The future of books and literature: 'new technologies...do not await permission.”

[BurtWorm]

Interesting post from Big Think on Jason Epstein's NYRB assessment of the state of book publishing now and in the future:

http://bigthink.com/ideas/18911

Jason Epstein thought of Amazon before Jeff Bezos. Or at least, he understood the concept: the necessity, and power, of making the world’s backlist available at all times. Epstein’s uniquely revolutionary presence in publishing belies the bias that editors are English majors who don’t read the Journal. The New York Review of Books’s 11 March edition has Epstein’s thoughts on the industry's future, the “fragility” of digitization, and the enduring individuality of literary creation.

Epstein speaks of what “will” happen, and his past predictive talents make the lure of taking his word for it (extremely) strong. Here is what he sees happening now:

The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg's German city of Mainz six centuries ago.

Here is what we might consider scary:

The most radical of these fantasies posits that the contents of the digital cloud will merge or be merged—will "mash up"—to form a single, communal, autonomous intelligence, an all-encompassing, single book or collective brain that reproduces electronically on a universal scale the synergies that occur spontaneously within individual minds. To scorn a bold new hypothesis—the roundness of the earth, its rotation around the sun—is always a risk but here the risk is minimal. The nihilism—the casual contempt for texts—implicit in this ugly fantasy is nevertheless disturbing as evidence of cultural impoverishment,<3> more offensive than but not unrelated to the assumption of e-book maximalists that authors who spend months and years at their desks will not demand physical copies as evidence of their labors and hope for posterity.

And yet, in some respects, the more things change . . .

The difficult, solitary work of literary creation, however, demands rare individual talent and in fiction is almost never collaborative. Social networking may expose readers to this or that book but violates the solitude required to create artificial worlds with real people in them. Until it is ready to be shown to a trusted friend or editor, a writer's work in progress is intensely private. Dickens and Melville wrote in solitude on paper with pens; except for their use of typewriters and computers so have the hundreds of authors I have worked with over many years.

As Epstein puts it, “new technologies, however, do not await permission.” It is unclear how publishers will accommodate this lack of politesse, but one thing seems certain: the role of editors who anticipate these shifts is more important than ever before.

[mike_c]

1. frankly, I don't get it....

First, let me say that I'm all for digital media, long term databasing of literary works, and especially print-on-demand publishing. I think those are all great technologies. I even think digital readers are just fine for anyone who wants to use them-- reading is reading, and it's always better for intellectual development and growth than passive activities, IMO.

Still, there is much more to a book than its contents. Books are objects that directly embody the knowledge and the stories they contain. One glance at a book is often sufficient to understand the nature of its contents-- its subject-- and to classify them in personally meaningful ways: "this is useful to me now," "this isn't useful," "this looks entertaining," or whatever. You just can't do that with computers and digital readers without destroying their primary reasons for existing. At the very least you need to get into the data files themselves-- the object is generic. Computers are universal tools-- digital media storage makes them universal books, but real books have specific identities that are an integral part of how we use them and why we like them. Universal books strip that identity away in the interest of being whatever the reader wants them to be. In the process, I think, they lose something difficult to articulate, but very real and powerful.

I read and write (and think) for a living, and there are presently six open books and about a dozen closed ones on my desk, within easy reach. There are several hundred more on the shelves behind me, many hundreds more at my home. I interact with the INFORMATION contained within those books constantly, but I've never been interested in swapping them for a digital reader, like Amazon's Kindle or the like, even though the information content would arguably be identical and the package would be "convenient," if small size is the best measure of convenience. I like the books though, not just the information they contain.

Print on demand technology is OK in some applications. The academic materials I provide to students typically constitute a small book's worth of information that they print in bits as the semester progresses. That is convenient in a temporary setting, but the objects they create-- usually three-ring binders stuffed with loose pages-- lack permanence, and more to the point, they lack CRAFT. A book is not just a collection of pages-- it is an artifact, made well or poorly, but distinct from its contents. I have admirably well-made books that contain useless information, or what I think of as low-quality information, and I have crappy, falling apart books that are so important that I use them frequently, struggling to keep the pages together and cursing the publisher who performed such shoddy work. Books have human histories beyond those of their authors and readers.

I just don't think electronic readers will ever really replace books, and publishers are kidding themselves if they think the market for real books will disappear. I love my books. I have little use for an electronic reader. Give me real paper pages, precisely printed, folded, sewn, and cut, bound between heavy cover boards and covered with cloth or leather. I love the end papers, the ribbons added to keep the spines neat, and the precision of the cover material's corner folds. I don't just read books-- I hold them, smell them, and feel them. No Kindle can ever replace that.

[BurtWorm]

2. I feel the same way about my books and agree with you that Kindles can't hold a candle to them

in terms of the sensual experience of reading them. (Although, to be fair, I haven't actually read with a Kindle, and should, therefore say they *probably* can't hold a candle to them.)

But this may be out of our hands (so to speak). The process of making books has become so expensive and wasteful, as Bernstein points out. There's almost no excuse for the way they're produced given the choice to make texts less costly to publish via electronics--at least those are surely the lines along which publishers must be thinking these days.

It pains my heart to think books might go the way of vinyl records. (Ouch!)

