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.
2 comments:
I would have a hard time giving up books. I like to read by the pool, in the bathtub, on the beach and in a pub on a sunny afternoon sipping a few beers. All of these places I would be uncomfortable taking a Kindle. But then again, I still have a wall of vinyl records and CDs that I drag out from time to time (sadly it is usually only when I want to rip something obscure for playing on my IPOD sitting in my mini BOSE player. The real question is when do I give away my 8-tracks and 78s that I have no way of playing anymore.
My husband has TWO e-readers and I still want the physical book in my hands...and so does he :-)
My 10 yr old son, is in love with the written word and will read it online, in book form (he wants his own library) on the e-reader in his electronics or with headfones...he sits across from me with a book and has asked to please go to barns and nobles today :-)
Post a Comment