair, writing for India Today, called it a "banquet" but also felt that the pieces were too familiar, like a buffet lunch composed of leftovers and reprised dishes. The Hindu's Rana Siddiqui seemed to have enjoyed reading the collection and liked the fact that it was food writing that focused on the place food has in our lives. Gonna take that woman out to dinner one of these days!
Two distinct responses emerged. The people who loved the anthology pinpointed what made it so much fun to put together--the variety. I loved being able to put Gandhi on meat-eating and Ruchir Joshi's funky version of shrikhand laced with additives and Suketu Mehta on the slaughter of goats and Manjula Padmanabhan on diets and Mahasweta Debi on stark deprivation and Jhumpa Lahiri on fish in an alien land in the same book. The people who didn't like it wanted a different kind of anthology--one that focused sharply and squarely on descriptions of food, on the plate rather than the table, on the history, say, of spices and ingredients. I'm hoping they didn't like A Matter of Taste enough to compile their own anthologies: I wouldn't want to put a collection like that together myself, given my slightly wonky tastes, but I would happily read it.
Just to finish, two recipes that have nothing to do with food:

From Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the masala movie blend:

"It seemed all Rashid had to do was to part his lips in a plump red smile and out would pop some brand-new saga, complete with sorcery, love-interest, princesses, wicked uncles, fat aunts, moustachioed gangsters in yellow check pants, fantastic locations, cowards, heroes, fights, and half a dozen catchy, hummable tunes."

From I Allan Sealy:

How the Raj is done:
"I wish to shew how the Raj is done. This is the play of children, good adept, rest easy. You must have the following ingredients. (It matters little if one or another be wanting, nor is the order of essence. Introduce them as you please, and as often.) Let the pot boil of its own.
An elephant, a polo club, a snake, a length of rope, a rajah or a pearl of price (some use both), a silver moon, a dropped glove, a railway junction, some pavilions in the distance, a chota peg, a tent peg, a learned brahmin, a cruel king, a chapati (or chaprasi), a measure of justice, gunpowder (q.v.), equal portions of law and order, a greased cartridge, a tamarind seed or else a cavalry regiment, a moist eye, some high intentions, two pax of Britannica, Glucose biscuits, an ounce of valour, something in the middle, a Victoria Cross, a soupcon of suspense (q.v), a bearer, a dhobi (or dhoti), a chee-chee, a dekchi (or deck-chair), a pinch of dust, a trickle of perspiration, a backdrop with temples or mosques (some use both), a church pew, a little fair play, a boar, some tall grass, a tiger, a rain cloud, a second snake or a mongoose, a flutter of the heart, a sharp sword, a bared ankle, walnut juice or burnt cork (some use both), a boy of British blood unsullied, a locket."

Business Standard: The Library of Everything

SPEAKING VOLUMES, Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi February 8, 2005

Authors, even bestselling ones, are haunted by the idea of mortality: some are doomed to see their books die in their lifetime, and the ones who are read fear secretly that future generations will forget their words. Booklovers are haunted by the idea of undiscovered continents: that somewhere beyond the horizon of their reading lie unforgettable works that they will never encounter. Neither category could fail to be moved by the concept Carlos Ruiz Zafon puts forward in The Shadow of the Wind: the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
"This is a place of mystery, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens ...In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new owner's hands. In the shops we buy and sell them but in truth, books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody's best friend ... According to tradition, the first time someone visits this place he must choose a book, whichever he wants, and adopt it, making sure that it will never disappear, that it will always stay alive."
Zafon's cemetery is a labyrinthine construction of passageways and bookshelves leading out from a round hall in a huge edifice in Barcelona. It owes much to other imaginary libraries, from Borges' gigantic library that would contain everything ever written onwards.
Perhaps we can imagine it best in this modern age, when the attempt to create a perpetually living library is reflected not in twisting corridors and wall-to-ceiling shelves crammed with musty tomes, but in online archives and websites.
Until recently, most attempts to create a web library relied on the old-world model; file indexes replaced catalogue cards, text or PDF files replaced actual volumes, but the 'shelving system' remained more or less the same. If you looked for Borges on a site like Project Gutenberg or the steadily growing Universal Library, for example, it would lead you to a small selection of books by or about Borges.
There were no complex links between texts; you could not, for instance, be taken directly from a Borges short story you were reading online to a similar work by an Arab writer, or call up all the short stories written in Argentina during the particular year that Borges wrote his tale.
Amazon raised the bar when the online bookshop--now more like a giant online mall that sells everything--introduced its 'Look Inside a Book' feature.
This attempted to replicate the real-world experience of browsing, where you could read the first chapter of or a few excerpts from a book. It had certain advanced features, however, that could only be matched by readers with phenomenally vast and accurate memories.
You could enter a random phrase, say 'giant Sumatran rat' or 'Indian philosophy', and Amazon's search engine would riffle through the pages of its vast catalogue of books until it had come up with a list of references to books that employed these phrases. So if you were looking for stories that featured a giant Sumatran rat as the hero, or a treatise on the eating habits of the giant Sumatran rat, or references in Sumatran mythology to the rat, Amazon's search feature was supposed to make it easier. In practice, this suffered from the usual drawback of online search engines--you got too much information and didn't always get what you were looking for.
Two recent variations on this theme are either promising or ominous, depending on perspective. Google is beta-testing its Print Search feature (www.print.google.com), which marks one of the first mainstream online attempts to collectivise libraries. Google Print puts together a database of books already on microfilm or in e-text versions or in PDF file format at various libraries, and allows you to search that database for keywords and key phrases.
Even in Beta, it's working better than Amazon's search, while generating its share of controversy: many publishing houses and authors are nervous about copyright issues. Google has attempted to address their fears in several ways: the only complete works on database are out-of-copyright works, if you search for a book that is copyrighted at present, you will get only an excerpt or a few pages, and print or save file commands have been disabled on this engine.
Publishing houses are still grumbling about possible piracy issues, but they're looking in the wrong direction. When the debates over music piracy and MP3 file sharing erupted in the wake of Napster, most people assumed that file sharing was an issue that would impact the music and the film-and-video industries, as it has.
The publishing world wasn't worried at that time about the implications of electronic file sharing: most readers preferred physical books to e-books, there were few decent e-readers available, and relatively few people would share e-books online in the same way that they might share their music collections.
But as e-book layouts have improved and scanners have become more widely available, the publishing industry might find that its complacency is terribly misplaced. Shareaza is just one of the many new, improved file-sharing networks that offers users the opportunity to share books as well as audio and video files.
It currently has thousands of books available on the network, with more being added every month'and Shareaza is just one network. This generation is more comfortable reading off screen than the previous one, just as MP3 enthusiasts are prepared to live with a drop in music quality in order to access free music.
This is the face of the new, web library as I see it. It will act both as a force multiplier for readers and as a possible conduit for piracy. It will be a repository for rare books, a source for unusual books, and indeed, a cemetery for forgotten books.
But if it does become all-inclusive--if today's publishers send an e-copy of every book to e-libraries as automatically as they do physical copies to brick-and-mortar libraries, for instance--it could end up being a junkyard rather than a resource. Imagine looking for Midnight's Children and being pointed to childcare guides, treatises on the nature of time or Sheldon's On the Other Side of Midnight instead.
Real libraries, however lovingly they try to preserve books both new and forgotten, are not inclusive beyond a point--the web on the other hand, depends on including everything.
What the new electronic libraries will need, whether its Google or MSN or filesharing networks, are filters. Or you could end up with vast electronic seas of information that no one ever bothers to trawl through.