In 2007, the British publisher Orion released a series of abridged versions of classic novels that could supposedly be read in half the time of the originals. With titles like Anna Karenina: In Half the Time and The Mill on the Floss: In Half the Time, the series was meant for those who were too busy to “read books over a thousand pages long” and were burdened by “work and kids and all the other things.” The books drew the attention of The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, who noted that the abridgment of Moby-Dick, in particular, which stripped the book down to its whale-hunting core, was part of a trend in the publishing industry for “the ‘taut, spare, driving’ narrative beloved of Sunday reviewers.”

What was sacrificed, however, was considerable. Countless readers have run aground on Melville’s mountain of details on the art of whaling, or have been left behind as he plunges, like his Catskill eagle, into philosophical realms, but it is precisely in these passages where his real appeal resides. That, at least, was the conceit of 2009’s ; or The Whale, which borrowed the oft-forgotten latter half of Melville’s title to crown a book composed entirely of passages cut by Orion. As Damion Searls, the man behind ; or The Whale, said, “[W]hat makes Melville Melville is digression, texture, and weirdness. If you only have time to read half the book, which half the time is more worth spending?”

Clearly, the world was a different place back then. The concerns shared by Gopnik and Searls are, of course, familiar to us today: that we no longer have the time to read; that even when we do, we are too distracted to linger on the page; that we prefer our whale-hunting stories to be action-driven spectacles, like the forthcoming In the Heart of the Sea, Ron Howard’s rendition of a true story that was reportedly one of Melville’s inspirations. But it is rather quaint to locate the manifestation of our collective ruin in a British publisher of abridgments, which have been around nearly as long as novels themselves.

These days, we have bigger fish to fry. In 2007, Facebook had merely 50 million users, as opposed to the 1.2 billion it boasts today. Twitter was in its infancy, and BuzzFeed was barely more than a gleam in Jonah Peretti’s eye. Thanks to the oceanic expanses of the web, there is no need to condense or abridge anything anymore, at least not for want of space. The parody site Clickhole published the entirety of Moby-Dick in a single post called “The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World”—the joke being that even the greatest American novel, digressions and weirdness and all, becomes vapid garbage as soon as it meets the internet.



This would appear to be a problem. And it is one that is likely to get worse. It is a commonplace to observe that more people, both in America and around the world, are spending more of their time online. But what is less widely understood is that the internet is becoming more like Facebook, that for many people the internet basically is Facebook, and that Facebook is, in turn, absorbing other gargantuan sites like BuzzFeed and Instagram into its DNA. Twitter, for example, is in an existential struggle to match Facebook’s reach at the risk of losing its identity, while would-be rivals like Ello fail to gain purchase because, well, everyone’s already on Facebook. The barriers to entry are impossibly high, and in this respect Facebook is more like a public utility than your average corporation, permeating the internet the way electricity courses through our homes. The blurring of Facebook and the internet writ large is particularly pronounced in the developing world, where, as Jeff Spross at The Week notes, Facebook is the sole entry point to the internet for many people.