Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading (23 page)
Read Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading Online
Authors: Jason Merkoski
Books that can fetch ten to twenty dollars today in used condition will be lucky to sell for ten to twenty cents in a few years, simply because the market for print books will be flooded and no one will need them anymore. A few book collectors will snap up the choicest pickings offered for sale, but the great majority won’t get sold, even at a penny each, because the buyers simply won’t exist in great enough numbers. It will be a buyer’s market. Unsold books will get donated to libraries, but even libraries don’t have infinite amounts of space.
With this glut of used books will come a perceived cheapening of books. Our culture still perceives print books as precious, even in the age of mass production. Books are still seen as status symbols, after all. The wealthy often have finely apportioned libraries in their mansions (even if they’re often just decorative).
But what will our culture be like when people start dumping their books because they simply can’t sell them? You’ll first see piles of unsold books outside the hipster neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco; then you’ll see piles of books by the trash on Sunday night for anyone to take. Then you’ll see community events in other cities where people get together on weekends and swap books.
If there are 119 million readers in the United States, and every reader has an average of one hundred books, and half of these will be eliminated over the next ten years as people go digital, about six billion books will need to be disposed of in some way or another. That’s around four billion tons, or the equivalent of ten years of trash. It all has to end up somewhere.
I think you’ll see a strange hybrid between dump and library—perhaps a section of the dump for books that’s cordoned off from the trash, a section run by profiteers or book-loving volunteers who will sell books by the pound or perhaps the truckload. What will the books be used for? Perhaps firewood or fuel.
As books move to digital and fewer are printed, fewer print books will be sold, which will hasten the decline of bookstores. Physical brick-and-mortar bookstores are already struggling to compete with online giants like Amazon or Walmart when it comes to price and selection, and the move to digital just hastens the already sad decline.
Most retail bookstores haven’t made the transition to the new digital culture. Even in university towns, the kinds of places where people usually read more, bookstores are closing their doors. Conventional bookstores that have focused on offering new books will fold, hit with the double whammy of fewer books being printed and the glut of used books on the market.
Publishers often complain that digital books are forcing their hardcovers to die, and I think they’re right. The hardcover book is a print artifact, a technique publishers discovered that would let them milk the same stone for blood not just once, but twice. They could sell a new book at a more expensive price point to early adopters and then release a cheaper version to the mainstream months later.
Digital books don’t allow this. They help democratize content. On the plus side, this means readers can—and often expect to—pay low prices for premium content, without hemorrhaging money into a hardcover edition. But on the minus side, a revenue source for publishers is falling by the wayside, which means it’s harder for them to take gambles on new content.
A publisher often has a portfolio of books, much like your own investment portfolio. Some titles are low-risk but low-sales, like bonds, while others are likely to be high-risk and high-return, like stocks. The ebook revolution may be making publishers think twice before taking on the risk of promoting a new author. But then again, perhaps this financial pressure will force publishers to take different risks in the digital space, to innovate new product experiences.
And this is healthy, even though some publishers will have to tighten their belts and others may fold by taking ill-timed risks that are too bold. It’s healthy because the culture of reading itself is changing.
You used to be able to go to any college town, hang out in the college coffeehouse, and see people reading at their tables. But now it’s different, which should be no surprise to you if you’re a college student or the parent of one. And believe me, I know—every time I traveled on Amazon business to visit publishers, I would stop at a college town and check out the campus bookstore and coffeehouse.
I would come to the coffeehouse expecting revolution, expecting to see people reading
The
Communist
Manifesto
or at least sci-fi novels, but now I see people sitting at their laptops reading Facebook or watching YouTube. Though there’s jazzy music on the coffeehouse radio, everyone is listening to his or her computer on earbuds. Books are at best decorations in the coffee-shop windows, encrustations of a former function that coffeehouses no longer serve.
In a broader sense, that’s true of books in our culture. Books are becoming decorations. Whither the printed book? Indeed, it has withered. There are cobwebs in the corner of the coffeehouse and spooks like me who sit on the paisley couches, watching people alone at their tables on Facebook. Reading was never really a social experience, so I’m not alarmed by this. In fact, I’m happy, because I know that as digital books grow, more and more people will start reading books again in coffee shops—and I mean actual reading, not the indiscriminate snacking of bits and bites from the internet.
