Wordup is the latest app designed to assist readers with the enormous challenge of choosing what to read next.
You can see the logic in it. Struggling to finish books you wish you’d never started is no fun. Well, you need never struggle again because Wordup factors in all your data – gender, age, lifestyle, career, cultural interests, political affiliations, stylistic preferences – and customises your reading material just for you. If you distrust prolixity you will be spared it. If you prefer naturalism to postmodern whimsy, then no mad plots either.
Having problems with unreliable narrators, dream sequences, explicit sex and violence? All grist to the mill, because with Wordup your every wish is their command. You pays your money, you gets your choice. No book need irk, challenge or bother you ever again.
But it doesn’t end there. With a database covering “the entire canon of contemporary literature”, Wordup can also solve any problems you may encounter while reading.
Need to talk about Kevin? Having difficulty distinguishing between Pi and Richard Parker? Struggling with the half-formed language of the Half-formed Girl? Click, click, click and you’re sorted! Wordup can summarise difficult sections, slimming down the text by as much as 80 per cent without significant loss of meaning or narrative tension.
So there you have it – Amazon with knobs on and pretty soon we’ll all be using it. Except that we won’t because I just made it up.
This is not to say that some geek with a left-brain the size of Sudan isn’t working on something similar right this second. Because dreaming up harebrained schemes to compromise the simple bond between author and reader is pretty much a growth industry these days.
One such scheme was recently proposed by the distinguished novelist Fay Weldon who suggested that “writers should ‘abandon literary dignity’ and write page-turning versions of their thoughtful masterpieces for the e-book audience”.
So Gentle Writer, when you hand in that ms, just remember you’re not done yet; you still have to produce the slimmed-down companion volume for ninnies, which is to say “the page-turning, plot-heavy, character-rich version which troubles no one with too much thought”. In the Daft Ideas Freestyle, Fay is currently in gold medal position.
Equally bonkers is the new speed-reading method, Spritz, which according to its Boston-based originators, offers a uniquely “efficient way to get words into your head faster”. Bypassing the antiquated and static blocks of text like the one you’re looking at now, Spritz has developed a speed-reading text box that shows no more than 13 characters at a time, flashing words at you in quick succession so you don’t have to move your eyes all the time.
Which is grand, but who wants a reading experience akin to watching the digits hurtling by on the unleaded petrol pump at Topaz? Reading can be a marathon or a 10k but never a sprint, or a Spritz for that matter.
Digital technology fosters the illusion of linear progress towards a state of perfection but the evidence, not infrequently, points in the opposite direction. In his book The Nature of Technology, Belfast-born economist W Brian Arthur presents a theory of how technology evolves, stressing how it "builds itself organically from itself".
This makes its development not linear and rational but "combinatorial", ie driven by many random forces which often produce irrational results. It can reduce literature to Topsy & Tim or teach us to read as fast robots but in so doing it promotes the dangerous fallacy that new things are always better than old things.
Bert Wright is curator of the Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival
