I attended a conference in San Diego this past weekend, about “21st Century Book Marketing.” Inevitably, a great deal of it was about the ways in which technology is changing the book-publishing world. One speaker, Dan Poynter, flat-out said “Don’t bother going to a New York publisher,” predicting that in a few years they will all be, simply, gone, and that self-publishing, and electronic forms of books, will be the only game in anyone’s town. A subsequent speaker disagreed, saying that the industry is certainly changing but that the experience of a physical book won’t be replaced for a good long while yet.
Speaking as a person who loves books, and the physical form of a book, it is terribly hard to imagine ever abandoning that. And yet, I never thought I’d listen to music on a computer--now it’s almost the only way I ever listen to music. My CDs are all ripped, and iTunes just plays, one record after another, for as long as I want. The convenience so outweighs issues like sound quality that I really only use my big stereo in conjunction with the TV anymore. I still have all the CDs, but most of them haven’t been touched in years.
Are books following the same path? I still don't own a Kindle or any other e-reader, but I’m starting to want one, just as I once began to covet an iPod. Because I’m in the middle of five books right now, which is not at all unusual for me, and it would be kinda great to have them all together in a form that never weighs more than a few ounces. (Although it must be said--there’s some odd thing about the clutter of books that is part of their appeal. Book lovers love having great precarious piles of books in every corner. I will sometimes demonstrate to new visitors the extent of my obsession by opening the kitchen cabinets--to reveal that the top shelves, all the way around, are filled with books. Not cookbooks--theatre and film books, actually. I simply needed the shelf space more for books than for food.)
This weekend I was talking to someone at the conference (the marvelous LiYana Silver, who kinda blew my mind with her “Redefining Monogamy” ideas), and as we talked a man came around handing out copies of a novel he’d written. A physical book, words on paper. So I did what I always do, what I call the First Paragraph Test: I open to page one, read the first paragraph, and if it sounds like something I’ve read before, I abandon the book.
This book was easy. It only took four words for me to toss the book aside. “Don’t write at me,” I said to the book and by proxy its author, “if you’re not gonna do it well.” But the point here is that it’s hard to beat that particular experience. Sure you can look at previews of a book online--the Kindle offers them, in fact I’ve got the first several chapters of Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions on my iPhone’s Kindle app right now—but wandering through a bookstore, letting your eye wander, picking up books that look interesting, that you might never have thought of before, then doing the First Paragraph Test with a happy result, I don’t know that there can ever be an electronic replacement for that.
Just a few weeks ago I was in Borders, wandering, and came across a book by A. Roger Ekirch called At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, and it completely caught my attention. When the power goes out I’ve often thought about the world before electric light, but the moment I saw this book I immediately had the old thought: Why didn’t I think to write that? It had simply never occurred to me that that random thought might make an interesting book. But as soon as I saw it in the store, bells went off, and the perfect rightness of the idea became instantly self-evident.
An Amazon search, or a random browse through the Kindle’s lists, probably would have never turned up this book. You can never prove a negative, can never know what you never found, can never appreciate the opportunities that never crossed your path. And I find it terribly difficult to imagine a world where I can’t wander into a bookstore and hope for something, some glorious unknown and uncontemplated something, to leap off the shelves at me.
Which leaves the publishing industry where, exactly? Well, that probably depends on how many people like me are still out there. And I’m sure someone has run a study on those numbers, but I don’t think I want to know.
The Borders at the Third Street Promenade, one of my favorite places to go wander, closed a few months ago. It lasted long enough to drive out an earlier tenant, the fabulous Midnight Special bookstore, but then even the Borders went away. This may just be a train that is already leaving the station.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Birth of a Demagogue
You may remember that I had some issues with Ayn Rand recently. My initial reaction, upon finally being exposed to some of her work, was to object vehemently, mostly on artistic grounds. I wrote a blog entry, posted it, and moved on to other things.
Then I discovered the power of Google Alerts.
Followers of Ms. Rand (you could almost call them Rand cultists) had Google Alerts set up for any mention of her name. So quite suddenly I found that my readership count increased measurably, and people were leaving comments on my post. And because the tone of my blog post was light (I believe the relevant phrase was “Ayn Rand can bite me”), these comments contained charming and insightful criticisms calling me, for instance, “intellectually jejeune.” (My new favorite phrase!)
Naturally, I immediately realized that this represented a host of new opportunities. Because what’s more fun than messing with the heads of a group of Ayn Rand cultists?
“Ayn Rand can bite me” set the tone, and I wrote a couple more entries in which I took little shots at the cult of Rand. And sure enough, my readership spike continued and the comments kept coming in. It was huge fun.
Trouble is, in order to keep the cultists aggravated I ended up writing things that I didn’t quite believe. I mostly believed them, they were in the neighborhood of what I believed, but strictly speaking, no, I was asserting untruths in order to keep the attention of the Randiacs.