Of course, the downside of this is that people may start to expect digital books to behave like the internet, like a repository of content that you can snack on. Because it’s true that, as you surf the internet, you’re snacking all day instead of eating a full meal. A book is a full meal, and like any meal, you have to be willing to spend time preparing it and savoring it. True, it takes time to read a book, and it doesn’t matter whether the book is physical or digital. The investment of time it takes to read and consume a book will remain constant regardless of the book’s format.
I remember that in Woody Allen’s movie
Sleeper
there was a machine called the Orgasmatron that people went into just to have orgasms. That’s it—no sex required, no foreplay, no nothing. Until someone invents an Orgasmatron for books, where you get all the information you need in an instant, you’ll still have to invest time in the experience of reading.
Moving beyond books, it’s a small step from the written word to images themselves and a vast project to digitize all the art in the world’s museums, whether it’s boxed up in storage or hung up in plain sight on the walls. Humanity is smitten with the digital, and there are missionaries who will see to it—partly because of profit and partly because of evangelical fervor—that all these analog artifacts are digitized as hi-fi reproductions of the originals, and they’ll be happy to sell them to you.
Is it too futuristic to imagine hanging an iPad in a gilt, rococo frame on your living room wall and seeing a high-quality selection from the Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed on it, pictures rotating every ten minutes? We can already display family pictures from our own digital photo albums, so why not display world-class art in our living rooms as well?
I think this is highly likely. In fact, the mass digitization of our culture could in some ways be considered part of a greater spiritual project. This wholesale conversion of the analog into the digital, of base “gold” into even more ethereal electrons, could be seen as part of a project that started centuries ago. It could be seen as part of humanity’s dream of infusing all of matter with soul, a dream at once ancient and yet science-fictional.
After all, this is where the Web 3.0 movement itself is going. Your clothes will be computational devices. Your e-reader will talk to your smartphone and your scale and your coffee machine, and they’ll all keep tabs on you, sense your mood, and recommend things for you to do or read or buy. Who would have thought that this dream of infusing the inanimate with the animate, of matter with soul, would ultimately benefit advertisers the most?
There were once so many passenger pigeons in America that their flocks darkened the skies for hours at a time as millions flew overhead. Ranging from the East Coast to the Rockies, they were a highly successful species of bird. Their fossils have been found as far back in time as the Pleistocene period, the same era that saw saber-toothed tigers ranging through what’s now Los Angeles, or wooly mammoths roaming through Chicago, or giant ground sloths, ten feet tall, loping through what would become Las Vegas.
That we had giant sloths in America surprises me. That all the passenger pigeons died out stuns me simply because of the reason for their extinction. They were killed for their meat, and generations of Americans knew no other meat than pigeon meat. Tiny pigeon sausages. Pigeon pies. In the span of about a hundred years, one of the most common American birds was gradually exterminated.
Likewise, books once had a glorious range. Books roamed the world. They traveled in luggage on the Pan-Am flights of the 1950s, were carried in purses and satchels on trans-Atlantic schooners, were carried by the Pony Express across the continent, and were often an important part of dowries of noblewomen. But now the range of books has shrunk, like the range of passenger pigeons, although not yet as terminally.
You can still find books on dusty ornamental bookshelves in some hotel lobbies. You can find them in the lost-and-found bins of large train stations and on sun-bleached shelves at beach resorts. You can still find thriving populations of books at college bookstores and libraries. Somewhat surprisingly, you can also find books in prison libraries, which boast higher circulation rates than almost any other kind of library.
But like passenger pigeons, like coyotes, like black bears, and like ancient coelacanths—dinosaur fish from millions of years ago that only live off two islands in the Indian Ocean—books inhabit a restricted range when compared to how prolific they were in their former glory days.
In ecological terms, books are threatened with extinction.
Books aren’t capable of reproducing in the wild or in captivity, although more and more book titles are published every year. But fewer physical books are being sold with every passing year, even if there are more titles to choose from. Book sales overall are tipping toward digital now.
Books are threatened with extinction, but like the smartest of animals in the wild, they’re adapting. They’re evolving instead into ebooks.
It’s almost contradictory for me to be a futurist of books. It’s like being a futurist of telegraphs or a futurist of rotary phones, because the death knell for print books has, in my opinion, sounded. As printed artifacts, books share a sacred reliquary along with eight-track tapes, gramophones, and LaserDiscs. But print books haven’t died yet, and they’re not going to go gently into the night.
