What we talk about when we talk about books
Submitted by craiggav on Tue, 02/09/2010 - 9:19pm
I'm taking it for granted that I'm preaching to the choir here when I say that books are different things. Books are novels, nonfiction, collections of photos, hardcover, paperbacks, inexpensive newsprint, rare vellum, scrolls, pop-up books, random pages bound together, text running left to right, right to left, vertically, no text at all, usually but not always made of paper. I think one of the things that we value so much about books is their very malleability. Hell, digitize it, put a "e" in front of its name and read it on a Kindle and it's still a book.
That being said, I think that it's time that we really start broadening our minds and ask ourselves some hard questions about what we're talking about when we talk about books, and as we move into the future what exactly it is that books do and what exactly we want them to do.
Books, for example, are not synonymous with any particular form of technology. The book, for example, is much older than those things we're used to seeing in bookstores and libraries, which are codices. The infamously destroyed Library of Alexandria? Nothing but scrolls. The end of the codex, if it ever happens, is not the end of the book. The single best example of this is the encyclopedia, which (in printed form) is dead, dead, dead, and exactly no one misses it. Whether Encarta or Wikipedia, there's a better way to collect large volumes of general reference information than unwieldy, expensive, and immediately obsolete printed volumes. On the other hand, e-readers may be getting better and better, but printed, bound volumes seem to still be the most accessible and cost-effective format for long-form fictional and nonfiction narrative, and so while novels may not carry the same high-culture impact that they did 60 years ago, they still sell (reasonably) well.
Books do not compete with newspapers, the internet, movies, or video games. These all do different things (or, perhaps more interestingly, they do the same things in different ways). Saving the book does not mean saving the novel any more than saving poetry meant saving the oral epic. Rather than bemoaning the death of the printed word, let's ask ourselves what print does that memorization and performance didn't do, and remind ourselves that memorization and performance still exist in the theatre, on slam stages, streetcorner lyrical battles, and lecture halls. The end of print (if print disappears) is not the end of the book.
Books are also not synonymous with authorship. The mystique of the author is the younger sibling (or grandchild) of the book. Homer has to be invented because when the Iliad was written no one cared who had written it. Discerning the future of the book is not a business plan for tomorrow's novelists (as much as I might like it to be), although since remuneration for writers will affect what books are written and not written, it will always be a subject of interest.
All books are written, although they are not written in the same way. All books are interactive, although they are not interactive in the same ways. Let's talk about what makes a book a book (and what makes it sometimes a newspaper, or a magazine, a film, or a video game), and what it is that we want the book to be.
What is it exactly that we're talking about when we talk about books?
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5 reponses to "What we talk about when we talk about books"
1. Linguistics or vocabulary
I know that some readers will be experiencing eye rolls as I have addressed this before and will again until someone starts shoveling dirt on my face.
Yes, books can take many forms, but you aren't really talking about the book. A book is a series of leaves (in the codex usually handwritten) which are either glued or sewn into signatures and then bound into a cover. You are talking about the text. The text is what is printed on those leaves. The text is what you read on the electronic device of your choice.
Even if the rest of the population uses the misnomer book while actually referring to the text, those of us who are wrestling with questions like the ones you posed should parse our words more carefully so we can understand what is being addressed. Are you talking about the medium or the author's work?
Being a writer, I want as many words as possible to describe things. And, given the background and malleability of English, I am all for inventing new words to cover new ideas or objects.
Also, being a writer, a novelist, I would actually like to be able to earn a living writing. In your response on performance, you mention musicians giving away their music. I don't really see that as a viable way to make it since the money made from live shows (until you are talking about much larger venues) is not much to live on, especially when the van breaks down in Tennessee. Will writers turn to public readings and give away their novels? Would you pay to go see/hear somebody read their latest work?
On the other hand, there is the 1000 true fans theory. This might sound good on paper, but what kind of writers are these fans going to support? I, myself, prefer literary fiction and I write the same. Are these 1000 people going to wait, paying me $100 a year, for six or seven years until I finish my next novel? Would you pay $600 for a novel? I'm a writer, I buy the great majority of my books second hand. Even my favorite writers that I do buy new copies of their books (Eco, Kundera, Saramago), there is no way I could pay a hundred bucks for their next one.
But they wouldn't need that, because they are established and wouldn't have 1000 but ten or a hundred times that, so I could probably get by with paying much less.
I personally think it is stealing when you download some band's song from the internet. I still buy CDs (and yes, even albums). With e-texts, it would be even easier to pass them around since the file size is so much smaller. It's the new writers that are trying to produce important works that will be pushed out of the reading public. A new business model that supports the author must be addressed, even by the writers themselves if no one else is doing it.
It seems that people want to change the text into something different (including video, I heard one commenter say about the new ipad), but that isn't reading now is it?
Cicero said "A room without books is like a body without a soul." I would say that Shava in her post is right when she mentioned about sixty years for the print book to fade away. I imagine reading by time will be a very different past time as well. I hope I don't see it.
2. The physical and the non-physical
I'll be the first to admit that if all we're talking about when we talk about books is the preservation of the printed and bound book as the primary means for distributing text-based information, then I'm really not interested at all. I am, however, interested in the intersection between books and text (and books and images, and narrative and text, and narrative and images, etc.). Even if the goal is just to "save the book," meaning to save the printed and bound book, then it's necessary to know what it does and what it doesn't do. How is a printed book different than a Kindle? What kinds of text are likely to migrate into electronic formats, and are there different kinds of text that benefit in specific ways from print presentations?
