Most of the time his stitching held, but when I open my copy of Where Do I Start, that collection of emails from Hugh’s daughter about her work on Vancouver’s downtown east side, I find the endpapers wrinkled, the pages separating from the covers.
“I wasn’t very good at it,” he admits. “I should have gone to a commercial bindery from the beginning. But eventually I got smart.”
Binding is a three-step process. The pages have to be sewn to create the text block, the covers have to be constructed, and the text block has to be attached to the covers. With The Paradise Project, the first and second steps take place together.
Hugh delivers the printed signatures to Smiths Falls Book Binding and, at the same time, hands over the Japanese Ajisai (Hyacinth) Gold paper to wrap the covers and the Japanese Arashi (Storm) paper to wrap the spine. Once the covers are made, they’ll be shipped back to Hugh to be printed while the text blocks are sewn.
The spine is made from a narrow strip of thin matte board; the covers are from a heavier stock. The spine and two covers are laid out on the work table like a spine sandwich. A long strip of tape, or “hinge,” is glued to one side of the spine, then to the cover on one side. When both hinges are set, the full cover is turned over. Storm paper is glued to the outside of the spine, extending an inch or so onto the front and back covers. Next, Hyacinth paper is glued over the outside of the front and back covers. The full cover is turned over again, and the spine and cover papers are brought to the inside, trimmed, and neatly glued.
Hugh fits the front cover sideways onto the platen and prints The Paradise Project and my name across the lovely Hyacinth paper.
There is no title on the spine. “Why?” I ask.
He looks embarrassed. “I guess because I never thought about printing on the spine!”
In this, he is more faithful to Gutenberg than he knows. The first bound books were stored flat on a shelf, spines facing the back. The owner would write the title in ink along the fore-edges of the pages, the way we used to print MATH and GEOGRAPHY on the fore-edges of our high school textbooks so we’d know what we were grabbing from the jumble inside our lockers. Around the sixteenth century, readers began to stand their books up on the shelf, a practice that was standard by the 1700s. To identify the standing book, printers added the title, author, and publisher to the spine, first as a printed or penned strip of paper, and later by printing on the spine itself.
While Hugh is printing the covers, the bindery is busy creating the textblocks. Before taking the pages to the bindery, he gathered them into signatures, carefully choosing impressions with similar ink coverage so that each book will appear uniform. At the bindery, each signature is stitched individually through the fold with threads that go through the paper several times. Then all four signatures are stacked in order and stitched, chained together with a single linen thread.
If I peer down into the spine of my presentation copy of The Paradise Project—indeed, into any well-bound book—I can count the individual folded signatures, proof that it is either a handsewn or a Smyth-sewn book.
Two weeks before the launch, I get an email from Hugh: “This book is blowing people out of the water. If you have heard a rumour that I’m excited about the launch I’m sure it’s not true. I don’t know about you but I’m going to have withdrawal symptoms when this book is done.”
He spoke too soon. Before the day is over, the bindery calls. Stupid Hugh has been at it again: some of the pages are gathered upside down. Hugh spends a day putting more signatures together and drives them up to Smiths Falls. The following Monday, he delivers the printed covers. The bindery confirms he can pick up the finished books at the end of the week.
“Good news!” he writes. “We will have 125 books bound in time for the launch and I’m well on my way to finishing the sleeves for the page-openers. Now I’m leaving it in your hands to arrange for good weather.”
The launch is Sunday. All through the week, the bindery staff works long hours to meet our deadline. It looks like they’ll make it. Then, first thing Thursday morning, Hugh gets another email: some of the endpapers are too short. Can Hugh get more?
The endpapers do more than look pretty: they bind the textblock to the cover. Emily produced her endpapers in matching pairs, one for the front and one for the back. Each endpaper is folded in half. One half is glued to the inside cover, and the other is glued narrowly at the inside edge of the first or last page of the book, so the endpaper is attached but also free-moving like a separate page. Because the endpapers are handmade, they vary in size. Too big is okay: it can be trimmed to fit. Too small is a disaster.
Hugh emails Emily. She has another 150 pairs of endpapers ready, but by the time she can get them to the bus and the bus gets to Kingston and Hugh drives them up to Smiths Falls, another day will be lost. Hugh emails the bindery and tells them he’ll get them there Friday morning. If need be, he’ll stay to help until all 125 books are bound.
The to-ing and fro-ing is playing havoc with Hugh’s timeline. He still has to finish making the sleeves for the books, another ripple caused by my offhand suggestion to leave some of the pages unopened. Hugh decided we had to supply a paper knife. How, then, to attach the knife to the book? A book sleeve, of course. And how would a book buyer know what to do with it? Include instructions, what else?
“I can see it all quite clearly,” Hugh wrote the night before he made the first sleeve. The knife would tuck into slits in the front of the sleeve, like a darning needle through a sock. A folded paper printed with instructions would be tucked under the knife. I wrote a brief treatise on the proper use of a paper knife; Hugh printed it and set to work constructing and sewing 125 sleeves. Between the two of us, we cornered the Kingston market on a certain slim metal letter opener, and I ordered fifty more online, dropping them into Hugh’s mailbox the morning they arrived.
