McMurtry speaks on future of books in internet age

By Margeux Clemmons     1/22/09 6:00pm

Try as he might, Pulitzer Prize winning author Larry McMurtry ('60), just can't quit the written word.The author, who also co-wrote the Brokeback Mountain screenplay, offered words on the business of books and the future of reading in 2009's Friends of Fondren Library Distinguished Guest Lecture series on Wednesday.

During his speech, McMurtry prodded at the dominant role of the internet in today's book sales.

"I never denied that cyberspace and internet are beneficial," McMurtry said. "They can find jillions of books and pop up jillions of quotations, but they can't cancel mortality."

---

---

McMurtry received his M.A. in English from Rice; during his speech he dubbed the university his intellectual home. After Rice, he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, allowing him to enroll in Stanford University's creative writing program. He has published 29 novels, 39 screenplays and two essays, many of which depict Texas and the American West.

McMurtry won a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for his novel Lonesome Dove, off of which a famous television mini-series was based. His other works include the novels Terms of Endearment, When the Light Goes and his most recent work of non-fiction, Memoir.

A rare-book collector, McMurtry also owns a book store called "Booked Up" in Archer City, Texas. He said the store, which houses approximately 350,000 volumes, was once a successful business, but sales have declined since the boom of dot-com companies.

McMurtry's talk continued with thoughts on the culture of the book and its waning popularity.

McMurtry blamed the convenience of internet searches, the cheap price of books sold online and the installment of more and more computers in libraries as contributions to what he sees as the death of the book.

"If there's a better tool, people are going to use it," McMurtry said. "But it is a sadness that it ends up depriving people. Mostly, we have no people who buy books for imagination. What's being left behind is a very beautiful culture, and I don't know what to make of it. I think it's gone, and I don't think it will come back. I hate to be gloomy, but that's what it looks like from my viewpoint - 55 years of bookselling."

Affirming the timelessness of the human love for narrative, McMurtry also said the nurturing of life-long readers is cut short.

"[Children] love being read to, love being absorbed in stories," he said. "But when they reach 10, 11 or 12, they are hit by a tsunami of technology: iPods, Blackberries, computers, iPhones. It's endless, and books are not competing."

The author said he still loves his bookshop and that people still frequent it, but that it has become temporal and no longer a commercial enterprise.

"People come in and hold a book as though holding a talismanic object from a past culture," he said.

McMurtry also mentioned that his customers are rarely young and that many individuals spend hours sitting among his collection but leave without purchasing anything.

Still, the prolific writer said that there may still be some hope for the book as we know it, although he was noncommittal as to what role the virtual e-book and quick, sometimes careless blog culture would play in the future of imaginative literature.

"You never want to count a good book out," McMurtry said. "It may be republished by accident or republished because the movie has been pretty successful.

---