The Net effect

A closer look at "The Zookeeper's Wife" provides a snapshot of what's missing on the Net. Ackerman did a lot of old-school research. "I read a sea of books, interviews and testimonies -- by and about people who witnessed the Holocaust -- and I studied World War II history, armaments, cuisine, leaders, airplanes, medicine, architecture, fashion, music, films and such," she says. "Some of that I could find on the Internet, but not much; most of it meant reading books, some of which I had to have translated."

Books require a different sort of communion with one's subject than the Internet. They foster a different sort of memory -- more tactile, more participatory. I know more or less where, folio-wise, Eliot gets nasty about the Jews in his infamous 1933 lecture series "After Strange Gods," but I always have to read around a bit to find the exact quote, and the time spent softens the bite of his anti-Semitism because the hateful remarks were made amid smart ones. For literary works, books are still, and most likely always will be, indispensable.

But not all nonfiction requires that depth. I asked "Freakonomics" co-author Stephen Dubner how the Internet is changing writing and more generally the way we think.

"The crabbiness," he says, "that emanates from a certain breed of thinker/writer -- a breed that I generally admire, by the way -- about how the Internet's cornucopia of information is destroying book culture is based on fear of change more than anything. Most people don't even like to change the part in their hair; asking them to accept a change in the way words are disbursed through culture is a bit much."

Moulitsas adds: "We no longer have to depend on so-called or self-appointed experts to tell us what we should think."

Or we have to do it less than we did a few years ago. The self-appointed experts are blogging on the Daily Kos. Things are shifting.

I remember feverishly pitching "War on Iraq" in 2002. When I pushed one editor to assign it for review, he snapped: "It's not a book, and I'm not going to assign it."

The irony: It had been on his paper's list of bestselling nonfiction books for weeks.

When I began to think about this essay I listed all the writers I'd like to talk to about how the Internet is changing the way we think and write. The first person was Donald McKenzie, a fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford University. I took his course on bibliography and hypertext in the early 1990s, when the Internet was a baby.