Photograph by William Hoiles, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
By contemporary standards, writers are a convenient and inexpensive natural resource. They require little of the polish of musicians or other performers—need no acting or dance classes, no expensive wardrobe (the crumpled corduroy jacket from school will suffice). Their public speaking may be halting and cryptic; even a proclivity to slobber during book signings can be tolerated. They needn’t be handsome, slim, or sober in order that money may be boiled from their fat. Unlike a miner who must dig deep into the rarified places of the earth to find the raw materials of his trade (which must be further refined, processed, and distributed before even the first glimmer of a commodity emerges), the writer may be set quietly in a corner where, like the spider, he may spin his long and delicate thread—which in the hands of even the slightest corporate Rumpelstiltskin, can be handily woven to currency.
It is due in no small part to the ease and abundance of this raw material that the publishing industry, however wobbly, still rests contentedly upon this foundation. The question of the hour for the juggernauts of the trade, however, is not how best to sustain their stable of writers (they require merely praise and wine), but instead—given the current options—how best to package their product; and the answer to that appears less simple.
The trouble lies in the form. For example, the codex was a technological upstart in the 2nd century A.D. Which (with the help of Roman Christians who found it a swell way of smuggling forbidden literature about) went on to crush the prevailing technology of the time—the scroll. But while the codex represented a leap forward with regard to random, as opposed to only sequential access, and the greater economy of using both recto and verso sides of the leaf, they remained rare, time consuming to produce, and expensive to obtain.
By the 1400s, Johannes Gutenberg amped up the publishing enterprise with the printing press and efficiencies of automation, making possible early social media movements such as Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation along the way. But not since the 1930s, when Penguin Books lifted an interesting concept—the paperback—from a defunct German publisher, has the industry been again revolutionized. That is, until something called an e-reader finally arose as the page binding of something called an e-book. And while e-books have in principle been around since the 1970s, it wasn’t until the introduction of the Kindle in 2007 that the utility, form, and infrastructure existed in sufficient proportions for the paired technologies to find a meaningful audience and a practical use.
Now that the technology is maturing, and manufacturers are rushing to throw their own variants of e-readers into the fray, what seems especially relevant to publishers and the fate of printed books alike, isn’t so much what the coming generations of e-readers will look like or do, but more fundamentally, what future awaits the book itself, and how will it fold as a product into a shared market with electronic publishing—or will it?
According to Forrester Research, sales of e-readers are projected to reach 10.3 million units by year’s end, up from 3.7 million last year. Vice President of Corporate Communications at HarperCollins Publishers, Erin Crum, cited Association of American Publishers figures showing a 158.1% jump in e-book sales in September of this year, and based on the 14 publishers who report e-book sales, an increase over the prior year of 188.4% in the first 9 months. This as contrasted with the 17 publishers who reported double-digit declines to the AAP, among trade paperback, and mass market paperback, with adult hardcover showing the greatest decline of 40.4%. Asked whether e-books might be cannibalizing market share from publisher’s printed offerings, Ms. Crum suggested it was nearly impossible at the moment to disentangle real trends from the depressed economy.
This sentiment was echoed by Jarek Steele, Co-Owner of Left Bank Books, an independent bookseller in Saint Louis since 1969.
“We definitely have to adjust to the increased presence of the e-reader,” he said, “but it’s hard to tell the difference of its effect, from the economy in general. … I think eventually they’ll share the market with books. It will probably gain some traction in the coming years, but then level off—I just don’t think it’ll do what iTunes did to the music industry, because its just a different thing, a different experience.”
In the interim, the measure of experiential difference between printed books and their electronic counterparts, seems to be a distinction which publishers are struggling to understand as they arbitrarily bundle free e-books with print purchases, or free printed books for sale with e-books, trying by whatever means to reach readers with different tastes.
Mark Alexander, 60-year-old Director of Marketing in Saint Louis, and connoisseur of Scandinavian espionage fiction, has owned a second generation Kindle since January. “I would probably read a book a month—and now I’m reading two a week on the Kindle. It’s this seamless experience of going from one book, to another, to another; and I’ve done that two or three times, where I’ve run an author’s list of four or five, six books, one right after the other in a period of a few weeks.”
While Alexander has repurchased in e-book works he already owns in print, Steele maintains that “the object of the book is still the draw.” If it’s the case that the dividing line rides the meridian of the experiential and tactile—versus the immediate and convenient—then in order to preserve the legacy of that object (as well as to salvage its sales as against a persisting erosion from e-publishing), perhaps the industry should take note of a recent phenomena in music publishing.
The Nielson Company, a media research firm, observed that in the 52 weeks leading up to January of 2010, the largest single segment increase in music publishing belonged to vinyl albums, with growth during the period of 33%. While their total sales figures pale beside those of CDs or digital downloads, the phenomenon says something idiosyncratic about consumer taste and preference. While arguments will abound in certain circles about the relative sonic attributes of the LP versus other media, certainly the LP holds nothing empirically measurable over other forms of listening, but romance. And it is precisely by contrast to the digital ease and electro-mechanical invisibility of the MP3 that the ceremony and color of the album and preparations for its fiddly turntable should seem substantial and comforting.
Likewise, where the digital download may obviate the compact disc, the practical utility of the paperback seems largely provided for by the e-reader (with the possible exception of scribbling in the margins); the paperback being after all only a cheap and convenient form of book—but never its reinvention. And herein lies the crisis confronting the aforementioned juggernauts of the trade: no matter how profitable, the paperback is not the measure of a printed book any more than a hardcover is merely a paperback with a two-ply spine. For generations, the quality of bookbinding and manufacturing has been impinged in the name of reduced costs, with floppy covers and acidic pulp used for printing trade paperbacks and hardbound classics alike. But if the industry mavens would like to assure the future of the printed book and its attendant profits, they must first observe what has made it the preferred content delivery system for 1,800 years—it never requires a systems update, and a well bound book lasts. Any bibliophile will tell you, there’s just something to be said for reading The Great Gatsby in a gilt and leather bound volume—a celebration of the text inextricable from the form. And coincidentally, ceremony, romance, and tactility, are facets of the happy anachronism of quality.
Hesse Caplinger is a writer and critic living in St. Louis; see his last column, on the reality TV show Work of Art, here.
