Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

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.

Photo from Flickr Commons.

Thanks to pal and author Brian Joseph Davis and Eye Weekly I got my hands on Yann Martel’s much anticipated follow-up to Life of Pi, Beatrice and Virgil, a few weeks early. I even got to chat about it a bit in Eye’s Pop Fiction Book Club. Part one, part two.

And because that’s not enough reading, a gang of us are tackling Colum McCann’s gorgeous novel Let the Great World Spin over at the Afterword Reading Society.

All this talk of e-books has me thinking about the possible decline of the bookshelf.

Russell Smith a few weeks back wrote about this very topic:

Book-walls are just aesthetic now, just an unusually dense wallpaper: We don’t really need them for consultation. I can probably find the complete text of most of them online within an hour. It’s the same for CDs: If you have the time to copy them all, you can throw them all away and buy music online for the rest of your life. In the future, we will live in ever-smaller houses with ever-larger TV screens, so you need all the wall-space you have. And all our books will be invisible, like our music: The sum total of our literary experience will be a list of file names on a grey plastic machine in a briefcase.

But of course, the bookshelf isn’t dead yet and there are still some stunning examples of bookshelf as art/decor/inspiration out there.

Design Sponge points us to artist Jane Mount’s gorgeous series of illustrations of people’s ideal bookshelves.

The one below speaks to me current fascination with whales and also has a bunch of books I quite love.

I’m also very fond of this one and

Of course, like Smith argues in his column, what we choose to display (and how we do it) can reveal a lot about ourselves. The New Yorker’s great books blog, the Book Bench, has a regular feature that psychoanalyzes people through their shelves.

Frankly, all this talk of the death of the bookshelf might be a bit premature. If Apartment Therapy can devote countless blog posts to the devilish problem of showing off all your books and refer to them as “the original modular furniture” (how trendy, how moderne) then I think we’ll be stuck with cheap Billy bookcases for a bit longer.

Despite all this talk about its death and decline, the book has a tight grip on our imaginations. Why else would e-book readers simulate the book-reading experience (that page-flip look and noise, book covers, etc.)? The book has talismanic qualities built by centuries of cultural history.

New York Times columnist Rob Walker, he writes the insightful Consumed column, is looking at the idea of the book. It’s a playful survey on how artisans, craft-makers and others play with the book form.

There are ‘pillow-books,’ edible books, book planters and more. All these projects, of course, tap into our very strong psychic attachments to books, both in form and content.

Photo: Artist Thomas Allen uses old pulp novels in his work. More from the Foley Gallery.

What compels people to want to transform animals into mantelpiece trophies, tacky roadside totems, or even diorama specimens? On the one hand, nothing seems as ludicrous as taking an animal and transforming it into a replica of itself. Why kill it in the first place? On the other hand, few objects are as strangely alluring as Flaubert’s parrot, Goethe’s kingfisher, or Truman Capote’s rattlesnake. Or, for that matter, as out of context as, say, Fenway Partners’ upright grizzly bear in its corporate boardroom in Manhattan. - from Melissa Milgrom’s Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy

Photo from Field Museum library archive.

Craig Mod’s essay “Books in the Age of the iPad” is probably the best thing I’ve read about the future of the book in a little while. Very well thought out and lots to digest. Hint, magazine and newspaper folks, it’s relevant to you too.

Excerpt:

As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?

We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback.

Russell Smith laments for the bookshelf, and frankly if people’s libraries were to start shrinking I would too.

The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog asks a bunch of people what they’re reading.

Finally if you want to mix-up your March Madness with a little bit of literature… BAM! This year’s The Morning News Tournament of Books is on. I’ve got my giant foam hand in the air for Let The Great World Spin.

52 in 52 is a project to read a book a week in 2010

[Note: I'm actually not behind in my reading, but I am behind in writing about these books. Whoops.]

Nicolas Dickner’s Nikolski was the only book that grabbed me from this year’s Canada Reads list and after giving it a read I want it to win the whole damn thing.

Nikolski is the story of three young people drawn to Montreal and the book explores ideas of personal identity, family, history and place. Leavened with the author’s healthy obsession with marine life, archaeology, maps and pirates. It all sounds heavy but Dickner’s playful writing makes it a real joy to read.

In fact, all these themes are why it makes a perfect candidate for Canada Reads. Immigrants, long-time Canadians, First Nations, Quebecers, non-Quebecers, Western Canadians, Eastern Canadians, all have a stake in this book and in some small way are all represented. This is a big country and Dickner tries to cram it all in, to strange yet beautiful effect.

One of the key objects in the novel is an odd book made up of parts of three others stitched together to create a unique object. I couldn’t think of a more beautiful metaphor to describe this book or the country that it’s trying to sum up.

Note: Pal Nic Boshart is defending this book as part of the Keepin’ It Real Book Club. Go Nic.

Food52 is an ingenious publishing idea thought up by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs. Each week Amanda and Merrill pick a different theme and then allow a community of home chefs and food enthusiasts to send them their best recipes. They’re tested, judged and then voted on by the community. The winners get included in a book that’ll be published by HarperStudio.

It’s a brilliant idea for so many reasons. Amanda and Merrill have plenty of food writing experience, having written books, for the New York Times and a number of magazines, but letting the crowd have input means they get to tap into the food expertise of hundreds if not thousands of people.

The open and crowdsourced nature of the project also means the book is building the kind of pre-publication buzz that any publisher would kill for. It’s not just the winners that’ll be telling their friends and family about the book, a lot of those who submitted recipes will undoubtedly do the same.

The model won’t work for a lot of books, a crowdsourced novel will probably suck, but crowdsourced photo anthologies, how-to-books, craft books, etc. would be exceptional.

52 in 52 is a project to read a book a week in 2010

Sometime in the early 2000s karaoke, a fringe activity that was firmly in the domain of Asian people and pseudo-exhibitionists, went mainstream. I always had some idea as to why this happened but culture writer Bryan Raftery has done a better job of telling this story.

To him it was the great confluence of reality TV (especially American Idol), the rise of teenybopper pop such as the Backstreet Boys, faux nostalgia and a growing comfort around amateur performance. Don’t Stop Believin‘, is part personal memoir and part cultural history. He talks about a long-gone and once beloved karaoke bar in New York’s Lower East Side, binging on karaoke and more. Yes, I got jealous that he got to fly to Japan and sing karaoke with his  best friend as “research” for this book.

For me, a self-confessed karaoke junkie, parts of Raftery’s book are very familiar. Don’t Stop Believin’ is not unlike hearing a stranger at a karaoke night belt out a song that you love. You can’t help but sing along and you sure as hell applaud at the end of the song.

As an aside, check out this great blog post from Flickr, what else, karaoke.

52 in 52 is a project to read a book a week in 2010

After two novels to start the year, it was about time I sunk my teeth into some non-fiction. I wanted something light and fun and this book hits the spot. Victoria Moore, the Guardian’s wine columnist, has given us a delightful little book on drinking well throughout the year. And she doesn’t just write about booze. Moore has written a very nice primer on juices, coffees and, that most British of drinks, tea.

Of course, some parts of the book were a bit like torture. The recipes on summer drinks had me aching for bike rides to the park and picnic (also, large pitchers of Pimms and mint juleps). But I’m probably more likely to start with some of the winter drinks. Some of you might be lucky to see them at a dinner party soon.

Moore should also send a thank-you card to her book designer, Heredesign, for elevating this book with dozens of charming letterpress-inspired illustrations throughout the book. I’ve embedded the Google Books excerpt for your perusal.