Social Reading

I have to agree with The New Yorker's dim take on Steven Berlin Johnson's optimistic vision of e-books. Though I might not call it optimistic so much as odd. His idea--or part of it--is that the movement of reading from paper books to a linked-up, electronic version of said will create a perpetual dialogue on each book--every line anyone ever struggled with or liked blogged about or commented on and then discussed in the vast community that is the internet. This strikes me as completely unnatural and strange. As the New Yorker points out, books have already started moving online--a lot--and yet we have yet to see a glimmering of this futuristic network of thought surrounding them and giving them a new social context. Okay, people write and read reviews on Amazon and start literary blogs and create fan sites for their favorite authors, but in this books are just like every other subject and project embraced by the internet. It's not surprising that such things should happen. This is not what Johnson is talking about.

The question of books in a social context is an interesting one. Of course your stereotypical book person is not a model social being; she lives in her head and is cut off from the "real world." This image didn't come from nowhere, and I'm sure I'm reacting not just to its persistence but to it's underlying validity when I say that there is something wrong about Johnson's hyper-gregarious vision of the future. I differ here, too, with the New Yorker's assesment of why Johnson is wrong. I don't think the value of physical books as social signifiers--their "attractiveness"--is going to have much impact on the proliferation of e-books either. Bottom line, books are not primarily social things. Certainly they shouldn't be confined within an anti-social bubble. Book clubs, casual discussion with friends, the kind of reviewing and discussion that already goes on online--these can add a lot to the experience, and being a reader can add a lot to one's social self as well, despite the stereotypes. Also, the social context of books is vital to how they are marketed and to how they can potentially infiltrate the culture more than they currently do--the more you hear your friend twittering or blogging about a book, the more likely you might be to read it or to read at all; the more marketers are able to convince you that everyone reads or that cool people read, the more likely you are to do so; the more you're not fully culturally literate unless you've read this or that...etc. That's all as it may be. Still, I don't think the social side of them has over or will ever be the primary reason people read books, and therefore the primary way they react to the experience of doing so is not really based in social terms. When you're deciding what to read, when you want to talk about what you have read, nothing could be better than a community of people to share with. But the space between, the actual act of reading, this seems to exist--rightly--in an essentially private sphere. Johnson's idea isn't much more revolutionary than others who see books becoming integrated into our modern framework, but because his vision intrudes on this private space (the sub-head of the relevant section of his essay reads "You're Never Alone"), it strikes a distinctly unpleasant note. Our culture is a culture of hyper-sociality--in a perverse sort of way that doesn't require you to look anyone in the face, but constant interaction and engagement with the thoughts of others nonetheless. How in god's name would Twitter have made sense to anyone at an earlier point in time? But, and I've said it before, I don't think books can conform too much to this ethos while remaining themselves. When and if they do become blurby and commentable and disjointed and super hyperlinked enough to really fit in to the very social way we process other kinds of information via the internet nowadays, I don't think they will really be books anymore at all.

Dunkin Donuts : organic five grain muffin :: romance novels : literary fiction

This is very true. I've felt a very insistent need for plotty, neatly ending, easily digestable books as these tough times have become more real to me. I imagine it is the mental equivalent of needing sweet, fatty goodness in times of stress, and releases similar waves of dopamine or seratonin or whatever it is. Most recently read, for example--and these books are all exactly what they sound like:

Mistress of the Art of Death
An Unexpected Pleasure
Clandestine
Princess Academy
The Curse of the Pharohs

E-books Depress Me Some More

From Black Plastic Glasses, a very informative article that offers actual analysis of how much e-books cost publishers. Here's a depressing summation: "Clearly ebooks aren’t free - they are perhaps as expensive or in some cases more expensive than print - yet they do not create large, short term cash flow to cover their costs. Ebooks, if successful, will sink the trade publishing industry." As things stand how, he says, e-books must always depend on print sales to finance them and to keep publishers afloat--hardly the model anyone envisioned when looking to the future of this new medium. Not only are they not our saviors, but they're positive leeches on the system, it seems. The author promises follow up pieces on how to escape this unfortunate situation.

