Books and the Internet

I had expected this to be one of the most interesting sessions in the festival and was quite excited about it. But ‘Can the Internet Save Books’ session moderated by Indian journalist Barkha Dutta of NDTV deviated from its core subject to vague one ‘technology and society’. Representative from Google that is digitizing books and perhaps going to change the way people access books forever was conspicuously missing. One of the problems was that Dutt was not prepared to ask questions. It seemed as if she had overestimated herself (‘oh, I am a celebrity, I am on Twitter and I have heard about Kindle’ kind of overconfidence, perhaps) and forget to bring deviating panelists to the topic.