Tarragona, 1976. Beyond his work as a critic, teacher and novelist, what distinguishes him the most is bibliomania, the defense of books and bookstores. Its new title identifies without fear the enemy: Against Amazon (Gutenberg Galaxy).

His new collection of essays and articles is titled 'Against Amazon', but Amazon is a 'mcguffin': in reality, it is a book in favor of bookstores and libraries. What should we protect them from? I would say that the book is at its best. Never in history have there been so many people who can read, and also read. But, suddenly, he has been confronted with the one who is his best ally, who at the same time is his worst enemy: the screen. It has been through the screen when several logistics companies have decided to compete against kiosks, bookstores and stationery stores in the distribution business. I don't think this crisis is going to be solved in the coming decades, it will be a constant coming and going between the old practices of cultural consumption and our old way of paying attention, and, on the other hand, our social experiences linked to reading and with the book. He doesn't look so bad either. I think it's a fascinating moment, very open. All technologists and technophiles have been wrong again and again in their divination exercises on the book, which resists as never before, and for now they have not asked for forgiveness. The auguries that said that the screen would kill the paper in the short term for now not They have been fulfilled. As he says, it seems that we will live a long coexistence because the screen is great, but also, because as Umberto Eco said, the paper book is a perfect technology that cannot be improved. The book is an extraordinary technology that has cultivated an idea very powerful Today, the book no longer means the codex, but the codex has supplanted and monopolized the idea of ​​the book, because a scroll of parchment is also a book. Originally, the Bible was a collection of scrolls. Let us clarify that they were papyrus scrolls, lest someone understand it figuratively and take offense. Correct. The point is that this technology is so powerful that it has led the computer scientists and inventors of our time to imitate and adapt it, and in that sense, although the Kindle and other reading devices have several advantages - you can regulate the light and vary the size By letter, which has allowed older people who could not read now to do so, what they continue to do is imitate, by size and tone of ink, the idea of ​​the book. As long as they continue along that line, the border is clear, and it is difficult for them to compete with paper readers. Is it possible that something better appears than the book in the future? Something that allows reading, but that is a completely different technology, and even better? One day, some 19-year-old boy, in his garage in Tel Aviv, or Tokyo, or Wisconsin, will have an eureka moment and think of something no one has thought, and his idea will begin to compete with the book in terms of reading. The closest thing to that I can think of is the app as a format. The apps are defining a new idea of ​​something that we could consider a mutant evolution, and with success, that it will be something different from the book in the future. Years ago, it seemed that the electronic book was going to replace the paper book. Today, that is not so clear, and although the 'ebook' has a lot of market, it is far from being hegemonic. How do you observe the phenomenon today? I would say that phases of digital euphoria and phases of digital consciousness can already be detected. The decline of Facebook at this time can be attributed to that logic, and I think it will be the tonic of the coming decades, in which we are going to extreme our digital habits. In the case of looking for a partner, a way of doing it on the internet has been imposed, but in other cases we will have new post-digital needs: the interest in crafts, the need to make excursions and spend disconnected weekends, sign up for clubs of reading, and the digital book is not going to be oblivious to this. You can toggle the readings on the two supports. We have the problem in that aspect of Spanish society that tells us that there are many people who do not read, or who read little, and we must open the concept of reading and understand that we read more than we think: we read whatsapps , articles by internet, and we also listen to books: Storytel has passed the million subscribers, which connects with our change of habit by replacing the radio with the podcast ... Talking about the end of the world is fine, but I find it more interesting to observe the birth from another world. Lately it seems that some voices arise, in social networks and comments scattered on the network, that attack the prestige of the book. Are they worrisome symptoms, or for now only minor anecdotes? Keep in mind that there are many people who are really forging their culture and knowledge with Google and YouTube tutorials, and they are doing it in an alternative way. It is necessary to contemplate that this type of training exists, that is important, and in some cases, linked with the writing in code, is even another form of new writing, and