Burning the Page

by Jason Merkoski

  There’s actually a thriving subculture of people armed with laptops who go to used bookstores, scan in the bar codes with their video cameras, and see if any of the books are worth enough to buy used from the bookstore. If so, they resell the book online at a higher price. You’ll see more of this in the years ahead, as well as better tools on smartphones to allow non-experts to make a living at this.

  I think we’re going to see a huge number of used book sales in the next five years as digital books go more mainstream. We may have a glut of books, in fact. If you’re like me and you think that the moldering, forlorn used books for sale on a scrappy rack outside a bookstore are sad, then wait until you see how much sadder it will get for printed books.

  Books that can fetch ten to twenty dollars today in used condition will be lucky to sell for ten to twenty cents in a few years, simply because the market for print books will be flooded and no one will need them anymore. A few book collectors will snap up the choicest pickings offered for sale, but the great majority won’t get sold, even at a penny each, because the buyers simply won’t exist in great enough numbers. It will be a buyer’s market. Unsold books will get donated to libraries, but even libraries don’t have infinite amounts of space.

  With this glut of used books will come a perceived cheapening of books. Our culture still perceives print books as precious, even in the age of mass production. Books are still seen as status symbols, after all. The wealthy often have finely apportioned libraries in their mansions (even if they’re often just decorative).

  But what will our culture be like when people start dumping their books because they simply can’t sell them? You’ll first see piles of unsold books outside the hipster neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco; then you’ll see piles of books by the trash on Sunday night for anyone to take. Then you’ll see community events in other cities where people get together on weekends and swap books.

  If there are 119 million readers in the United States, and every reader has an average of one hundred books, and half of these will be eliminated over the next ten years as people go digital, about six billion books will need to be disposed of in some way or another. That’s around four billion tons, or the equivalent of ten years of trash. It all has to end up somewhere.

  I think you’ll see a strange hybrid between dump and library—perhaps a section of the dump for books that’s cordoned off from the trash, a section run by profiteers or book-loving volunteers who will sell books by the pound or perhaps the truckload. What will the books be used for? Perhaps firewood or fuel.

  As books move to digital and fewer are printed, fewer print books will be sold, which will hasten the decline of bookstores. Physical brick-and-mortar bookstores are already struggling to compete with online giants like Amazon or Walmart when it comes to price and selection, and the move to digital just hastens the already sad decline.

  Most retail bookstores haven’t made the transition to the new digital culture. Even in university towns, the kinds of places where people usually read more, bookstores are closing their doors. Conventional bookstores that have focused on offering new books will fold, hit with the double whammy of fewer books being printed and the glut of used books on the market.

  Publishers often complain that digital books are forcing their hardcovers to die, and I think they’re right. The hardcover book is a print artifact, a technique publishers discovered that would let them milk the same stone for blood not just once, but twice. They could sell a new book at a more expensive price point to early adopters and then release a cheaper version to the mainstream months later.

  Digital books don’t allow this. They help democratize content. On the plus side, this means readers can—and often expect to—pay low prices for premium content, without hemorrhaging money into a hardcover edition. But on the minus side, a revenue source for publishers is falling by the wayside, which means it’s harder for them to take gambles on new content.

  A publisher often has a portfolio of books, much like your own investment portfolio. Some titles are low-risk but low-sales, like bonds, while others are likely to be high-risk and high-return, like stocks. The ebook revolution may be making publishers think twice before taking on the risk of promoting a new author. But then again, perhaps this financial pressure will force publishers to take different risks in the digital space, to innovate new product experiences.

  And this is healthy, even though some publishers will have to tighten their belts and others may fold by taking ill-timed risks that are too bold. It’s healthy because the culture of reading itself is changing.

  You used to be able to go to any college town, hang out in the college coffeehouse, and see people reading at their tables. But now it’s different, which should be no surprise to you if you’re a college student or the parent of one. And believe me, I know—every time I traveled on Amazon business to visit publishers, I would stop at a college town and check out the campus bookstore and coffeehouse.

  I would come to the coffeehouse expecting revolution, expecting to see people reading The Communist Manifesto or at least sci-fi novels, but now I see people sitting at their laptops reading Facebook or watching YouTube. Though there’s jazzy music on the coffeehouse radio, everyone is listening to his or her computer on earbuds. Books are at best decorations in the coffee-shop windows, encrustations of a former function that coffeehouses no longer serve.

  In a broader sense, that’s true of books in our culture. Books are becoming decorations. Whither the printed book? Indeed, it has withered. There are cobwebs in the corner of the coffeehouse and spooks like me who sit on the paisley couches, watching people alone at their tables on Facebook. Reading was never really a social experience, so I’m not alarmed by this. In fact, I’m happy, because I know that as digital books grow, more and more people will start reading books again in coffee shops—and I mean actual reading, not the indiscriminate snacking of bits and bites from the internet.