Still, that “intellectually jejeune” comment stung a little. So I finally decided to stop telling lies in the name of outrageousness, and to write a thorough, essay-length critique of Objectivism. Then an actual dialogue could begin, and perhaps a real back-and-forth might prove possible with the people I had been maligning as Randiacs.
The result: crickets.
The readership spike stopped spiking. The only comments I got were from friends of mine who already agreed with me. From the cultists, nothing. Stone silence.
I joked about it in a subsequent blog. Pretended that since no one had attempted to refute my argument then ipso facto it must be considered as having been proved true, and I expected sales of Atlas Shrugged to plummet immediately. No such luck.
The more likely explanation is, per Occam’s razor, the simplest one. Now that I was no longer being provocative, no one was provoked. And to the cultists, the idea of responding to a 3,700 word critical essay was absurd in a Comments box on someone else’s blog post, so naturally none of them even attempted to.
This is one explanation for how Rush Limbaugh was born. How Glenn Beck came to be. Being as charitable toward them as humanly possible, I have to concede that once upon a time, they might have been real people with something real to say. But that they quickly discovered that real criticism vanishes into the wind, while verbal grenades draw attention and response and further attention and increased ratings and yet more attention and bigger paychecks and then more attention. And never mind if, little bit by little bit, the things they said strayed further and further from the neighborhood of truth.
Do that long enough, and eventually it does become true, because you start to believe your own bullshit. And then you’re a weeping monstrosity like Glenn Beck.
So.
Just in case my mention of Ms. Rand happened to trigger a Google alert, if you are one of her devotees, I ask only one thing: don’t bother. There’s no need to respond in any way. We’re not going to agree, so don’t waste your time. If you are one of those who believe Glenn Beck is the new messiah, and you too have a Google alert set up, there’s just no point trying to defend him here, so move on. I’m not going to say anything outrageous just for the purpose of picking a fight, and if you try to pick one I’m probably going to just ignore it. So move on. There are better things to do, and I plan to go and do a few of them.
Have a lovely day.
(Chowderheads.)
Then I discovered the power of Google Alerts.
Followers of Ms. Rand (you could almost call them Rand cultists) had Google Alerts set up for any mention of her name. So quite suddenly I found that my readership count increased measurably, and people were leaving comments on my post. And because the tone of my blog post was light (I believe the relevant phrase was “Ayn Rand can bite me”), these comments contained charming and insightful criticisms calling me, for instance, “intellectually jejeune.” (My new favorite phrase!)
Naturally, I immediately realized that this represented a host of new opportunities. Because what’s more fun than messing with the heads of a group of Ayn Rand cultists?
“Ayn Rand can bite me” set the tone, and I wrote a couple more entries in which I took little shots at the cult of Rand. And sure enough, my readership spike continued and the comments kept coming in. It was huge fun.
Trouble is, in order to keep the cultists aggravated I ended up writing things that I didn’t quite believe. I mostly believed them, they were in the neighborhood of what I believed, but strictly speaking, no, I was asserting untruths in order to keep the attention of the Randiacs.
Still, that “intellectually jejeune” comment stung a little. So I finally decided to stop telling lies in the name of outrageousness, and to write a thorough, essay-length critique of Objectivism. Then an actual dialogue could begin, and perhaps a real back-and-forth might prove possible with the people I had been maligning as Randiacs.
The result: crickets.
The readership spike stopped spiking. The only comments I got were from friends of mine who already agreed with me. From the cultists, nothing. Stone silence.
I joked about it in a subsequent blog. Pretended that since no one had attempted to refute my argument then ipso facto it must be considered as having been proved true, and I expected sales of Atlas Shrugged to plummet immediately. No such luck.
The more likely explanation is, per Occam’s razor, the simplest one. Now that I was no longer being provocative, no one was provoked. And to the cultists, the idea of responding to a 3,700 word critical essay was absurd in a Comments box on someone else’s blog post, so naturally none of them even attempted to.
This is one explanation for how Rush Limbaugh was born. How Glenn Beck came to be. Being as charitable toward them as humanly possible, I have to concede that once upon a time, they might have been real people with something real to say. But that they quickly discovered that real criticism vanishes into the wind, while verbal grenades draw attention and response and further attention and increased ratings and yet more attention and bigger paychecks and then more attention. And never mind if, little bit by little bit, the things they said strayed further and further from the neighborhood of truth.
Do that long enough, and eventually it does become true, because you start to believe your own bullshit. And then you’re a weeping monstrosity like Glenn Beck.
So.
Just in case my mention of Ms. Rand happened to trigger a Google alert, if you are one of her devotees, I ask only one thing: don’t bother. There’s no need to respond in any way. We’re not going to agree, so don’t waste your time. If you are one of those who believe Glenn Beck is the new messiah, and you too have a Google alert set up, there’s just no point trying to defend him here, so move on. I’m not going to say anything outrageous just for the purpose of picking a fight, and if you try to pick one I’m probably going to just ignore it. So move on. There are better things to do, and I plan to go and do a few of them.
Have a lovely day.
(Chowderheads.)
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