I’m not the kind of person that tends to remember dreams. I had one a few weeks back, however, that has really stuck. In the dream I was reading an old book (the kind with heavy, leather binding and yellowed pages that smell a little musty) in the library, and the book began to fall apart in my hands. Holes appeared in the cover, and the pages blackened at the edges and crumbled off wherever I touched them. The dream wasn’t frightening, but I woke up with that creepy, post-nightmare feeling and couldn’t, for a while, go back to sleep.
It took me several days to realize that the dream might have been a visual representation of an anxiety. The evening before the dream I had been listening to an interview on NPR with Bob Stein, a director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, in which Stein claimed that not far down the road, the print book would be obsolete. We’re in a moment of transition, he said, “from the book to whatever is going to become more important than it.” (My emphasis).
With the release of the iPad in April and with improvements to the Kindle appearing later this month, there’s been a good bit of discussion out there lately about the move from print publishing to electronic formats—though I don’t think I had heard that transition described in such absolute terms before listening to this interview. Perhaps it’s the assumption behind Stein’s claims that disturb me the most. I understand, of course, the benefits of going paperless: it’s more economical for publishers, it’s better for the environment, it’s more portable, yada yada. The reasons are all very practical. But since when do practicality and higher profit margins add up to “more important?”
Call me a traditionalist, but to me the loss of the book would be more than the loss of a cumbersome, costly, “wasteful” object. Isn’t the book-as-object, its heft and smell, the tooth and weight of its pages, an important part of the experience of reading? Yes, the book delivers content—information—but to the book lover, reading is also an aesthetic experience. The Kindle and its like are essentially invisible media, designed to perform a function without calling attention to themselves. Many books, on the other hand, are designed to be noticed. As a poet, I appreciate the fact that the way the poem looks on the page is just as integral to the poem as the music of the words or the rhythms of its stresses and syllables. The pleasure of the poem is an experience of the eyes, just as it is an experience of the ear and the imagination. There’s an element of this to prose, as well.
Additionally, the book-as-object is an artifact. As a kid, I used to love to explore the books my parents had stacked around the house. Sometimes I’d find funny marginalia, inscriptions from old high school sweethearts, newspaper articles or photographs stuck between the pages as temporary bookmarks and then forgotten. I’ve learned quite a lot about my parents from the books they’ve kept. Just a few weeks ago, on a visit home, I came across a copy of Leaves of Grass that had belonged to my great-grandfather. I’d had no idea my great-grandfather read poetry. That book is a treasure to me. I highly doubt that three generations from now someone will find my Kindle and treasure it. Technology is disposable. Technology is sterile, impersonal.
I have a tendency, perhaps unfairly, to connect a lot of American cultural strangeness to our Puritan roots. Why, for instance, are we uniquely obsessed with sanitation: bleach-based cleaners, disinfectants, odorlessness? Undoubtedly because some of our earliest settlers believed that cleanliness was next to godliness. The infatuation with the electronic book is another one I’m adding to the list. The Puritans forbade embellishment and imagery in their places of worship because they feared that churchgoers would venerate the object as holy, forgetting that it was merely a symbol of the divine. In American culture, when it comes to a contest of function and form, function seems to win out nearly every time. The Kindle is economical and efficient. It is not beautiful. If you see the book as a mere medium to convey information, then obviously this doesn’t matter.
I would like to think that the advent of the e-book won’t kill the artsy, beautiful books or even the old musty books. I have a feeling they will still be around in the same way some DJs prefer to spin vinyl records instead of CDs and MP3s. I’m sure there will still be people reading from glorious bound tomes — but in the subways — and in modest puritan pews, people may in fact cling to their clean and sterile e-books. I have yet to read a novel on a Kindle or an e-reader, which is funny. I’ll read non-fiction books, but a novel for me is more intimate so I need the tangible touch of paper and glue to connect with the lives of the characters. I feel we will for a long time be an analog/digital society; when it comes to beauty and aesthetics, though, it is hard to say who will win out in the end. And we don’t want to confuse beauty with nostalgia, either.
I agree with the “real-books-are-vinyl-of-our-generation” argument, and I don’t really see books dying out, at least in my lifetime – and I’m 22, so I’m hoping we’ve got awhile. My it’s naiveté, but I for one am going to cling to that naiveté with white knuckles. Reading Infinite Jest just wouldn’t be the same if you could just click a hyperlink instead of flipping across a cinder block of paper to get to the endnotes.
My grandfather also had an amazing, diverse range of books in his office. Even though I had been in there many times before, it wasn’t until after he passed away that I discovered he had multiple William Trevor novels, the collected stories of Frank O’Connor, and Joan Didion’s books. Having those books, knowing he read them, has tremendous value to me, something that we get from books in a way that we just won’t get from an e-reader.
It seems to me it’s all a question of our appropriation of new technology. Certainly, technophobe English professors might not appreciate the discussion we’re having on this blog, but, despite all the huffing and puffing out there, the medium can be worthwhile.
Confession: I finally broke down and bought a Kindle this time around. I plan to use it especially for non-literary fiction or non-fiction. But for good literature I intend to continue buying the book as object, because I can dialogue with the author, pencil in hand, in a way that the Kindle note-taking device just doesn’t allow. Also, I value having a personal library of good fiction–the books I will want to flip through again on occasion and then eventually pass on as heirlooms.
Given the reactions to your post, Claire, I’m pretty sure there will always be a market for real book even if sales do decrease.
On a different note, I tend to think the American obsession with technology and efficiency comes more from Pragmatism than from Puritanism. Much as an early American consensus emerged around the shared truths of the varied Christian denominations, James, Dewey, and Peirce dealt with America’s melting pot of confusing diversity by keying in on “what works”. Without a single tradition in common, it’s a natural American movement to go to the common points, the bare bones, what just works. And from there, it’s not a far stretch to become obsessed with the efficient and economical at the expense of the ornamental and the traditional.
I hope you’re right about the continuing market, Chris. I guess my fear is that the book will survive *only* as a sort of novelty/luxury item–the way you can buy high-quality, leather-bound editions of certain books now for a lot of money.
I loved this!!