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| Today's winter relief photos courtesy of Jan |
I gave away some of Mary's books when she died in 2010. I also gave away her Kindle. I'm on my third Kindle, and I use it almost every day. The other day, just when I was musing about my ambivalence towards electronic books, I heard from my youngest son Sam, who's about halfway through writing his second book of poetry, not counting his many self-published chap books.
Sam asked: How long before physical books go the way of vinyl, and would an e-book world produce Catcher in the Rye, or Howl?
As of May, 2011, Amazon was selling 105 e-books for every 100 printed books. Let's call them p-books. This is an enormous change in how we read, although I want to suggest that the most important aspects of the change may not be the physical form of the books, but what is implied in the second part of Sam's question: who gets to write, who gets to read, and what is available?
First, the first part of the question: will p-books go the way of vinyl, which I interpret to mean will they turn into a niche market, rather than be the dominant form of knowledge and creative transmission? I can't see a path for long term survival of p-books. I think we'll see books printed on paper for a while yet, but the modern book publishing business is composed of several interlocking parts, and when one of those parts is no longer economical, the whole house of cards will collapse.
In practice this will produce a death spiral for printed books - e-books are so much cheaper to produce and sell and buy. As fewer people are ready to pay for p-books, the per-unit cost will keep going up, discouraging more buyers, and so on. I don't see much of a mass market for printed books in a decade.
The loss of p-books is very important for how human beings express themselves. In the old days, 7-10 years ago, there were many more authors than there were publishers. Getting the attention of a publisher and convincing that company to publish your book was a big deal. Writers collected rejection slips as ironic talismans of our tragic struggles. Getting an acceptance from a publisher was for most of us cause for champagne.
Nowadays anyone can post their deathless prose on the internet. Mass distributors like Amazon are increasingly willing to devote a few electrons to marketing your memoir or spine-tingling tale - if a handful of copies sell, they can recoup their tiny investment.
Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951 by Little, Brown & Company, has sold about 65 million copies - and still sells a quarter of a million copies annually. Nowadays it's much easier to make your book available to the public, but it wouldn't be prudent to expect 65 million copies to sell. 65 is a more realistic number. And electronic publishing generally doesn't come with a marketing budget - no bookstore readings or promotional tours.
One wonders how many great books never got past the gatekeepers at Little, Brown and so we never got to read them. By the same token, how many wonderful e-books are hidden out there on the internet, doomed to languish in digital obscurity?
I've worked with a number of publishers over the years, and even as an inconsequential writer of little-known books, I received assistance in promotion and book design. Most beneficial by far has been the editing. My editor at Emerson & Church, who will publish my latest book in March, spent months emailing back and forth with me, going through every sentence in the book several times. When he and I had finished our energetic exchange, he sent the book to an outside editor. And when she had done her edits, the book went to a copy editor.
The ideas and words in my book are mine, but there is no doubt your experience reading The Ultimate Insider's Guide to Winning Foundation Grants will be much better as a result of the publisher's expertise.
Some of the 99 cent self-published books I've downloaded from Amazon are so poorly written I've angrily deleted them from my Kindle. And many are so badly copy edited I can't stand to read them. I know you can point to mistakes and typos in my blog, even though I re-read every post many times before I hit the "Publish" button. But the lack of rudimentary quality control in whole books, even from well-known authors, is alarming.
Howl was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Light Bookshop in 1956. Ginsberg's extraordinary poem was immediately hauled into court under the obscenity laws of the time and exonerated in 1957. So this part of Sam's question leads us to the second concern I have about the emerging e-book era. I don't know a way to create and distribute an e-book without intimately interacting with huge distant corporations - I use a computer form Apple, an internet connection controlled by Time Warner, and my last book was sold among other places on Amazon. This is not exactly mom and pop literature.
What if I go against the grain more than is acceptable to these giants? What if I write a book about the splendors of on-line censorship that offends them? In the old days I ran into people on street corners in San Francisco and London selling what they had written. Once 40 years ago I emerged from the Paris Metro to be greeted by a lovely woman who handed me her poetry and invited me to discuss her work on the spot.
You can't hand out electrons on street corners. High tech books require interaction with high tech providers, whose agendas may diverge so much from yours that you're silenced entirely. I agree with the various internet-oriented companies who yesterday "went dark" over the SOPA/PIPA internet censorship bills (even though Wikipedia's protest was easily bypassed by putting "m." in front of their address to access the mobile site). The SOPA protest included billionaire companies fretting about legislation that would hurt their business. I'll be more impressed when they go dark over mass starvation or torture. Perhaps inadvertently, they showed us they're willing to stop the public's access to the resource they own, when they are displeased.
Let's return to books. The good news, Sam, is I don't have to rely on the race/class/gender/financial biases of editors at Little, Brown to gain access to reading material. Almost anyone can publish now, and it will only get easier: the cheap instant availability of knowledge via e-books may become a substantial advance for the human race.
Yet I'll also be buying e-books that are sometimes poorly written and shoddily produced, and I will have no way of knowing what is being censored or changed by companies a lot bigger and more difficult to argue with than Little, Brown - companies revealing this week that they do have political agendas.
And they will not hesitate to bar our access to seemingly public tools when it suits their purposes.
The Little, Brown and Company site:
http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/publishing_little-brown-and-company.aspx
Wikipedia's mobile site, for the next time they get their knickers in a bunch:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
City Lights Bookstore:
http://www.citylights.com/