Ray Bradbury was right about so many things and spellbinding about so many others that it almost hurts to write this: Ray Bradbury was wrong when it came to reading. But then I also get to tell you this: he changed his mind. HarperCollins is in the midst of preparing its Ray Bradbury backlist for digital publication, paidContent has learned.

Bradbury’s longtime editor Jennifer Brehl talked to me about the plans and the author, who died Tuesday because, she said, “I don’t want people to think he was this dinosaur because he had some opinions” that he started to change late in life.

The details for the “huge undertaking” are still being worked out but Brehl said plans were well under way with Bradbury’s approval. (I’ve yet to reach Bradbury’s agent Michael Congdon.) “He knew we were going to do this,” she said. “He agreed to it. … I told Ray, ‘You have to step boldly into the future.’”

She added, “We respected his wishes for so long. [He finally said] ‘Yeah, ok, I see what you’re saying.’” The HarperCollins e-books all will be available to libraries no matter the publishers’ overall strategy, according to Brehl. “That was one of the big, big concerns.”

For too long, Bradbury equated reading with print

Bradbury fretted for decades over what would happen when reading books gave way to screens or was lost to ignorance. But for far too long, for Bradbury reading equaled print. The man who could see Mars missed the point closer to home: encourage reading in every form.

He also worried about the power of screens, as my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote. But he had no qualms about making books or stories into movies (whether he liked the results is a different matter). He embraced television, even adapting 65 short stories for HBO and USA’s The Ray Bradbury Theater and appearing in the opening. He allowed audio books.

But he famously kept most of his work from being published digitally (legally). Only a few short stories here and there and eventually, grudgingly, Fahrenheit 451, agreeing only to an e-book edition with the new print edition as long as it was made available to libraries. Publisher Simon & Schuster didn’t allow digital library lending so it was a victory.

That was the exception. Instead Bradbury either stymied his would-be digital readers — or sent them underground, a bit like Ray Bradbury characters willing to break the law to read. He was so protective of the form he missed numerous opportunities to make it easier to read his books. Yes, they’re mostly still available in print but they aren’t as accessible to everyone. It’s almost like a dare: if you really care about me and my work, if you really care about books, you won’t want digital versions.

But it wasn’t that. For Bradbury, says Brehl, it was about community. This is a man who went to the library to read and to write (Fahrenheit 451 was written in the basement typing room at the UCLA library), who saw the Internet as an isolating force that keeps people apart and as a massive distraction.

Brehl told me: “For a very long time, Ray was averse to having his books in digital because he felt the Internet did more about keeping people away from one other. If you have to have physical books you have to go to the library, you see each other. He thought the Internet put walls up between people.”

In Bradbury Speaks, a collection of essays published in 2005, he writes of the Internet with such derision that I can imagine this computer shooting sparks if he knew I was researching him online instead of in a library. Even worse, because it took him so long to come around, I’m reading the Internet essay in chunks via the Read Inside feature on Amazon instead of the digital edition I would have purchased last night, along with a couple of others, or checked out digitally from the library.

In 1996, he told a group at his childhood Waukegan Public Library:

“My God, all this Internet stuff is pure crap. You can’t take a computer to bed. You can take a book to bed.”

And, as numerous interviews and writings show, he didn’t like the idea of technology that removes personal control or responsibility.

Technological contradictions

He was a man of technological contradictions. He had a “giant” flat-screen TV, according to the New York Times, but resisted e-mail. Brehl laughed at one memory: for years, they faxed back and forth. When his daughter Alexandra took on responsibilities she and Brehl started using e-mail labeled Fax from Dad or Fax to Dad. They finally confessed and he got a kick out of it. “We enjoyed that,” she recalls. “I have no doubt he would have gone even further.” (You could almost see the smile over the phone when she also talked of Bradbury’s love of simple pleasures, like vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce.)

He allowed NASA to send a digital version of The Martian Chronicle to Mars on mini-DVD in 2008, a book that it looks like we will finally get digitally on Earth. (S&S holds the print rights but not the digital, according to Brehl.)

Bradbury was right that reading a book in print is different — and about the smell, the crackle of pages, the way it feels to pick a title and make it a companion for however long it takes to read. I can close my eyes and see my first copy of The Illustrated Man, a used paperback from the bookstore I haunted as a kid in Memphis. Some books from college recently turned up, notes along the margin, words underlined, question marks and other symbols dotting the pages. Highlights in an e-book aren’t quite the same even though they may have made writing that thesis a lot easier.

While we talked on the phone, Brehl could see more than a dozen of his books that she’s left sticky notes in. Digital highlights aren’t the same for her either. But I also appreciate being able take otherwise-unwieldy books on a trip and the mind-and-money saving ability these past few weeks of mostly being housebound to download dozens of library books.