[mike_c]

3. the irony is that books haven't changed appreciably in a century or more....

Sure, some different materials are used now-- better adhesives and sewing fibers in particular, but the basic technologies of printing and bookbinding haven't changed much in the last century other than to become more and more automated. Pre-press stuff has changed more, but that's not really the issue.

The main point I was after is that there is an interesting disconnect between the real costs of producing books, as you say, and their production. The costs have gone up tremendously, but the books being produced are pretty much the same as the ones that were such a better bargain to make 50 or 100 years ago-- and in those days bookbinding included a whole lot more hand labor, even in the mass market. That seems more an artifact of economics than the intrinsic cost of producing something like a book. Change the economy just a little and it's easy to imagine economies in which low-tech printing and bookbinding are way more cost effective than manufacturing sophisticated and energy intensive electronic devices to do the same thing, i.e. store information.

Now that I think about it, book manufacturing is sort of a metaphor for lots of economic problems in modern life. The cost of things seems to be growing far faster than their intrinsic value-- I mean, it used to be economical to pay skilled, journeyman craftsmen to hand make books, but now it's too costly to make them by machine, using semi-skilled workers who often cannot do any of the tasks the craftsmen used to do. Something about that circumstance just doesn't make sense. I don't doubt that it's the case-- I just don't understand why.

Books also have the advantage of working even when the battery dies.

[Odin2005]

4. a book is just a way of transmitting information.

What is important is the text itself, not what the text is displayed on. The things you mention, "Give me real paper pages, precisely printed, folded, sewn, and cut, bound between heavy cover boards and covered with cloth or leather. I love the end papers, the ribbons added to keep the spines neat, and the precision of the cover material's corner folds. I don't just read books-- I hold them, smell them, and feel them." will become less and less relevant as older generations age and die off. I still prefer books for more expensive texts because I don't have to worry about data loss, but for a $8 fiction book an electronic medium is just fine with me.

[EFerrari]

8. Good bookmaking is an art just as portraiture is. n/t

[mike_c]

10. it's a question of values, I suppose....

I value the object as much as I value it's contents, often quite a bit more. I'm the sort of person who nearly always buys the $30.00 hardcover edition rather than the $8.00 trade paperback edition, even when the content is mass produced entertainment literature, e.g. beach novels. Having tried it both ways, I much prefer the physical craft that well-made books represent, irrespective of the contents. Lots of people "wait for the paperback edition"-- I do just the opposite whenever possible, and if I see a trade paperback that interests me in a book store I'm more likely to look for a hardback edition online or elsewhere than I am to buy the less expensive paperback immediately.

So I disagree with you in a sense-- the text IS important, of course. It's the book's reason for existing. But I find "what the text is displayed on" just as important.

[BurtWorm]

11. Something tells me that that form of book will always exist.

It just might become very, very expensive.

[kimmerspixelated]

15. Finer words about the true beauty of reading books,

has rarely been written. I, too, love the feel, smell and experience of a book. It's hard to cuddle up with hot tea and a comfortable chair with an electronic device.

[Touchdown]

5. What a word salad.

Epstein writes like George Will talks. No wonder he laments physical books becoming niche. His wroting probably helped it happen.

[anonymous171]

6. I stopped reading as soon as I saw "synergies."

Technophile drivel.

[BurtWorm]

9. Then you missed his point

which was precisely to mock that idea.

[Grand Taurean]

12. As you said

"Synergy" is technophile bulls**t!

[Uncle Joe]

13. Why do you believe synergy to be drivel? n/t

[EFerrari]

7. Wth. English majors have to go all over the place to interact with the texts

in their field. It's one of the most expansive majors in the academy.

[ThomWV]

14. "fragility of digitization" is something that's been bothering me for a while

Hanging on the wall, in our hall, is a photograph of my grandfather taken in 1899, at his christening. I have several pictures of him in his later years. I have a few pictures of my father, there are a few of me that could be found if someone really wanted to look.

There have been thousands of pictures taken of my son, but almost all of them were digital and today not half of them could be found or retrieved, next year fewer. They can't simply be put in a truck to be bound years later, they have to be actively maintained, and that isn't happening.

I don't think my own experience is unique, I think it is omnipresent. Digital memory is fragile indeed.

[BurtWorm]

16. Computer scientist defends books in print

Sort of an update or an addendum from Big Think to the one referenced in the OP:

http://bigthink.com/ideas/18932

David Gelernter is not a man known for conventional thinking, so perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Yale computer science professor—whose digital-world achievements include the development of the Linda coordination language—mounts such a stirring defense of print media in an interview this week.

"Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony," Gelernter argues, noting that the format is a small wonder of design and has been integral to some of humanity's most cherished intellectual achievements. On the one hand, he believes "people are too smart to allow it" to disappear altogether. On the other hand, he observes that his Yale students become "less and less able to express themselves in writing" with each passing year, and believes a failure to reverse that trend will make print media wither into irrelevance.

Gelernter doesn't just talk old media, of course; he also explains the concept of "lifestreaming," which he helped define in the 1990s, and how it is increasingly coming to fruition around the digital universe. The interview was conducted in partnership with the DLD (Digital-Life-Design) conference in Munich.