Nationally-known authors who visited the Seacoast in 2011 discuss how technology is affecting the way people read and write stories.

The way we buy and read books has changed dramatically over the last 12 months: once-mighty national chain store Borders closed its doors, and sales of digital e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iPad and Barnes & Noble’s Nook increased exponentially. New advances in electronic reader technology are taking place all the time, such as the Kindle Fire, which came out in November. While the potential impact of e-books was fuzzy just a few years ago, it’s now clear that sales are competitive with printed books and could perhaps displace them in the foreseeable future.

The effects have been felt locally. RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth came to the brink of closure in 2011, before customers helped enact a last-minute rescue plan and the store a secured a new location. Meanwhile, Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, which began offering Google e-books through its website in 2010, celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. Best-selling author Dan Brown was on hand for the gala. 

In fact, through it all, the appeal of authors remains strong. The Writers on a New England Stage series, a collaboration between The Music Hall, RiverRun, Yankee Magazine and New Hampshire Public Radio, packed the house with novelists as diverse as Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Patchett, Neil Gaiman, Chuck Palahniuk and Stephen King. Local bookstores hosted dozens of other nationally recognized writers, many of whom shared their thoughts about the current state of books with Seacoast readers.

Among those to weigh in was Newburyport resident Andre Dubus III, who came to Portsmouth in support of his memoir, “Townie” on April 13.

During an interview with The Wire, Dubus called himself a “social network hater.” He is not on Facebook or Twitter and never sends text messages. He said he has serious misgivings about how social media is affecting the way people read and write.

“My theory is it’s really damaging people’s attention span, and I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of shorter chapters, shorter sentences, maybe a less complicated, less patient rendering of human life,” he said. “I’m old-school, though. I like big fat novels that take a long time to get started, and character-driven stories are still what turn me on.”

Dubus is less concerned about the digital platforms now available for reading. He said “Townie” was selling well in hardcover and as an e-book, and he acknowledged there’s no turning back from the digital revolution.

“I don’t care if people are reading on a Kindle or a piece of paper, as long as they’re reading sentences written by a writer,” Dubus said. “I hold out hope that the book doesn’t have to die just because there are other technologies coming along through which to experience literature.”

Jaimy Gordon, too, has come to accept e-readers as a legitimate medium for literature. Gordon, who won the 2010 National Book Award for her novel “Lord of Misrule,” read at RiverRun on April 25. Prior to her visit, she told The Wire she has come to enjoy the sight of e-readers illuminating the interior of an airplane at night.

“It’s wonderful to think you can carry a library of the classics around with you everywhere you go,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s the same as being able to interact with a book with your hands the way that writers so often do.”

Gordon said many serious readers and writers still cherish the physical object of a book. In the future, she said, as the digital era continues to progress, hand-stitched books with small print runs could become collector’s items.

“If I’m loving a book, I carry it around with me. I write in it, it gets dirty, it gets creased, it’s got notes in the back of it... For people like me, the physical book is never going to lose its centrality,” Gordon said.

Jennifer Egan, whose novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad” won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is another writer who is not enamored with technology. And yet, as she told The Wire in advance of her May 16 visit to The Music Hall Loft, it has had a demonstrable impact on the way she writes. An entire chapter of “Good Squad” was written in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.

“I don’t have an iPhone, I don’t like to read online, I’m not someone who just says, ‘Whoa, a machine, how fun, let’s use this.’ But even I have bumbled into some surprising territory technologically,” Egan said.

Like Dubus, who said his daughter was “obsessed” with Facebook, Egan said her 10-year-old son was infatuated with digital machines. But she does not believe e-books and social media networks will forever change the way stories are told.

“To me, these are just epiphenomena. I mean, these are just surface shifts,” she said. “I hope they don’t fundamentally change our way of telling stories, because in my mind, the danger there would be the much drum-rolled shorter attention spans, a more diffracted way of thinking, and difficulty sustaining a long narrative.”

It’s hard to say whether shrinking attention spans are actually altering reading habits. Author Jim Shepard doesn’t necessarily think so. Shepard visited RiverRun on June 16 to read from his short story collection, “You Think That’s Bad.” The Wire asked Shepard if short stories are better suited to modern readers than novels.

“If they are, then modern readers haven’t figured that out yet,” he replied.

Shepard’s 2007 short story collection, “Like You’d Understand, Anyway,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. Despite the accolades, he said readers are still less receptive to short stories than they are to novels. Perhaps, he said, readers invest more attention in novels with the expectation of a bigger payoff. He called it the “J.K. Rowling effect,” noting that millions of readers of all ages faithfully followed the “Harry Potter” series through seven beefy installments.

On the other hand, Shepard continued, some people equate short stories with poetry, which might require a bit too much intellectual effort for the average reader. Nevertheless, he is currently at work on a new book of short stories. 

“I guess my ambition is to make sure I don’t put very much food on my children’s plates,” Shepard joked.

Neil Gaiman offered a unique perspective during his appearance in the Writers on a New England Stage series on June 22. Gaiman was touring the nation in support of the 10th anniversary edition of his 2001 fantasy novel “American Gods.” In the book, anything worshipped by humans has a corresponding deity, including electronic devices like computers and telephones. He’s now at work on a sequel.

“I think ‘American Gods 2’ is going to have a lot more about the new gods, a lot more about the weird cutting edge of technology,” Gaiman told NHPR’s Virginia Prescott. “I want to write about shorter attention spans, the upside and the downside of things like Twitter. I want to write about the peculiar nature of community and the upside and downside of that, as well, in this sort of electronic age. I love the fact that you can have communities which consist of people who have never met in the flesh, but they are real communities. But I’m also fascinated by the downside of that.”

Gaiman, himself, boasts some 1.6 million followers on Twitter. But he’s still a loyal advocate of the printed book. He served as honorary chair of National Library Week in 2010, a position that compelled him to defend the relevance of libraries in the digital age. He reiterated that defense at The Music Hall, stressing the advantage of browsing for books at a physical store or library rather than online.

“Look, Google will bring you back 100 million answers. A librarian will bring you back the correct one,” Gaiman said.