In the upscale home décor stores of the future—and by future, I mean ten years from now—tucked in among the rugs and tapestries and oversized urns and stuffed animal heads, you’ll start to find books sold as decorative items. They might be artistically bound with strips of copper. They might have keyholes from doors installed onto their spines. They might be artfully aged and lacquered. Perhaps they’ll be set up on pedestals, or a small ceramic pigeon will be perched on the book. But you’ll start to see books altered, turned into art objects.
In a trip today to my local art town, I saw three stores that sold these types of altered books. Some of the books were turned into pulp and molded into trees, with smaller books hanging from them as fruits would. I saw pages from a book carefully razor-bladed out with an X-Acto knife and painted to show scenes of children playing in a field.
What does it say about us as a culture that we’re turning books into art?
To me, it says we’re aware of the passing of books, and we’re mournful. We feel pent-up nostalgia for books. We’re aware of a genuine loss, one that we can only express with X-Acto knives and spray cans of lacquer and glitter. We’re altering books, making them into art and ennobling them with ideas that are too hard to put into words. We’re transforming humdrum leather-bound books that were formerly commodities into artistic statements.
We’re aware somehow that art will last longer than commodities, and our artists are salvaging some books in a repurposed form, in the hope that some of them will last through the ages. Because let’s be honest: do you really think the major libraries are going to hold on to all of their print books in an age of cheap terabyte hard drives? Do you really think the Library of Congress is going to digitize its book collection and then keep all the print books once they’re digitized? They won’t, and how can they? There’s simply too much material to store.
So there’s going to be a massive die-off of print books. They’re not emigrating, flying overseas with the sound of pigeon flutter as their pages loft them through the sky. Books are dying. Future archaeologists will speak of the Gutenberg Era and the sharp discontinuity of our time, characterized by a major extinction event that has left no print books in the fossil records.
The artwork of Georgia O’Keefe often depicts bleached skulls on a desert landscape. When artists get around to painting the end of the Gutenberg Era, they’ll perhaps paint the bleached books left behind on the literary landscape.
I think highly of printed books, but I already think of them as bone-white, bleached, inert, and dead—unlike ebooks, which seem to sparkle with electricity and wonder. I look at my walls of printed and bound books like they’re all polished skulls in a curio cabinet. Just as I’m achingly sad to see them go, I’m also excited at moving onward into the future, into the digital.
But what about you? Have you come to terms with the death of printed books? Have you grieved, in your way? Care to share your thoughts or help others through the mourning process?
I can’t appreciate fiddle music. No matter how good it is, fiddle music sounds to me like someone plucking the guts of a sick cat. But I know, rationally, that there must be truly great fiddle players. My mind understands this, even if it can’t appreciate that kind of music.
Some things are simply matters of taste. Cilantro. Sushi. Cuban cigars. Krautrock. Spiders. There are no doubt items in this list that you find distasteful. And perhaps some that you appreciate, as a connoisseur might. Your taste for these is partly learned. In our country, we have developed an appreciation for sushi, for example, which is essentially raw fish. Spiders, by contrast, rarely make it onto the haute cuisine menus of our restaurants.
Culture is shifty, and as anyone who has traveled outside his or her home country knows, it can vary widely. And yet, some parts of culture are universal.
We all have an innate sense of storytelling, for example.
Whether you look at the oral culture of the Homeric Greeks, or the stories of the Navajo, or the stories of Jonathan Swift or Charles Dickens or any contemporary author, you’ll find that most stories deal with people. This should come as no surprise. As people, we care about other people. It’s part of our tribal ape heritage. It’s wired into us. We’re programmed by patterns in our own brains to care about people, to find them fascinating, and to see them even when they’re not present, like ghost lights in the dark.
As an example, consider
pareidolia
. It sounds like a disease, but it’s the surprisingly common tendency we have to see faces where none exist. And not just any faces—not bear faces or panda faces or fish faces—but the faces of people. We see them in whorls of wood and in the clouds overhead. There’s even a shrine to a tortilla in southern New Mexico. If you look hard enough at the tortilla, you can see the face of Jesus. We have triggers that fire when we see things that resemble faces. These triggers sometimes misfire, hence pareidolia. Looking for faces is clearly important to us because it’s biologically programmed.
Our sense of story is just as innate.
Good stories work well when they engage us in what we care about. Fiction does well when it paints a clear picture of a person, outfitting him with a camel-hair coat and a red beard. If the picture is too abstract, we don’t engage. Likewise, a cookbook will fail to make us salivate if it doesn’t have a photo of a pastry drizzled in chocolate sauce or a glistening sirloin steak cooked to perfection.
