Books in the New Millenium

Richard Campbell - Author, Media and Culture

One of my favorite writers, Joan Didion, says at the beginning of her collection of stories, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." I mean, that sort of captures it all, the importance of narrative. This is the way that we make sense of our experience, we tell stories.

Anne Rice - Novelist

People were saying back in the '50s that the novel was dead. They were saying in the '60s that it was dead. They were saying in the '70s that it was dead. It's never gonna die. There are more novels being written and published today than ever before and nothing is ever gonna change that.

Elizabeth Beier - Executive Editor, St. Martin's Press

You don't wanna curl up with your Sony Reader or your Kindle, you wanna curl up with the book, feel the paper, and turn it. I think where convergence happens the best, we have a lot of authors with great Web sites. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez is a fantastic example. She's really unbelievably smart and unbelievably good at kind of finding readers and connecting with them.

Heather Lyon - Independent Bookstore Owner, Lyon Books

It's kind of a convergence thing. For example a very traditionally formatted book that we presented recently, Mike Farrell's book Just Call Me Mike, is just your basic paperback book, but he gives many links to different parts of his Web site where you can see photos of his travels, you can read supplemental information on the history or background of the countries he visits and he updates the story. So the story exists beyond the publication date of that book, you can find out what happens next. And so, his book has a beginning, middle, and an end but you can read the epilogue by going on to his website and finding out, again, what happens next, now and then a year from now. It's a beautiful thing.

Anne Rice

In this new age in which we live where the internet is so powerful, I get everyday so many e-mails from readers and I answer them all. And I do try to update my Web site three or four times a week with new information. And you know this has been wonderful for writers because unless you go on the road the way I used to go on the road, and you see your readers at big signings the way I used to, you don't know who your readership really is.

Heather Lyon

I often read books, when I'm not in the bathtub, with my laptop on my lap and then on top of that my book because I keep wanting to look things up on Wikipedia or dictionary.com. I want that additional information that the book refers to, that supplemental Web site, I wanna see the slideshow. And so, I love using the computer with, alongside the book.

Anne Rice

But the novel itself, that novel that they want to hold in their hands on the subway, or lie in bed and read at night, that is as popular as ever. It's more popular than ever. There are more novels out there, more people reading them than ever before. I look back on the '50s and '60s when they said television was going to kill the movies and television and the movies were going to kill the novel. And all these predictions were shortsighted. There's no telling what's going to happen. Every tool we get, like the computer, it helps us write better. It helps us do something better. The Web site helps us to reach our readers, it helps us to do better what we really want to do which is to write stories. Stories with meaning, stories that will grab you by the throat, stories that will shake you up, stories you will never forget, stories maybe that'll change your life.

Richard Campbell

You know, the first really successful internet company was Amazon.com. What did Amazon.com first sell? Books. So you have a new mass medium, the newest mass medium, the Internet, makes its mark by selling the oldest mass medium, the book. I think that's really just a great story.