IS CYBERSPACE MORE PERMANENT THAN BOOKS? December 5, 2008
Posted by thenaturalist in Virtues of Cyberspace.add a comment
Over breakfast with a writer friend this morning, I got to wondering out loud if perhaps cyberspace is more permanent and enduring than hard copy books? When I first committed myself to getting published, I believed that books were the most eternal places I could put my words. But now it’s occurring to me that the books I worked so hard to write back in the 1970s and 1980s (MY BOOKSTORE) will probably drift out of print and linger around only in the kinds of libraries that never clean out their stacks and dusty old used-book stores. So maybe cyberspace is actually a more permanent place to put what I write? Who knows? It’s there, it’s free, anyone can chance to read what I chance to write, and given its vastness, I can’t imagine anyone ever deciding to clean it up, deleting old blogs in the process. So whatever I write in my blogs might just last forever. In light of my miserable experiences with the book publishers I worked with, writing for whatever readers I happen to connect with in cyberspace seems worth the effort. Now all I have to worry about is content….
