Wired Magazine has a list of “Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Fiction” which is worth a perusal. The ones that resonate the most with me right now are these:

• 5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.
• 8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.
• 17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

#5 resonates with me since I just moved form a large house to a tiny condo and had to move my book collection – again. I have hundreds of pounds of books stored in many bookshelves, even after trimming the collection by about 50% in a recent moving sale. I read the other day that Sherman Alexie considers the Kindle to be an “elitist” device – because Kindle is expensive and only driven by one company. While I understand where he’s coming from and agree that it is currently elitist, I also think it neglects the fact that people with large libraries of physical books are also “elitist” but also “environmentally non-friendly.” I love books, but I also think that books are a luxury that should not be afforded by people who read a lot and can afford to get a device that doesn’t perpetuate the shipping of dead trees and the expansion of personal space to maintain a collection of knowledge.

#8 is just plain interesting. As a literature student, I love the ability to locate nearly any reading material via Amazon.com. The fact that the long-tail is now available to researchers and academics is a boon to society and literary study. Unfortunately, it is also true that the availability of the long-tail has indeed “balkanized” more casual readers. It’s important for cultural reading experiences to exist, for mass market works that matter to be read by large percentages of a population as it further discourse and allows for common language to be achieved. I am particularly interested in group readings of major works. In fact, this is one reason I’ve been so active in reading groups throughout the years and am partaking in Infinite Summer. (We’ve got a small reading group that will most likely be meeting a couple times a week on Wednesday evenings in Seattle. If you want to join us, feel free to leave your comment so I can get in touch with you. You’ll be doing your part to combat excess balkanization.)

#17. That just the result of non-face-to-face discourse in the internet age. A small percentage of vocal self-serving twits can exert undue influence over debate. It’s a core problem that needs to be addressed. I don’t know what to do about it.

The entire list is thought-provoking and worth a read. Which one resonates most with you and why?