The book is dead, long live the book
Hugh McGuire of Book Oven posted this on Twitter a few days ago and I finally got around to writing about it:
The distinction between “the internet” & “books” is totally totally arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now.
A few of my friends, literary types that they are, totally disagreed. I want to parse this statement a bit because I do agree with it, to a point.
With the success of the Kindle and the iPad, ebooks look like they’re here to stay. Their continued existence doesn’t threaten the existence of the book so much as it is forces us to return to a very basic interpretation of the book.
A book is a physical object, it’s something bound and limited by the covers. It has boundaries and limits. The ebook tries to keep some of these trappings but really they’re fictions. Ebooks need covers and binding the same way that that album you downloaded from iTunes needs liner notes. What you’re getting when you download the ebook version of Moby Dick isn’t Moby Dick the book, it’s Moby Dick the text.
If we’re thinking just about texts then the internet is going to decimate the bookstore and publishing. Heck, it gutted the music industry and has film and TV execs seeing pirates and thieves around every corner, and these are products that are more complex from a bits and bytes perspective. Plain, simple, old words just don’t have a chance.
I think this is what Hugh is getting at with his statement. Of course, it’s easy to see why people get angry about this. People don’t just like books, they love them. I love them too.
Where Hugh and I diverge is that I actually see a very real future for the book. It’s going to come from embracing the physicality of books. Great paper stock, beautiful design, a certain playfulness with the reading experience, all of these are hard, if not impossible, to replicate with your ereaders.
What does this mean for publishers? Don’t skimp on design. Make your books desirable objects. For retailers? Make your stores nicer. I don’t go to your store to get the cheapest price. You’re always going to lose to online retailers on that front. Go boutique. Go niche. Make yourself a real world place that people want to visit. For the reader? Start paying attention to how your book is designed. Admire a nice cover. Appreciate the typography. And, this one can’t be underemphasized, keep buying books.
In five years, more and more ‘books’ might be read online and on ereaders. But you’ll still be buying books, real, solid books printed on paper. They’ll just look a whole lot nicer. Start adjusting now.
May 12th, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Hi Ron, Thanks for stab one! I hope this one bounces a bit… I have a half written jumble of a mess in need of editing, that will explain in more detail what I mean. But in short, I believe that a “book” is:
* words (ie content) + structure (ie paragraphs & chapters), made accessible to people in a particular form (ie paper, epub on an iphone, mobipocket on a kindle etc).
so paper books are but one expression of a book.
and given the above, the smart place to place a book (ie words + structure) is on the internet, where it can be delivered “easily” in whatever form a particular reader wishes.
and more than that, once on the internet, and well-defined as words+structure … there is a whole host of *other* things beside read that we can do with a book, some of which we’re already experimenting with (see commentpress, or even LibriVox, for instance), and some of which we cannot yet imagine.
so if you consider that “the internet” and “books” are different, then you will spend your days arguing over what format is better – paper or epub or kindle or whatever. you will worry about pricing & whether the ipad will preserve a certain supply-chain business model. these things are not unimportant issues, but they are less important in the long run than the true and deeper change that is occurring, which is that as books become connected in a capturable way, we can do so much more with them than ever before. Or at least, we can record this moreness more than ever before.