Likewise, while in a wonky way I'm deeply interested in the book business, I'm not interested at all in preserving a particular business model of bookselling or authorship. I'm against stealing content, but that's not what I'm talking about when I talk about free downloads. I'm talking about bands posting their songs for free on MySpace, not Napster. I'm talking about authors posting free versions of their text believing that it will help sales of the printed version, or deciding not to make their texts available for free. Can many authors make a living off readings/performances? Clearly not. At the same time, very few are able to make a living off sales of their printed books right now, so maybe we shouldn't dismiss such an idea out of hand.
I am NOT talking about creating a one-size-fits-all model of content creation, formatting, sales, or distribution. I am talking about the way we share information and tell stories, and how these impulses informed and are informed by the media we use to do so, whether that's paint on a cave wall, ink on paper, or pixels on a screen. I love my library, and have created books myself out of a love of the format (certainly more than because the writing I put in them merited preservation). However, I would find a tyrrany of book-ism at least as stifling as the disappearance of the book, and probably moreso.
3. book and text
I will tackle the business plan first. I hope that it is as apparent to the publishers as it is to me that the business model will have to change. I think the smarter of the publishers would demand a single format for the text to be published in so it could be read on whatever platform the reader owns. Amazon's our-format-only is short sited and will have to fall by the wayside, sooner, I think than later.
As far as the text goes, I don't think there is an example where it wouldn't work as well on an e-reader as it would on the page.
As far as the book and the e-reader themselves go, here is an immediate list of things off the top of my head. I will stick to the pros. Given that each dispenses the information contained within the text, I will not address that part of it.
BOOKS- They are inviting, durable, aesthetically pleasing, weather resistant, portable, stand alone, enjoy a much longer longevity*, theft resistant, (and if I may speak sentimentally) a pleasure to the senses.
E-READERS-Cheaper cost per text bought (after initial outlay), hip, portable (though power issues are a consideration), searchable, upgradeable, (possibility of sometime in the future addition of hyperlinked and multi-media embeded texts).
(*By this I mean not that the book has been around much longer, but rather that a book will still be readable in 100 years whereas the digital media of the day will be obsolete in a much shorter time.)
I can expound on any of these points if you want me to, but I believe most are self explanitory. As far as printing books just because they are books, given my nature, I would like to see that medium continue, but I'm not holding my breath (although there will be certain publishers that will be printing collectable level books). I am an unapologetic bibliomane living in an age where the book as the thing-in-itself is becoming obsolete. (Having said that I just got an email from B&N about the sale on the Nook.)
As far as the author goes, there will come a time when the only way to get a text is in the electron format. That is why I don't think it would behoove authors to offer their texts for free due to the slippery-slope effect (will people pay for something they once got for free?), though specifically wrought exerpts could entice readers to buy the whole thing.
"May you live in exciting times," goes the Chinese saying and these are certainly those times for a wide number of people on both sides of the cover. Like an agnostic, I can only say I don't know. I look at those plastic readers and all I see is a lifeless slab of silicone that not even the best of texts could rouse into life, whereas the book lives and ages and even dies just as we ourselves do. But I am just a bit prejuidiced.
4. The book as the work
We have a sense of a book as a work -- that is, a work of a certain length which nevertheless exhibits a kind of unity. In other words, we distinguish between a novel and a novella, between a work of fiction that is a book and one that seems to somehow not fully be a book.
And that's just in fiction. If someone says, "I am writing a book," that carries with it some expectations of scale and scope. They are probably "only" writing the text that is contained within the book, but this too can be taken as being self-identical across different physical editions, whether differing in substance or in accidents. Ulysses is a single book, even as the different books that can be used to refer to Ulysses differ greatly in their appearance.
At the same time, however, there are books that are not works and works that are not books. "The Waste Land" might be a work, even if it doesn't appear in isolation as a book. (The Waste Land and Other Poems, it's probably called.) A telephone book is probably not a work, unless it is an extraordinary telephone book. But it is nevertheless a book.
The one stable meaning that I think can be found in any of the various etymologies and appearances of "book," whether "liber," "volumen," "codex," or "ebook," might be that of a gathering together to create a unity. Both a scroll and codex are gathered. The Bible is the book of books -- the gathering together of things that are themselves gathered. The Book (really, the scroll) of John the Revelator talks about the book (really, scroll) that is sealed seven times, with each seal loosing an apocalyptic harbinger. These are not superstitions. They tell us something about our media.
5. more labels gone
I always regret that I came too late for the pamphlet. Oh, to be a pamphleteer! striking fear into the hearts of capitalists and governments everywhere.
On the scholarly side there was the monograph, now also deceased (much to our loss, I think), but the term monographeer never really caught on. Strange that.
I am in the throes of rewriting a novel before taking it to the publisher. When people ask, I never mention book, but always novel. This one word informs them it is fiction of a certain length (since the word novella has fallen out of favor, this length has come to mean anything over 100 pages. The upper end seems to belong to Robert Jordon's Wheel of Time series which seems to be running at least 12,000 pages [ as Monty Pythons peasants would say 'get on with it!']). I also prefer the term novelist over author, but soon it will be fictionalist!
Even though it is off topic, don't you find it strange that works are either fiction or non-fiction? The thing and then the not-thing? This somehow gives a weightier credence to fiction, doesn't it? More solid or real?