that there is a lot of programmer who is self-taught. This is important. Now, those comments to which you refer are related to a topic of ours now that is the rejection towards the intellectual. The intellectual has become an insult to many people, it is a very broad issue that can not be answered to vuelapluma, and it has to do, surely, with the rise of populism, which is consciously anti-intellectual, and that for example is fine reflected in the documentary The Fourth Power , on the informative follow-up of the New York Times during Trump's first year as president.What can be done to convince many people that books do not bite? It is important that they perceive bookstores as spaces kind, because many perceive them as elitist. The bookstores have that option, or if not the other, which is to become a redoubt of a massive elite of booklovers and wounded letters, but that entails a risk of exclusion from the majority. That is an advantage that Amazon has for many potential buyers: nobody here judges you for what you buy. There was a bookseller in Barcelona, ​​José Batlló, from the Taifa bookstore, who was famous for treating clients who were asking him badly for a bestseller , reprimanded them and boasted that they had sold hundreds of Rayuelas in exchange for those customers who were looking for another thing. It is a nice anecdote, because of the character's character, but acting like this in a bookshop has a dark side. One thing that seems worrying to me is that students are less and less accustomed to handling bibliography in courses and when doing their jobs. . In the classes I give I have been noticing for a long time: its first source of information, and sometimes the only one, is Wikipedia and the first results of Google searches: they do not feel like going further, or do not know how to do it. As a teacher, do you perceive it the same? The idea has been imposed, which is a false certainty, which says that everything is on the Internet. Actually, it's stupid. You just have to go to a bookstore or a library to realize that on the internet there is only a very small part of the knowledge and information that exists in the books. In addition, it is an incorrect statement also because the Internet is confused with Google: there is a lot of information that is only in newspaper libraries and that is invisible to Google, you only find it with the library search engine. And precisely because of this, I know that many schools are trying to search the internet in an ethical and responsible way, to take students to the use of books, and also of films or documentaries that are not on YouTube. have a subject that is 'Internet'. I don't know if you know Carlos Alberto Scolari. He is a professor at Pompeu Fabra University, an expert in transmedia, and has directed a European project on adolescent technology literacy. During the investigation it has been found that most of the learning related to the internet is self-taught, outside the school, so that the school must incorporate this pedagogy for the citizens of the future. If we share absurd news by WhatsApp or Facebook, that is because we have a lack of training in the use of these technologies. He says in one of his articles that a library began to be built because when he was a child there were hardly any books at home. same need for which in many places second-hand libraries arise: it is a way to fill a void. South Korea, for example, is building its identity as a young country from books, innovating in the sale of books, and the youth of a country is like the youth of a person. What is the point of accumulating books at home? You describe your library as a private nirvana. My library is really an experience that I immerse myself in, because it occupies the whole house, I don't know where the library ends and home starts. Even my three and five year old children already have a large library, a skin of books, and without a doubt my library is my external memory. Before I start writing any article, book or chronicle, or preparing a class, I go to certain books and I leaf through them, I reread them, as a way of intuitively remembering what I mean. It has become the main memory of my travels, in addition to the hundreds of objects that I keep in trunks or boxes: bookmarks, envelopes, photos, brochures, even the environmental perfume they have in the Internazionale Luxemburg bookstore in Turin. And among the books, I have memories of where and when I bought them, whether it was in Buenos Aires, Chicago or Tokyo. Can you get it well organized? It is a thematic library. I have all the contemporary narrative together, and the non-fiction part classified by different themes that are the themes of my books: chronicle, travel history ... Is having double-row books mandatory, or undesirable? I have never practiced double row in a classic sense, because I get rid of hundreds of books every year. I don't want to go from 6,000 or 7,000 volumes, which is reasonable to control your library and know what you have and how to find it. There are some shelves in which I put some books vertically and others horizontally, but without those that are horizontally hide what is behind. So in many cases I practice the row and a half. Umberto