Baldur Bjarnason: Ebooks and the Senses. I think that ebooks will take over the publishing industry due to their economic benefits. That said, there will be demand for certain books in print format because the benefits to the reading experience are unmatched. The book’s value as a memento comes at a distant, but still important, second place.
Doesn’t anybody love the feel of a book anymore? No one, in all this Kindle blather, mentions the particular sensuous riffling through the onionskin pages of one of Edmund Wilson’s small, fat memoirs; the way the dense trade paper of Hannah Arendt’s Life of The Mind accepts hilited line after line; the thick pages of an ancient Peter DeVries paperback, its stitching come undone, too funny to replace.
Don’t you just love a book.
Didn’t you just love them more before they got all tricked up as gift-y objects.
I want to dog-ear the meaningful page; I want my underlining to for heaven’s sake not bleed through. I want to lay an unfinished Dickens face down, bending the spine open. I want rows of favorites shelved by author, gathering that awful sneezy dust. Once when I was (so briefly) manic, I conceived of and carried out what seemed the astonishing inspiration—one whose sense took way back seat to its sensibilities—to arrange the world’s books by color. Actually, mine looked rather nice.
For reasons I don’t quite remember, I don’t like Steven Johnson very much. Kottke has a quote:
As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, “In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.”
And if that weren’t fucking nightmare enough …
You’ll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage’s true meaning.
Dude! We already got this! They’re called blogs!
Spare me.
Besides which, for a guy who writes books, Johnson seems numb between the ears when it comes to love of writing, of literature. The “passage’s true meaning?” You mean, other than the author’s? “Explaining?” Give me a break. If there were IQ tests before you could log on, would we be in this tedious mess? Can I roll back the clock to that endearing time when writers and other thoughtful people enjoyed connecting in the electronic dark? When we unbearable naifs thought this was what linking was?
I can’t stand it. Where’s the nearest book.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=263b1323-d0ce-4eab-89f8-93a1d76c1108)
This reminds me of something that happened to me and my sister a while back. One of the peculiarities of Icelandic culture is that we publish an enormous number of original Icelandic books per capita, biographies, novels, political polemics, poetry, etc.. The flip side of that is that books go extremely quickly and easily out o print[^1]. With a community of that size and the economics of print being the way they are, only exceptional circumstances warrant the effort to keep books in print. Even some of the books by our late Nobel laureate, Halldór Laxnes, occasionally go out of print.
Which is the reason why, when me and my sister wanted to give our mother some boks by one of our maternal great-grandfathers (Séra Sigurður Einarsson from Holt, a poet, playwright, priest and academic, the Séra is one of those priestly honorifics like ‘father’), we had to go looking among the used book stores of Reykjavík.
My sister found a copy of one of Séra Sigurður’s books in a used book store on Hverfisgata[^2]. It was an odd copy, bound in a non-descript paper cover and most of its leafs/pages were uncut. My sister wondered whether it was a flawed copy or some such, but the dealer said that that was the way it had been made and sold.
Books in Iceland, at least, were sold with simple covers and uncut. The readers read it with a paperknife in hand and cut their way through the book. If they liked it, they brought it to their local binder and had it bound to their liking.
So instead of having a dud copy, what she had was the nearest thing to a mint, as new, copy of that era she could get.
A little bit of research confirmed what the dealer said, it was news to me and my sister, perhaps not to you, and to my surprise we found out that this had been, and still is in some areas, standard practice in the publishing industry. That the industry had been rife with all sorts of customisations and local work. That books had been customised, bound, re-bound and cut or made to fit.
To wit, the print market that ebooks are competing with today is not a medium at the peak of its variety and innovation but a particularly dreary incarnation of the form.
There are few things I would like more than to see both ebooks and print thrive, because I see them as the two legs of longform writing, a beast that is weakened already by an onslaught of the insectoid micromedia.
The sleazy marketdroid in me (yay for the dayjob!) sees nothing but rich potential in using ebooks for customer development and print for profit and revenue.
The writer in me sees nothing but potential for freedom and flexibility in having a variety of forms and venues for publishing.
But, the pessimist in me worries that ebooks will be used to cannibalise print, because it’s easier than addressing the systemic problems of the publishing industry infrastructure.
That I, as a interactive media dude and designer, should have to *lose* capabilities and options going from the web to epub is nothing short of a fantastic victory for the worst, suicidal tendencies of an already beleaguered industry.
We did, in the end, find several books by our great-grandfather, all of them found by the proprietor of the Hverfisgata bookstore. Two books of poetry and one of his plays, which were well received.
All my sister’s idea, of course, she’s got a knack for coming up with clever things.
[^1]: POD doesn’t help much. All of the Print on demand companies are based overseas and the economics of starting an Icelandic one simply aren’t there.
[^2]: Possibly Iceland’s most famous used book store as it is the place where Bobby Fischer spent most of his last days. He used to go there, pick up his mail and spent the day there arguing with the owner and other customers. He and the owner of the store had originally met when Mr. Fischer first came to Reykjavík in the famous chess match with Boris Spassky, and the owner was one of the group instrumental in mobilising the entire Icelandic parliament to pass the resolution that granted Bobby Fischer asylum in Iceland and got him out of japanese prison.
“Books in Iceland, at least, were sold with simple covers and uncut. The readers read it with a paperknife in hand and cut their way through the book. If they liked it, they brought it to their local binder and had it bound to their liking.”
But this seems perfectly charming to me, so Jane Austen. Alright, I suppose it’s entirely impractical … I’m just for anything that would help reading and publishing. Or would the industry please hold on for just a while longer, til my novel comes out.
It probably is impractical. But I think that it demonstrates that there is some scope for more imagination when it comes to print publishing.
I guess we should be happy for one thing, that during a time of economic meltdown there is at least one possible ‘growth story’ for the publishing industry. Even if they mess it up a bit and miss out on some of its potential, it’s still going to be a good thing overall. Amazon’s open to DRM-free books for publishers that want it. Both Harlequin and O’reilly show that you can do good things if you work with your fanbase.
It’s really the bloggers and pundits that are the fools in this story. The readers and the publishers plod along; awkwardly, sure, with more mistakes than not and much slower than I’d like, but they’re heading in the right general direction.
The publishing industry differs from the music industry or the film industry in that most of the people in it love books and aren’t cynical about it either.
So, happy thoughts and visualise a bright and cheery future. ^_^
But then, it’s the bloggers and pundits that are the fools in most stories.
Thanks you very mach.