Every Year a New Threat for Writers
A spring morning in Oxford: two good things, no three: it’s not raining, the clocks have gone forward (thanks be to God) and it’s the Oxford Literary Festival. 2008, in case you didn’t know, has been declared a national year for reading, as if we weren’t all doing it last year and the year before. But never mind. It’s always good to have one’s pleasures endorsed, particularly as reading is, apparently, under threat. There’s a lot in the press about difficult times ahead for writers as the digital storm gathers momentum, but why should this mean the end of writing as a means to make a living? Will writers drown in the tide of new technology or will we all be carried forward into new and exciting places that we couldn’t otherwise have hoped to reach?
One of the good things about getting older is that we’ve heard it (or most of it) all before: once it was TV that was a threat to writers’ livelihoods, but now we know that the TV adaptation of a book guarantees that sales will rocket. Unbelievably, libraries were also thought to threaten writers until some genius came up with the PLR, the public lending right and everyone calmed down again. Now, it’s the digital age that is going to wipe us all out, but of course we know in our hearts that it won’t; people still want stories and digital transmission of words merely means that we have to work out new and convenient ways of paying a fair price for our reading material, all of which leads me to the glorious fact that it is the Oxford Literary Festival. Masses of authors, skyscraper piles of books, eager punters, the written word ain’t dead yet! And it’s still not raining.