This preponderance of detail is what makes books work best. It takes a special kind of reader to enjoy Samuel Beckett and his abstract, disembodied fictions. We need details. Details resonate with us. Or, more properly, they resonate with our imaginations.
As far as I know, no clinician has isolated the imaginative faculty. It can’t be seen in any anatomy book. There are no brain labs at Harvard where rabbits are being vivisected to find the elusive imaginative faculty. It can’t be removed with forceps or pinned to a Styrofoam dissection tray. There are no crackpot scientists posting papers about the imaginative faculty in the pages of
Nature
or online sites like arXiv. The imaginative faculty cannot be bottled like a freakish two-headed snake in a bottle of ether at a carny sideshow. In fact, the imaginative faculty resists my own attempts to describe it, which is why I can only say what it isn’t.
But we all have this imaginative faculty. One theory for why we have this relies on evolutionary psychology, which offers explanations based on how our original human ancestors might have experienced life in the savannahs of Africa. If you believe in evolution, this theory might explain the imaginative faculty as an extension of being aware of predators and prey.
In the savannah, you would have to be alert to lions or tigers. You might imagine a tiger approaching if you heard a twig snap in the dark, and you’d react accordingly. Likewise, as a hunter, you would have to put yourself inside the head of your prey to capture it. You would have to think like a wildebeest, for example. Put yourself into her hooves. Anticipate how she might react, which rocks she might jump over, which trees she might try to hide behind.
In this sense, hunting requires storytelling. And because imagination is linked to our very survival—the ability to eat and the fear of being eaten—this faculty may have developed over time as an evolutionary adaptation, linked of course to our large brains.
However this faculty adapted, we can use it to put ourselves inside a really good book. Your second-grade teacher might have helped you to develop an appreciation for books, but it was always innate inside you. I would even bet you first discovered your imaginative faculty while reading a book when you were a kid. Perhaps it was a fantasy book about wizards of angelfire who fought dragons, or a comic book about Krypton or Eternia, or a story you imagined of Bible heroes flying through the sky.
The imaginative faculty is part of our human condition. We look for patterns and apply them to ourselves. We read a book and patch the details provided by the author together with those from the circumstances of our own lives. Whose face does the man in the red beard wear? Your mind fills the gaps with details from your own imagination. Perhaps you see the face of an old professor behind the red beard. An author doesn’t need to spell out all the details when he writes. He can rely on you, as a reader, to fill them in.
You patch these details in with your imaginative faculty, just as you sometimes see faces in knotted wood.
This faculty is innate, but it can be improved by training.
One doesn’t go straight from reading
Dick
and
Jane
books to Beckett’s
Waiting
for
Godot
. But we do become gradually more voracious readers as our critical thinking skills improve and as we learn to look for nuance and ambiguity. We learn to crave details that get gradually more complex and characters that are less black and white. As for words, we come to crave the occasional neologism.
We crave, in fact, the fullness that experience itself can bring. And when we can’t get it from an author’s own words, we patch in our own experience. When you read a book of fiction, you use details from your own life to fill in the author’s missing gaps. You caulk the author’s stories with scraps from your own outlook and knowledge.
Reading demands a lot out of you. Out of all readers, in fact.
Sadly, reading rates are dropping, although existing readers are not giving up the reading habit. Once you’re a reader, you’re always a reader. What’s happening instead is that fewer people are developing the reading habit every year. It takes time for a child to develop this imaginative faculty to a point where it becomes rewarding. It takes time for the feedback loop to kick in. There are not enough new readers buying books every year, which is a matter of population dynamics. For a population to grow, there have to be more net births than deaths. Unless this decline is arrested, reading will decline.
I could stand on my soapbox on ten thousand street corners, talking about how important reading is, but it wouldn’t help. I could have my own TV show that teaches kids about reading, with LeVar Burton and Justin Bieber and a masked Mexican wrestler, and it still wouldn’t be enough.
I could airlift a million copies of
Dick
and
Jane
over the poorest part of Appalachia, the area with the country’s lowest literacy rates, but that wouldn’t help either. Against the onslaught of digital media, reading may decline to nothing more than a faded art form, neglected like ballroom dancing or Appalachian fiddle music.
In this sense, you might think that the future of reading is doomed. How can reading cope, given that movies and TV shows already provide a surfeit of details for us to work with? When you watch
Star
Wars,
you don’t need to imagine what Darth Vader looks like under his mask; you can see each lurid scab on screen.
