Literature: By the Books?

Does this even count as a book?

The definition of what we call "Literature" has been quite contentious in this past century. Thanks to (relatively) recent innovations in printing, coloring and digital downloading, new mediums to tell a story have cropped up like dandelions. In the past, the only three ways to tell a story were through oral tradition, books and the theater, and for over a millennia this is how it was. The invention of the newspaper changed that, however, as now stories could be printed piecemeal each week to get readers hooked onto an ongoing saga. After that came radio, movies, comics, and the face of Literature was forever destabilized as chaos took hold of it's image. This "Disruptive Innovation" broke all of the previous rules established in favor of finding stories in unlikely places.

These inventions have forced people in recent years to reevaluate what we consider to be "Literature", and though most agree that it only covers "Written Works" as defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica (see here for more details), that only really eliminates Radio, Movies and television broadcasts, as well as videos online. Comics are still considered a written work after all, the same with Manga, "visual novels", and even that topic that people are ever wary of: Fan Fiction. How are we supposed to take those things into account, how do we change our frame of reference, to include these different styles under the same umbrella that books or perhaps plays fall under?

You could liken the situation to the "Age of Exploration" from years past, but I disagree in that regard. In my view, the issue isn't that these new mediums haven't been explored to their full capacity, they have, it's just a matter of whether they count at all for the title. Just because a man discovers a new location in the sea does not make it a continent, it could easily be island that is all on it's lonesome.

Image Credit: "Amazon Kindle Fire" obtained via Wikimedia Commons