  Of course, the downside of this is that people may start to expect digital books to behave like the internet, like a repository of content that you can snack on. Because it’s true that, as you surf the internet, you’re snacking all day instead of eating a full meal. A book is a full meal, and like any meal, you have to be willing to spend time preparing it and savoring it. True, it takes time to read a book, and it doesn’t matter whether the book is physical or digital. The investment of time it takes to read and consume a book will remain constant regardless of the book’s format.

  I remember that in Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper there was a machine called the Orgasmatron that people went into just to have orgasms. That’s it—no sex required, no foreplay, no nothing. Until someone invents an Orgasmatron for books, where you get all the information you need in an instant, you’ll still have to invest time in the experience of reading.

  Moving beyond books, it’s a small step from the written word to images themselves and a vast project to digitize all the art in the world’s museums, whether it’s boxed up in storage or hung up in plain sight on the walls. Humanity is smitten with the digital, and there are missionaries who will see to it—partly because of profit and partly because of evangelical fervor—that all these analog artifacts are digitized as hi-fi reproductions of the originals, and they’ll be happy to sell them to you.

  Is it too futuristic to imagine hanging an iPad in a gilt, rococo frame on your living room wall and seeing a high-quality selection from the Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed on it, pictures rotating every ten minutes? We can already display family pictures from our own digital photo albums, so why not display world-class art in our living rooms as well?

  I think this is highly likely. In fact, the mass digitization of our culture could in some ways be considered part of a greater spiritual project. This wholesale conversion of the analog into the digital, of base “gold” into even more ethereal electrons, could be seen as part of a project that started centuries ago. It could be seen as part of humanity’s dream of infusing all of
matter with soul, a dream at once ancient and yet science-fictional.

  After all, this is where the Web 3.0 movement itself is going. Your clothes will be computational devices. Your e-reader will talk to your smartphone and your scale and your coffee machine, and they’ll all keep tabs on you, sense your mood, and recommend things for you to do or read or buy. Who would have thought that this dream of infusing the inanimate with the animate, of matter with soul, would ultimately benefit advertisers the most?

  Bookmark: Altered Books

  There were once so many passenger pigeons in America that their flocks darkened the skies for hours at a time as millions flew overhead. Ranging from the East Coast to the Rockies, they were a highly successful species of bird. Their fossils have been found as far back in time as the Pleistocene period, the same era that saw saber-toothed tigers ranging through what’s now Los Angeles, or wooly mammoths roaming through Chicago, or giant ground sloths, ten feet tall, loping through what would become Las Vegas.

  That we had giant sloths in America surprises me. That all the passenger pigeons died out stuns me simply because of the reason for their extinction. They were killed for their meat, and generations of Americans knew no other meat than pigeon meat. Tiny pigeon sausages. Pigeon pies. In the span of about a hundred years, one of the most common American birds was gradually exterminated.

  Likewise, books once had a glorious range. Books roamed the world. They traveled in luggage on the Pan-Am flights of the 1950s, were carried in purses and satchels on trans-Atlantic schooners, were carried by the Pony Express across the continent, and were often an important part of dowries of noblewomen. But now the range of books has shrunk, like the range of passenger pigeons, although not yet as terminally.

  You can still find books on dusty ornamental bookshelves in some hotel lobbies. You can find them in the lost-and-found bins of large train stations and on sun-bleached shelves at beach resorts. You can still find thriving populations of books at college bookstores and libraries. Somewhat surprisingly, you can also find books in prison libraries, which boast higher circulation rates than almost any other kind of library.

  But like passenger pigeons, like coyotes, like black bears, and like ancient coelacanths—dinosaur fish from millions of years ago that only live off two islands in the Indian Ocean—books inhabit a restricted range when compared to how prolific they were in their former glory days.

  In ecological terms, books are threatened with extinction.

  Books aren’t capable of reproducing in the wild or in captivity, although more and more book titles are published every year. But fewer physical books are being sold with every passing year, even if there are more titles to choose from. Book sales overall are tipping toward digital now.

  Books are threatened with extinction, but like the smartest of animals in the wild, they’re adapting. They’re evolving instead into ebooks.

  It’s almost contradictory for me to be a futurist of books. It’s like being a futurist of telegraphs or a futurist of rotary phones, because the death knell for print books has, in my opinion, sounded. As printed artifacts, books share a sacred reliquary along with eight-track tapes, gramophones, and LaserDiscs. But print books haven’t died yet, and they’re not going to go gently into the night.

  In the upscale home décor stores of the future—and by future, I mean ten years from now—tucked in among the rugs and tapestries and oversized urns and stuffed animal heads, you’ll start to find books sold as decorative items. They might be artistically bound with strips of copper. They might have keyholes from doors installed onto their spines. They might be artfully aged and lacquered. Perhaps they’ll be set up on pedestals, or a small ceramic pigeon will be perched on the book. But you’ll start to see books altered, turned into art objects.