Likewise, video games don’t make the same demands on you as reading. Animators have crafted a whole world for you, along with computer-generated faces and professionally recorded voices. This makes it easier for you to experience the movie or TV show or video game, as your mind isn’t being taxed. But this is itself a drawback. If the imaginative faculty is seen as a kind of muscle that you flex inside your mind, then not using it may cause it to weaken and atrophy.
In some ways, this is a problem of philosophy. Does imagination matter?
If pre-imagined media experiences are what matter to you, then ebooks alone cannot compete against the onslaught of TV, movies, and video games.
Many ebooks are still mostly text, and the few experiments that attempt to hybridize movies and reading come off like tigers mated to killer whales. They’re like bestial monstrosities. Interesting as such experiments may be, the future of books does not lie in this direction.
No, the future for books is a return to the imaginative faculty, to the resonance between reader and author that causes the reader’s heart to flutter and his pulse to quicken, which causes him to sympathetically sweat when a zombie crashes onto the page or when a loved character is brutally murdered with a knife through the eye. Movies and TV and video games may win out in terms of production costs and special effects when compared to a humble book, but no movie yet made can let you into its world. Readers inhabit a book. They burrow into Frodo’s hobbit hole and curl up with him for a pot of tea. In contrast, the only way to “read” a video game or movie is when you are not participating in it.
As an example, I’m on an airplane now, heading back to Seattle. As I walk down the aisle to stretch my legs, I see plenty of Kindles. It sometimes seems like there are more Kindles on airplanes than Rollaboards. But even with all the Kindles and iPads, books seem to be outnumbered. On this airplane, at least, there are more laptops and video-game consoles, more people playing games and watching movies. The written word is outnumbered two to one.
When I return to my seat, the kid next to me is playing his video game. He’s utterly absorbed by the blinking dots, hunched over his game like Quasimodo and reacting to the electrons on his screen. It’s reactive. It’s a matter of stimulus and response. And I know this feeling well; I’m no stranger to video games. I know that when you’re absorbed in a game, it’s all-consuming.
But afterward, when the game is turned off, you can reflect, strategize your next steps, and plan ahead. It’s at such times that you really “read” a game. And likewise, the most voracious “readers” of a movie are the fans that obsess about it afterward, who imagine themselves as characters in the movie, or who buy books or director’s cut DVDs afterward to read into the nuances of the movie’s world.
I think this redefinition of “reading” bodes well for the future of books. But it means a shift in thinking. It means that any media experience can be “read” like a book, that there’s no preferential treatment of books over other forms of media, as long as the content is “read” with an active imagination. Because philosophically, I do think the imaginative faculty is important. I couldn’t live without it.
And I think that most of the successful people I know at Amazon, Apple, and Google, as well as among the publishers of the world, are those who are most creative, most imaginative. These are people who “read” into experiences, who don’t just talk to me about what was on TV last night but who imaginatively transplant themselves into the worlds of those TV shows. They’re the kind of people who wonder what it’s like to be a Cylon in
Battlestar
Galactica
, who “read” into a media experience and apply it to their own lives, and who patch in details of the media with their own life experiences to personalize it.
I think any piece of media is capable of such a reading. A movie doesn’t have to be a classic like
Citizen
Kane
. It could be anything, as long as you resonate with it and read into it with your imaginative faculty. Because books demand this form of reading, they’re here to stay for a long time in print or digital form—at least for that select group of people who enjoy imaginative reading.
For such people, books demand to be read. And they demand your attention. And paradoxically, because books by their nature aren’t as visually or auditorily rich as other forms of media, they engage our imaginations more strongly because of our need to patch in details. It’s a wonderful feedback loop: the more we read, the more we need to read and the less satisfied we are by entertainment that panders to our senses but deprives our imaginations. Once a reader is hooked, there’s no way to give up the habit.
As readers who are accustomed to the deep resonance we have come to enjoy when our imaginations are engaged, we’re hooked. And ultimately, because the imagination is so innate, no simple technological silver bullet can be applied to books or ebooks to make people read more. It doesn’t work that way. Reading—whether you’re reading a book or “reading” a movie—is a personal act of volition, of attention, of mindfulness. Reading comes from within. It takes energy. But it’s also so very rewarding. Reading is a gift that keeps giving.
At least, as long as you’re able to pay attention to what you’re reading.