Iván Thays
Ryu Murakami desconfía del formato impreso
Y sucedió lo que tenía que suceder. Finalmente, un autor serio y vendedor ha decidido que su nueva novela solo se venderá en soporte digital, más específicamente por medio de iTunes y para el iPad (buen gusto). Se trata del escritor japonés Ryu Murakami (¿recuerdan Azul casi transparente?) y la novela A Singing Whale que, además, tendrá soporte multimedia pues vendrá con soundtrack del no menos famoso Ryuichi Sakamoto.
¿Cuántos seguirán su ejemplo? Robert McCrum, en The Guardian, anuncia la estampida:
Murakami?s move is something else, however, a highly significant defection to the enemy. Although not as well known as his celebrated namesake Haruki, the author of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Ryu Murakami is an important literary figure in Japan, a serious writer with a serious career and readership. If he is tearing up the contract by which publishers worldwide do business and reaches a bigger, better audience through the iPad, what next? What copycat stampede might not his example inspire among other writers?
¿Fin de la historia del libro impreso? ¿O comienzo de una historia nueva? Como dice McCrum, la versión digital de los libros no lo es todo. Aun hay mucho pan (y muchos intereses) por rebanar. Vale la postura del otro Murakami, en todo caso, como disparador de nuevas relaciones entre autores y lectores.
Somewhere between the inanities sponsored by Google and the wisdom of Murakami there?s some stodgy middle ground where the steady application of scholarly logic to the culture of the book in the age of digitisation is yielding dividends.
Consider, for instance, the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. This fabulous collection holds some of the manuscript treasures of English literature, one of the first versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and a very early edition of Chaucer?s Troilus and Criseyde. For several years, Cambridge and Stanford universities have been collaborating to digitise these texts for the benefit of all. Now, scholars across the world can access these treasures at the click of a mouse, inspecting them more thoroughly than if they were in the Parker Library.
End of story? Well, no. I hear that one unintended consequence of this unique scholarly programme might be to intensify academic interest in the manuscripts themselves. Apparently, the electronic (and almost free) version is not enough. Mr Murakami, take note.