Yep

People just aren't going to stand for e-book prices that approximate actual book prices. I'm surprised they stand for those that are only slightly lower. The first commentator on this article makes a good point: it is probably true that our intuitive sense of the relative cost of making an e-book, and therefore the justified price of one, is mistaken. I don't think it's very likely, though, that anyone is ever going to win consumers over with logic. People aren't going to start paying for online newspapers that they've never had to pay for before, and they're not going to stomach paying as much for an ephemeral digital file as they would for a physical book. Whether it is an instinctive sense of value, or simply that we have gotten used to paying nothing or very little for internet-gleaned entertainment, I don't see this attitude shifting any time soon or ever. Where does this leave publishers? Maybe it will drive technological advancements that will lower the cost of publishing and distributing an electronic book. Maybe they will just be stuck with low low profit margins. As someone who cares about the industry, I feel for them: the promise of this shiny new technology is marred by the fact that it won't lead to the more substantial profits that publishers and their authors need and deserve. As a reader though, I am unwilling to factor this sympathy in when calculating what price I will pay. Perhaps e-books will eventually become so easy to get and read that more people will read, period, and that increased volume will make up in some way for the low profit margins. I don't see why not. Any maybe eventually publishers will be able to save money by not printing and distributing/storing as many physical books. They're hardly going to abandon e-book technology, in any case, and I'm sure eventually readers and publishers will reach a sort of leveling off point on prices where neither feels utterly screwed by the system.

Indeed

"But there is a wider, if less concrete threat to book publishing from the internet. Electronic communication has generally made life easier for writers and harder for readers. Text is simpler to produce on computers, easier to amend and spell-check, and a breeze to distribute.... Worse, the dizzying range of easily accessible material on the internet conspires with a lack of editorial guidance to make web reading a disjointed experience that works against the sustained concentration required for serious reading.

This privileging of the writer at the expense of the reader is borne out by statistics showing the annual output of new titles in the US soaring towards half a million. At the same time a recent survey revealed that one in four Americans didn’t read a single book last year. Books have become detached from meaningful readerships. Writing itself is the victim in this shift. If anyone can publish, and the number of critical readers is diminishing, is it any wonder that non-writers – pop stars, chefs, sports personalities – are increasingly dominating the bestseller lists?"

But hopefully "The roles of editor and publicist, people who can guide the potential reader through the cacophony of background noise to words they’ll want to read, will become ever more important."

From the London Review of Books

What The Hell Is A Cell Phone Novel?

Am I just being old-fashioned? A lot of my recent posts have revolved around the idea that book reading is a special kind of reading. Specifically, that it is a lot different from the kind of reading one does on the internet, that kind of reading being characterized by its brevity, its short attention span, its schizophrenia (reading an article about the war in Iraq six seconds after you finished catching up on Brangelina's latest adoption). I think I may have gone slightly too far, though. Every other article I read about books or publishing deals with how they are being made to fit into this impatient, disjointed mindset. For example, did you know that 86 percent of Japanese teens read cell phone novels? CELL PHONE NOVELS. Reading something like that I picture Dickens a la text "it ws the bst of tms it ws the wrst of tms LOL TTYL" and I can't help but conclude that if people accept this sort of thing as a novel, the novel will soon die off. This isn't reading! Flipping to a page of your e-book in between checking your email and playing cell phone games is not reading, I cry out instinctively. But it is. Upon checking my outrage and taking an honest look at myself I realize that I very rarely read in concentrated, studious bouts, but more often during commercials, while waiting for something to start, or as I carry out tedious office work and try to pay attention to my audiobook at the same time. I'm sure an earlier generation would have cried out at this just as much, but I know that I still get a lot out of reading. Admittedly it is impossible to read anything challenging this way, so some of the loftiest benefits of reading are out of the question; I probably won't have any philosophical relevations or blazing moments of intellectual clarity, or whatnot. But I am still doing something which is, in fact, quite different from everyday internet reading. Like dolphins and sharks, blurby book reading and normal internet browsing may have evolved similar characteristics to survive in today's tech sea, but they are fundamentally different. I maintain that book reading is special, but in more than one way. Many of its qualities can remain intact even as others are, in my opinion, being destroyed. Even if one reads in distracted bursts, there is an ongoing narrative or argument that requires sustained attention. It isn't like flitting from site to site. And the content is typically more profound than most internet browsing fare. So even I don't fully embrace these changes, I accept them as less than appocalyptic. And I know, in any case, that there's no use in insisting on some artificially inflated standard for readers to live up to. They'll either ignore you or be driven away. Is it better to adapt to what people want, at the possible expense of quality? Yes, I think it is. So I'm going to try to tone it down a bit.

