The Book Is Dead. Long Live the Book. Part I of IV

Let’s Discuss the Future of Books. Is There Any?

I am a book lover, a lover of all things written and there has been a very specific way that I have consumed the written word my whole life – via the printed, published page – it’s so obvious of a relationship between written form and the tangible page that it has never needed to be stated. But, things are changing fast and the new form does not have pages nor is it even printed necessarily – the eBook. And although skeptical at first about eBooks, I am beginning to come around. As I devoured Bertrand Russell’s Politcal Ideals on my iPad – a book first published in 1917 that I can now download from iBooks for free (thanks to Project Gutenberg) and my first eBook experience, I was struck by how wonderful it was. I did not long for that book smell or that book feel which was surprising given how much I love books as objects, as pieces of art in-and-of-themselves, how much enjoyment I get out of looking at my bookshelf – each rectangle a kind of trophy of my reading of it. I am proud of some of those trophies even – Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses, Infinite Jest, Don’t Smell The Floss (wink, Matty Byloos) – I love looking at them and being proud of having read them.

But, isn’t that a bit selfish, I began to wonder as I gazed into my virtual bookshelf now in my barely ten inch Apple iPad no thicker than a magazine? I mean, that’s a lot of self-congratulation over simply reading something, I didn’t write it, I just bought it and looked at it. And then the object just sits and collects dust mostly, a waste of resources at worst and at best just a kind of aggressive-possessive instinct, like the head of a great bear that I shot and hung over my fireplace, were I a hunter. Before I got my iPad I began thinking about the book as an object in my house and I was bothered by it then even.

I began to give books to my local libraries or sell them at the last great used book store on LA’s westide (Alias Books on Sawtelle in West LA, big ups). I thought of it as a kind of spring cleaning, but all that I was cleaning was just making room for more things that I would later have to clean out again and again. I’m trying to be less of a consumer of tangible things, less of a collector, although I do love collecting things, tangible things, be it CDs, paintings, literary journals – I continually long to start collecting vinyl records although have not really begun –  so why not books too? Well, I don’t really have answer to that other than, it feels wasteful to me now. It didn’t before, but now it does.

I start to think of the millions upon millions of books that are printed each year and how many of those just wind up in landfills. Not my books, you say. Landfills are for Danielle Steel or Michael Crichton. What about the books given as gifts that are never opened that we all take into our homes? I’m guilty of this as well, shitty books to be sure, but I’m still guilty of it and I feel real guilt, I mean I love books and I don’t want to neglect one – even Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, I loathe this book, but I had to read it when it was given to me, I felt obligated. But, now here it sits on my shelf with other books that I adore, unfit to yellow next to them, but I’m a collector of things so I keep it.

I shepherd all these books until I die and then they get thrown in the landfill once and for all – even my finest books. None of them are first editions.  Many are paperbacks that seem to tatter all by themselves sitting up on my shelf. Realistically, these books will probably not even survive my next move. It feels wasteful. So, why must I buy this book and read it? I waste my limited money on it, I waste my limited space in my home, I also enable and encourage the waste of giant publishing houses to waste their ink, their paper, our limited trees and our limited water in its making.

Then, I thought I had the answer, I’ll get rid of all of my books at used book stores, stop buying books all together and just go to the library and borrow the book until I’m done. I come to find out that my public library does not even carry some of my favorite author’s works. They have dozens of copies of those sleazy neglected library books from the ‘70s and ‘80s where the clear plastic has even yellowed and men on the covers are all balding, raging cokeheads or volleyball players and women are dressed in leotards for at-home aerobics and look like Kathleen Turner. And volume upon volume of Leonard Nimoy’s Come Be With Me poetry work – which makes me literally nauseous with the feelings of wasted resources.

I mean, long ago, it took one-hundred monks each one-hundred days of writing one-hundred pages a day going blind and losing all ability to clap or smile again to make one copy of a book, I’m kidding, but you see my point. That meant something. Those copies were handcrafted, literally. A copy of a book had extraordinary power and weight. Books were not ubiquitous pieces of garbage mass-printed, sold off at the holidays and given to nieces and fathers when a better gift cannot be found. Would monks work on transcribing a copy of Leonard Nimoy’s Come Be With Me until they went blind? And again on paperback?

I’m starting to believe that the book, as an object, is dead. Gasp. I don’t want to even type those words, but I really do feel it as I hold my iPad and download The Complete Works of William Shakespeare – for free – (again thanks to Project Gutenberg).  And this whole experience of turning my world view upside-down made me wonder again if there are more revolutions to come for the written word. I mean, this iPad is novel and is a beautiful object in its own right, but it’s far from the final phase of this technology with each coming year bringing a new piece to this advancement, faster and faster.

But, the digital book that I read, the next evolutionary phase of the tangible book is just a simulacra of a real book – the same number of permanent cascading pages to the left and right edges regardless of how much you’ve read, animated pages that flip when you turn them like a real page – it’s kind of silly. Boring actually, boring in a good way for me personally, because I enjoy that book-look, but perhaps not for the next generation of readers who are just learning their alphabet on their young parent’s iPads. Will they want a “book-like experience” when looking at something very non-book like their portable tablet computer? Will they have nostalgia for that book medium – its shape, limits, form? Or will they see it as something else entirely? My guess is the latter and that the book will continue to become less and less of an object in our lives, for better or for worse.

And to be fair, there is some rudimentary advancement in book technology in the eBook – the search function for one, pretty amazing to have a database of words at your fingertips, but kind of tepid and lifeless in an intellectual sense, doesn’t really breathe new life into the book form. The dictionary built-in to most of these eReaders is something, a marginal something, but it is different than a tangible book and should be counted amongst the early seeds of change. Being able to copy-and-paste with the swipe and tap of a finger, again, that’s something different than the old days, but it still feels derivative. And then we’re back to the glaring oddness that it still looks like a book.

Kerouac Holding, On the Road

Pages are still part of the equation in these eBooks. The whole idea of a “page” is ludicrous in the digital realm – a page is finite due to the limitations of paper, but we are not reading paper on these tablet PCs. It reminds me of Kerouac’s dream publication of On The Road, he wanted it to be one continuous scroll, a loop without a distinct ending or beginning – that’s really what the reading on an eReader could be – bound-less, form-less – that’s exciting. How would that affect the story? The words used? With no finite end, would that make artists more interested in verbosity or would it make them more succinct? What about structure? Character and theme – the book form with its limits certainly influences artists, we just don’t really consider it much anymore. Some writers are considering it now, perhaps influenced by this new evolution.

Could this be the beginning of a full-fledged revolution of written word itself not simply the evolution of the delivery device like VHS to DVD – something mostly footnote worthy in the annals of art-history – but something more evolutionary, like the jump from oral storytelling to written storytelling. Is it even possible anymore? In some regards it’s already happening, I think, and for me, it seems to be most aggressively taking shape in three different main anthropological evolutionary subsets.

Admittedly though, I think a lot of it is the same thing that always happens, a new form overtaking the formerly dominant form as the new primary form with the multiple other lesser forms still moping around for awhile, perhaps forever, and not being as commercially viable any longer. And commercial viability, by the way, plays a big part in what this is about, I think, which sucks all together and I’m going to kind of ignore the “marketplace” factor because it’s just too much to handle here – that’s for another article. However, I must say that commercial viability seems less and less relevant as I download both of Homer’s The Illiad and The Odyssey – for free – (again, Project Gutenberg, I tip my digital hat to you gentleman-like).

The first of three subsets explored in part two of four, next week.

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Posted by Matt Ferner on August 25 2010. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry