Death By Snippet

I've been saying for a couple years now that the printed book won't be killed by any specific type of electronic device, but rather by ever-shorter attention spans that will make book-length material unpalatable to an ever-increasing percentage of the population. And it appears the L.A. Times is with me.

One memorable freshman sagely informed me that people shouldn't be reading entire volumes these days anyway. He had learned from a high school teacher that book authors (presumably fiction excepted) pad their core ideas to make money and that anything worth writing could be expressed in an article of 20 or 30 pages, tops.

Has written culture recently taken a nose drive? These are the students who grew up on Spark Notes, the popular study guides. Many of this generation are aliterate — they know how to read but don't choose to. And abridgment of texts is now taken to extremes, with episodes from micro-novels being sent as text messages on cell phones.

To be fair, my own era had CliffsNotes, not to mention Reader's Digest Condensed Books. We also relied on introductions and secondary sources when we were too busy (or too lazy) to work through primary texts.

But today's college crowd has a tool we did not: the search engine. Want to learn tap dancing in Austin? Lessons are just a few clicks away. So are the words spoken by the White Rabbit in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" or every reference to dogs in "The Canterbury Tales." Between Microsoft Word's "find" function, Project Gutenberg, Amazon's "Search Inside" feature and Google Print, seeking out precise fragments of information has become child's play.