SIVACRACY.NET

At Saturday's Book & Author Breakfast, John Updike barely talked about his upcoming book, Terrorist, and more about the culture and the place of the book and booksellers in it.

"You are in the front while writers cower in their studies," he told the audience. "I see bookstores as citadels of life. They civilize neighborhoods." His favorite local store "brightens my life and the whole street it's on."

Speaking of the May 14 New York Times Magazine article called "Scan This Book!" about the universal library of the future--where all texts would be available digitally and snippets of them mixed together the way listeners mix favorite music--Updike mocked some of the writer's predictions, including that authors will be involved in more performances and that readers will have "access to the creator." He called the article's vision a "pretty grisly scenario," a kind of "throwback to a preliterate society where only a live person adds, shall we say, value." He wondered if the culture of celebrity had made "signed books seen only as a ticket to the lecture platform." The written word, he continued, is "supposed to speak for itself and sell itself even if the author's picture is not on the back cover." Sadly, he said, the author has grown "in importance as the walking, talking advertisement for a book."

Authors will "soon be like surrogate birth mothers," he predicted, with seeds "planted by high-powered consultants" and their works then "dropped into the marketplace."

He noted, too, that "yes, there is a ton of information on the Web but much of it is unedited and inaccurate." By contrast, the book, he continued, "is still more exacting and demanding of writers and consumers."