ebooks the death of novels and a just society?

AMERICAN novelist Jonathan Franzen has taken a swipe at ebooks, saying serious readers prefer printed books – and going so far as to suggest the electronic version is not compatible with a just society.

Speaking at the Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia, Franzen – the celebrated author of Freedom and The Corrections – said: "The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work, so it's pretty good technology. And what's more, it will work great ten years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It's a bad business model."

Franzen, 52, speaking at the first press conference of his career, criticized the way that ebooks can be remotely updated by publishers, The Daily Telegraph reports.

A notorious instance of this came in 2009, when readers found that two editions of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm had been erased remotely from their Kindles by Amazon because of a copyright dispute says The Week.

"I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience," Franzen said. "When I read a book, I'm handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that's reassuring. Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it.

"A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough."

For Franzen, the ephemeral nature of ebooks is a cause for concern: "Will there still be readers 50 years from now… who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don't have a crystal ball.

"But I do fear that it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government." ·