  In a trip today to my local art town, I saw three stores that sold these types of altered books. Some of the books were turned into pulp and molded into trees, with smaller books hanging from them as fruits would. I saw pages from a book carefully razor-bladed out with an X-Acto knife and painted to show scenes of children playing in a field.

  What does it say about us as a culture that we’re turning books into art?

  To me, it says we’re aware of the passing of books, and we’re mournful. We feel pent-up nostalgia for books. We’re aware of a genuine loss, one that we can only express with X-Acto knives and spray cans of lacquer and glitter. We’re altering books, making them into art and ennobling them with ideas that are too hard to put into words. We’re transforming humdrum leather-bound books that were formerly commodities into artistic statements.

  We’re aware somehow that art will last longer than commodities, and our artists are salvaging some books in a repurposed form, in the hope that some of them will last through the ages. Because let’s be honest: do you really think the major libraries are going to hold on to all of their print books in an age of cheap terabyte hard drives? Do you really think the Library of Congress is going to digitize its book collection and then keep all the print books once they’re digitized? They won’t, and how can they? There’s simply too much material to store.

  So there’s going to be a massive die-off of print books. They’re not emigrating, flying overseas with the sound of pigeon flutter as their pages loft them through the sky. Books are dying. Future archaeologists will speak of the Gutenberg Era and the sharp discontinuity of our time, characterized by a major extinction event that has left no print books in the fossil records.

  The artwork of Georgia O’Keefe often depicts bleached skulls on a desert landscape. When artists get around to painting the end of the Gutenberg Era, they’ll perhaps paint the bleached books left behind on the literary landscape.

  I think highly of printed books, but I already think of them as bone-white, bleached, inert, and dead—unlike ebooks, which seem to sparkle with electricity and wonder. I look at my walls of printed and bound books like they’re all polished skulls in a curio cabinet. Just as I’m achingly sad to see them go, I’m also excited at moving onward into the future, into the digital.

  But what about you? Have you come to terms with the death of printed books? Have you grieved, in your way? Care to share your thoughts or help others through the mourning process?

  http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/21.html

  Reading: A Dying Art?

  I can’t appreciate fiddle music. No matter how good it is, fiddle music sounds to me like someone plucking the guts of a sick cat. But I know, rationally, that there must be truly great fiddle players. My mind understands this, even if it can’t appreciate that kind of music.

  Some things are simply matters of taste. Cilantro. Sushi. Cuban cigars. Krautrock. Spiders. There are no doubt items in this list that you find distasteful. And perhaps some that you appreciate, as a connoisseur might. Your taste for these is partly learned. In our country, we have developed an appreciation for sushi, for example, which is essentially raw fish. Spiders, by contrast, rarely make it onto the haute cuisine menus of our restaurants.

  Culture is shifty, and as anyone who has traveled outside his or her home country knows, it can vary widely. And yet, some parts of culture are universal.

  We all have an innate sense of storytelling, for example.

  Whether you look at the oral culture of the Homeric Greeks, or the stories of the Navajo, or the stories of Jonathan Swift or Charles Dickens or any contemporary author, you’ll find that most stories deal with people. This should come as no surprise. As people, we care about other people. It’s part of our tribal ape heritage. It’s wired into us. We’re programmed by patterns in our own brains to care about people, to find them fascinating, and to see them even when they’re not present, like ghost lights in the dark.

  As an example, consider pareidolia. It sounds like a disease, but it’s the surprisingly common tendency we have to see faces where none exist. And not just any faces—not bear faces or panda faces or fish faces—but the faces of people. We see them in whorls of wood and in the clouds
overhead. There’s even a shrine to a tortilla in southern New Mexico. If you look hard enough at the tortilla, you can see the face of Jesus. We have triggers that fire when we see things that resemble faces. These triggers sometimes misfire, hence pareidolia. Looking for faces is clearly important to us because it’s biologically programmed.

  Our sense of story is just as innate.

  Good stories work well when they engage us in what we care about. Fiction does well when it paints a clear picture of a person, outfitting him with a camel-hair coat and a red beard. If the picture is too abstract, we don’t engage. Likewise, a cookbook will fail to make us salivate if it doesn’t have a photo of a pastry drizzled in chocolate sauce or a glistening sirloin steak cooked to perfection.

  This preponderance of detail is what makes books work best. It takes a special kind of reader to enjoy Samuel Beckett and his abstract, disembodied fictions. We need details. Details resonate with us. Or, more properly, they resonate with our imaginations.

  As far as I know, no clinician has isolated the imaginative faculty. It can’t be seen in any anatomy book. There are no brain labs at Harvard where rabbits are being vivisected to find the elusive imaginative faculty. It can’t be removed with forceps or pinned to a Styrofoam dissection tray. There are no crackpot scientists posting papers about the imaginative faculty in the pages of Nature or online sites like arXiv. The imaginative faculty cannot be bottled like a freakish two-headed snake in a bottle of ether at a carny sideshow. In fact, the imaginative faculty resists my own attempts to describe it, which is why I can only say what it isn’t.