Self-Publishing, -Destruction

The rise of the self-publishers is upon us already, apparently. It seems more sinister than it did when it was just a theoretical caveat to the future of publishing. I'm sure there is a positive way to construe this. In and of itself I guess there's nothing terrible in it--so far self-publishers aren't really in competition with traditional publishers. Even if they were, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. It would be a change--the good books would be harder to find with no pre-screening, and that would have to be dealt with somehow, maybe through a class of super-readers, as someone suggested, or maybe a resurgence of book review sections. As everyone keeps saying, music itself hasn't been ruined by the demise of the big labels, it may even be better, and that's what really matters here--the books, not the business. But I fear self-publishing is more pernicious than it seems, or at least its rise indicates some very disturbing book and reading trends. My worry is not for publishers, but for the books themselves.

A line in a Slate article about all this clarified some of my fear. "Books are the new blog," they say: everyone can have one, but most shouldn't. Maybe this is what worries me most about the rise self-publishers: what does it say about the people who use them? It seems to me that an appreciation for truely well crafted books is slipping lower than ever. The ease of printing one's own, the sense that this is a common and appropriate thing, both reflects and reinforces a very casual attitude, even a disrespect, for the medium. I really doubt that most of the people commissioning these books are real readers. They're like that lady on Real Housewives of Atlanta, perfectly convinced that she was a great singer and deserved a record deal, without having ever done the slightest study or even really listened to her own voice. You can't be so confident in your horrible prose if you're in the habit of reading actual books. Of course this doesn't apply to all who self-publish. I'm sure there are some genuinely unfairly neglected geniuses out there. But, as the Times article quotes one bookseller as saying, “'For every thousand titles that get self-published, maybe there’s two that should have been published,'”

Like I mentioned in my last post, I worry about internet reading affecting book reading. And this trend towards seeing books as just a sort of physical blog, a medium of the people and open to all, confirms that worry in a slightly tangential way. Mabye it doesn't say anything directly about how or whether internet media-drenched people read books, but it does show a drift away from respect for book-reading and writing as a sort of institution. The very fact that self-publishing is on the rise just as publishers are selling fewer books and people are reading fewer of them confirms this. It reminds me of newspaper publishing and how it has declined. People cite, rightly I'm sure, the rise of the internet as a reason. With so many blogs and other sources online, why get an old-fashioned paper? Why rely on someone else to assemble the information and trivial entertainment stories you want, when you can assemble them for yourself online? But I don't think there has been anything like a direct transfer from newspaper reading to online reading. Something has been lost in the way that people look at the news. This is why papers can't be just as successful by transfering themselves to the internet. People want something different now. It seems that books are headed the same way. Perhaps everything will stabalize at some point far in the future when a generic media form will at last be reached, a sort of blog with a narrative, but not requiring too much sustained attention or loyalty, with options for shorter or longer reads. I don't look forward to it. I'm all for self-expression, and I think internet media are great within their own sphere (I'm not oblivious to the fact that I am, at present, BLOGGING), but these two individually commendable things seem to be seeping a little to far into something I want kept sacred. And I don't like it.