I’m not sure if Bradbury knew that you can read hundreds of pages of his work free through HarperCollins’ Browse Inside program. Not The Exiles, the one story I most wanted today (and literally can’t go looking for in my house because of some physical limits) but numerous complete stories from The Illustrated Man — The Veldt still has the power to completely creep me out, maybe more so on a screen — and other titles are there. Full books are not and in each anthology or book I found, The Exiles, first known as The Mad Wizards of Mars, was always in the unavailable section. (I am supposed to be able to embed the Browse Inside versions here but so far the HarperCollins widget isn’t cooperating.)

The Exiles, one of numerous precursors to Fahrenheit 451, is about a colony of authors, including Charles Dickens, L. Frank Baum and Ambrose Bierce, on Mars who survive as long as their books stay in print and die as their books are destroyed on Earth. (Spoiler) An astronaut annihilates the colony when he burns the last books. It didn’t occur to him in that story — or as far as I know — any others that books could die if they were only in print, that the content — and the authors — could live on through other formats.

Dinosaur image courtesy of Flickr / Denise Chan
Fahrenheit 451 image courtesy of Flickr / unten44

Science-fiction author Ray Bradbury, one of the world’s leading writers of the genre for more than 60 years, died on Tuesday at the age of 91. Although he wrote many books and short stories that were well-received — and in many cases made into movies, plays and TV shows — he was probably best known for Fahrenheit 451, about a dystopian future in which the government burns books. The story is usually seen as a protest against censorship, but Bradbury said his point was to draw attention to how television and other forms of media were making people less interested in the world of ideas. Given that we are surrounded by more media and entertainment content than ever before, what would Bradbury think of the world we live in now?

In the book (which Bradbury wrote in the UCLA library on a typewriter he rented by the hour), protagonist Guy Montag is a fireman — but that term is used for people who burn things, including books, rather than for people who put fires out. In the future envisioned by Bradbury, people’s lives have been taken over by television, which for most people involves multiple wall-sized screens that broadcast mind-numbingly mundane shows with which the citizens of the future are obsessed. Montag’s wife is one of those people, and he grows estranged from her and fascinated by the books he is supposed to be burning. The book ends (spoiler alert!) with a nuclear war that apparently destroys most of civilization.

Bradbury saw society as becoming anti-intellectual

Although books are outlawed in Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury said in interviews that his main purpose wasn’t to argue against censorship (although that’s clearly a sub-theme). Instead, he said he was trying to paint a picture of where society might be heading, as books and other old forms of media and entertainment were being replaced by what he saw as shallow and frivolous alternatives like television shows. In this future, Bradbury argued that books would become outlawed because people themselves would become increasingly anti-intellectual and see them as suspicious. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he was no fan of electronic books:

Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell… A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

Bradbury also reacted strongly when Yahoo wanted to publish a book of his online: “You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It’s distracting,” he said. In a lot of ways, Bradbury’s views about television and the dumbing down of culture were similar to those raised by author Neil Postman in his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” which was inspired by Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and was about the soporific effect of television and its impact on society. It’s not clear what Bradbury thought (if anything) about the internet or the rise of social media, but it seems likely he would see them as just part of the same pattern: shallow amusements that serve to distract people from the pursuit of true knowledge.

Bradbury wasn’t alone: in recent years, others have made similar kinds of arguments about the dangers of the web and social media. Author Nick Carr’s book “The Shallows” tries to make the case that the internet and its non-stop distractions are not only making us less interested in deep thoughts (and less interesting as well) but are actually changing our brains so that this is permanent. And more recently, internet sceptic Andrew Keen’s book “Digital Vertigo” takes aim at social media and the shallow and distracting effects it has on society.

Would social media support Bradbury’s view, or oppose it?

There’s certainly plenty of ammunition for this kind of criticism — from the distractions found on sites like Buzzfeed and the hours people waste on Facebook games like Farmville, to the shallow amusements offered by sites like Perez Hilton or the often darker distractions of a community like 4chan, or the way rumors and hoaxes prevail on a network like Twitter. But does all of this mean that society is becoming anti-intellectual, to the point where people prefer to be amused instead of reading or thinking deep thoughts? I’m not convinced.

One of the things that Bradbury — as great as his vision was — didn’t foresee was how much of the media we consume would be created by us, rather than by some faceless media corporation aimed at serving us mental pablum or lulling us into a false sense of security. The social and user-generated part of social media is the part that makes it truly magical in some ways, whether it’s when Reddit comes together to raise money for a boy like Caine Monroy, or when people in Tahrir Square and elsewhere risk their lives to show us images and video of a war, and thereby help bring it closer than any news show could ever do.

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of brain candy out there, or that shallow amusements and distractions created by YouTube or 4chan users are any more uplifting or redeeming than a TV sitcom, because they aren’t. But the tools that we have now are capable of so much more, and there are many people using them for those purposes — and the potential benefits of that are almost unlimited. Bradbury’s dystopia serves as a useful warning about the dangers of amusing ourselves into stupefication, but there is hope yet.

Author Neil Gaiman has written a wonderful tribute to Bradbury that is worth reading, and embedded below is a video clip of the author in 1969, describing what he sees as the social benefit of artistic pursuits like writing:

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of MyLot user CillySophie and Flickr user Alan Light