I doubt it.
I have a confession to make. I hate books.
Yes, I’m a book person. I have a day job in books, I read the things all the time, I dropped out of a graduate program where I made them. I’ve written a novel (just one, so far; I’ve acknowledged the problem and I’m working on it).
I spend so much time around books that it might actually be good for me to watch some television.
As I said, I hate books. I choose to blame, in part, the combination of retail bookselling and two years of “artisan book” this and “artisan book” that. I started in the retail end fresh from college, hoping for great things, and took a break to do most of a graduate program in that nebulous field called “Book Arts.” To be fair, it’s only nebulous because I haven’t managed to reconcile the commercial book with the artist’s book. I think that’s the key to the question of whether or not it’s worth trying to save books as we know them.
Staring at the disgusting underbelly of the book business for nearly ten years has taught me valuable lessons:
Decent books are overshadowed by the dreck that floods in, day in and day out, in waves of brightly colored paper. This is, I’m certain, related to the complicated accounting of profit margins and bottom lines.
Physically, books are awful. Used books are particularly deceptive: they look fine, until you turn to page thirty-seven and find a flattened mosquito in the middle of a paragraph and the remnants of someone’s ancient spaghetti dinner in the margins. There are books that have rotted for twenty years in a damp basement, and smell of mildew and that unfortunate incident with the furnace; then their owners get offended when one turns down the books. “But,” they insist, “these are gems! Treasures! Classics in the field!” It’s hard to find a civil response, when the book in question is a twenty-year-old text on computer design and may have been used to prop open a window through a rainy summer or five. Then there are some books which I know are great, but the covers are orange from cigarette tar and faintly sticky. I don’t care how good the book is, I don’t have any interest in getting up close and personal with it if I can smell your four pack-a-day habit on it from six feet away.
Then there are the books that have gone out of print – despite the fact that people want to read them – because of some strange copyright complication, and so old copies of them go for hundreds of dollars on various online marketplaces. Perhaps a more business-savvy person wouldn’t find selling tatty copies of such books for fifty times their original price morally repugnant. I do.
New books and their bastard cousins, remainders, aren’t any better. They’re less likely to smell strange, although it happens; they have their own problems. Printing errors are common, and end with books sitting in boxes creating an obstacle course through any storage space that might otherwise be useful. There are books with chapters printed backwards, upside down, or twice. Many “remainders” are, in fact, returns – so your local independent bookstore is probably selling Wal-Mart’s rejects. Don’t question the sticky spots; certain companies use non-removable stickers. We do our best.
After two hundred copies of a book in one afternoon, I know I don’t want to read it. After the mylar jacket is on the hundred and fourth, I don’t have any interest in looking at the cover again, let alone reading it. They’re just repetitive strain injuries waiting to happen, no longer new worlds of story and all that.
Both new paperbacks and hardcovers are perfect bound, most of the time. This means that they’re glued in, and the glue often splits in the first reading. It’s a tolerable binding, if you don’t plan on reading the book more than once.
That’s the root of the problem: books are trash. The book you bought to read on the airplane and abandoned at the baggage claim is never going to find another home. It’s not even going to get recycled. It’s going to end up in a landfill, covered in unidentifiable slime and bits of plastic from discarded toys. The modern book is not an object to be treasured. It’s just another consumable to be left for someone else to deal with.
The form certainly has its strengths, but as a disposable container it lacks a certain something. It might be the permanence associated with books; it might be that the environmental destruction associated with this object that’s just going to end up as trash is … probably not worthwhile.
What’s going on here? Greed. There is too much invested, on the part of those who manufacture and market, in old technologies for an easy transition. This was true of the printing press as cutting-edge technology: scribes bemoaned the terrible new monster and claimed it would ruin scholarship and everything else they could think of. Some scribes embraced the new technology, quietly, and who was successful in the long term? Not the ones who wailed and wanted everything to remain unchanged.
As a bookseller, I feel like I’m unwittingly stuck in something of a cultural dead end, pushing objects that are no longer doing everything they should be in promoting the dissemination of art. I’ve failed my values somewhere along the way, and I’m selling my soul far too cheaply. Bookselling no longer has even the faint gilding of being intellectually demanding; we have computers to do our thinking, and we buy only the pretty books.
The hardest step to make is letting go of Gutenberg. The paper book was a brilliant solution, and had great staying power; it helped spread the Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the renaissance, and it changed the way we look at authorship. That accomplishment was predicated on finding new, accessible pathways for ideas and art to follow and reach more people – which is what nudged along cultural revolutions to shape the modern world.
Clinging to the old technology even in the face of its collapse, and operating as though the new technology is something to fear, just drives us toward cultural stagnation. Yes, there will still be artists and thinkers, but they will be marginalized if they can’t use any of what came before for a framework – remember what Newton said about standing on the shoulders of giants.
Books have had their day. They’re still useful for the things they’ve always been good for. There are new considerations, though, and they’re important ones. Imagine the creative possibilities of following in the creative footsteps of Gutenberg (and his more successful successors) and embracing the potential of the new technologies we’ve got available. What made the printed book so successful? Not its scarcity, and certainly not some printer-imposed difficulty in using it. Maybe we should leave books to what they’re valuable for, stop treating them as trash, and think about how we can use the other options we have; stop letting the companies that value only the bottom line dictate how we communicate with each other and use those creative minds of ours. If we honor Gutenberg’s accomplishments, we’ll let the book as it was go, and resurrect it as something new.
[I wrote this last summer, submitted it to a journal, decided I was tired of waiting for it to get read, withdrew it from consideration and re-wrote it. I have, well, kind of a lot to say on the subject. I believe there will be more.]