Eco was a great proselyte of the 'anti-library': all those books that we have but have not read, and that we may never read, but that we have because they should be, or in case Maybe one day we want to read them. Do you also practice it? No, I don't believe in the library , and I get rid of it. Eco spoke from the privilege that he was supposed to live very well from his intellectual production, and he could allow himself to live in a space of several hundred square meters in which the address and a large library were confused. I live in an apartment of 80 square meters, and that's fine, the restrictions are good, and the infinite expansion of libraries at home is problematic. It is necessary to set limits, which are the Billy shelves that I buy in Ikea. Ikea dictates my library. Interesting: Amazon is an enemy of the book, but Ikea may be one of her best friends. In my case, she is doubly friendly, because I also use pencils from stores to underline books. Anyway, Ikea could do much more for the book if, for example, they bought real books to decorate the furniture that is exposed in stores, instead of fake volumes. In our world, Amazon is inevitable: it is even necessary to Locate discontinued books. Considering that Amazon will remain there for a long time, what is its ethical code to live with it? I have realized that Amazon is a common thread of the book, and the other is Jorge Luis Borges, and Borges, in all its great stories of cultural speculative fiction, talk about the impossibility of assuming culture as a whole. He does it in The Sand Book , in The Babel Library ... He already announced Amazon when he imagined a place where all the books were together, but in a useless way that did not favor intellectual training. I've spent a lot of time reflecting on Amazon and buying online in particular, which also leads to HBO and Netflix. What happen? Amazon, HBO or Netflix do not pay all their taxes in Spain, and buying online contributes to no local commerce. So, you may ask yourself: Do you want your children and grandchildren not to know what it is to buy in a market? In my particular case, as for Amazon, I only consume some Amazon Prime Video series, such as American Gods or The Marvelous Ms. Maisel , which I think are phenomenal series, because a friend gives me her password.That is her limit.I do not buy nothing more because it seems to me that it is not sensible to give a single company so much real and personal information about you. If you buy books on Kindle, you are already giving your bank details, your real address, your tastes, your academic level, something that Netflix does not ask you for, much less the libraries. If you only read on Kindle, those who receive your data have a complete view about you. I am not against Amazon selling scooters or pizzas, what I do not like is their way of managing the sale of books. A few years ago, he published the book 'Teleshakespeare' (Errata Naturae, 2011), which was one of the first in recognizing television fiction from the beginning of the 21st century the same value as narration as the great masterpieces of literature. In recent times, however, production has increased and we have gone from a few very good series to many series in which more and more mops. Does that overwhelm you? Series of very high quality are being produced, but in fact, they are few, and instead there are many more than before, bad or mediocre. I give the series 10 minutes of seduction space in the pilot chapter, and if I don't see it clearly I don't follow it, unless many friends, or people on the networks, tell me it's worth it. marathons, then. You have to be patient, it makes no sense to watch a Netflix series in one day to be the first to comment. As a cultural critic you are a prescriber, and this is not a race of speed, but of substance. The marvelous Ms. Maisel , Gomorra or Better Call Saul are wonderful series ... There are no less good series than before, but it is difficult to detect them. And at some point it will happen as with music and books, that there will be so much offer that it will be impossible to keep up, because good series are also emerging in all countries. The difficult thing will be to find them, if they remain hidden by irrelevant novelties. On Netflix it happens that 90% is garbage. Netflix is ​​a total Babel library. The best algorithms are human beings, we are configured so that we connect with other human beings and a macroalgorithm is generated that helps us a lot, but the algorithms of Netflix and YouTube are terrible. What is worth it is to put random keywords in the search engine and find what Netflix does not show you in the first place. Why let the algorithm decide for you? You have to take action and leave passivity behind, the algorithm tames us passively, and you have to remain active.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • culture
  • literature
  • Final Interview

The final interview Luis Solano, editor: "A book no longer competes with another book, but with Instagram, the series or go for drinks"

TendènciesRosa Ribas: "The whole world fits in a neighborhood"

CultureHow the audiobook industry is rescuing lost readers: "If I don't get you into the subway you get into history ..."