“Mother never said that this publishing business would be easy, but the important thing is that we will be ready. I have the sleeves made and the paper knife instructions printed, I just need to mount the knives and notes, which I will do on Sunday morning. Don’t you just love these mad dashes to the wire?”
I can almost hear him chuckling.
“Keep your fingers crossed, Author. We’re riding the rocket in the eleventh hour!”
THE READIES
This book that I am writing, Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, is called a manuscript even though I am not writing it by hand. I’m typing it on my MacBook Pro in a program called Scrivener. I’ll send the finished “manuscript” to my editor by email. She’ll make suggestions with Track Changes, a feature of word processing programs. The designer will format the book digitally. And I’ll receive the final edit not as galleys—the old, long, curling sheets of typesetting—but as a PDF file. Much of the printing of the paper book will be accomplished on digital presses. This book will assume a physical form only in its very final stage: a print butterfly emerging from a pixelated chrysalis.
The ebook version of Gutenberg’s Fingerprint has a final physical form, too—on an ereader, the most recent stop on the moving frontier of the digitization of publishing. Long before ereaders were invented, physical books were being converted to pixels through Project Gutenberg, founded in 1971 when Michael S. Hart, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, decided to type up the Declaration of Independence and make it available for free public download. The Declaration became the first ebook; the United States Bill of Rights and the Bible were second and third. Hart went on to found the first digital library, offering public-domain books for free download as ebooks to be read on personal computers.
Over a thousand titles were on the virtual shelves of Project Gutenberg’s free library by the time ereaders came on the market. The first prototype—a floppy-disk-driven, six-inch reader called Incipit—was developed at the University of Milan in 1993, but it wasn’t until 1998 that two ereaders—SoftBook and Gemstar’s Roc
ket eBook Reader—were introduced to consumers, along with websites where ebooks could be downloaded for a fee. The Millennium and the EveryBook came out in ’99; the Cybook launched in 2001. Those first ereaders weren’t very different in principle from the next generation of Kindles, Kobos, and their ilk, except for storage capacity, which was limited to 1,500 pages (about five books) and Internet connectivity, which was dicey enough to provoke significant download frustration.
Ereaders may not have been invented until the 1990s, but the idea was articulated sixty years earlier in an essay called “The Readies” by Bob Brown, which appeared in the journal transition. In 1930, after watching a “talkie” movie, he got the idea that books, too, needed a shot in the arm, “a machine that will allow us to keep up with the vast volume of print available today and be optically pleasing.” Brown wasn’t an inventor, so nothing came of his idea, but he did predict that such a machine would allow users to adjust the type size, avoid paper cuts, and save trees. He also predicted that eventually words would be “recorded directly on the palpitating ether.”
I saw ereaders long before I could buy one. I was a Trekkie. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Star Trek: The Next Generation was my eye candy of choice, a television series that showcased fantasized, twenty-fourth-century technology while basing its plots on the works of Raymond Chandler, Herman Melville, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, and even Gilgamesh. At quiet moments, Captain Jean-Luc Picard would retire to his cabin with a cup of “Tea—Earl Grey—hot!” and a book, sometimes an antique twentieth-century paper book, but often a small rectangle that he held before him like a mirror, reading pages that scrolled before his eyes.
Despite the futuristic prep of Star Trek, the first ereaders provoked the virulent love-hate reaction that so often greets new technologies. Some writers jumped on the bandwagon: Stephen King’s novel Ride the Bullet, released in 2000, appeared first as an ebook. Within five years, however, the limited memory and download irritations cancelled out the desirable novelty of the device. By 2003, manufacturers were going out of business and Barnes & Noble was closing down its ebook sales division.
Ha! print-lovers gloated. A flash in the pan.
Their triumph was short-lived. Just one year later, Sony released LIBRIé, the first ereader to use electronic ink technology. Finally, words on the screen had almost the same clarity as words printed on paper.
In 2007, Amazon introduced the Kindle, the first truly reader-friendly ereader. It was pretty basic—it didn’t pretend to be anything but a hand-held plastic page—but it connected to Whispernet, Amazon’s private data storage and retrieval system that held millions of books, an avid reader’s wet dream.
Other online book retailers followed suit. Barnes & Noble brought out the Nook, Chapters/Indigo the Kobo, Sony its Sony Reader, all of them digital devices designed solely for reading. They don’t run email or Twitter or Facebook or any other distracting applications. They are just books—super-thin, spineless, coverless books, not so different from a codex, with pages that appear one at a time to be read singly, not in spreads that open like, well, a book.
Dedicated ereaders are exactly that: dedicated. They are like printed books in the way that they are content to sit patiently on a bedside table or in a purse or a glove compartment, waiting to be picked up, flipped open, and read. They exist only to be read. People like them precisely because they seem so familiar.
But this very appealing strength is also a great weakness. The tethered distribution systems of a Kindle or a Kobo forces a reader to shop at only one store—a gigantic store, but even so, the ereader comes with built-in boundaries. With my Kindle, I can read only what Amazon offers.
This fenced-in ereader world was about to blast open. In 2008, BooksOnBoard.com started selling ebooks that could be read on Apple’s brand new iPhone, introduced just the year before. In 2009, Sony hooked up with a digital wholesaler, OverDrive, offering their ereader customers access to the ebook holdings of any participating library. That same year, a Sony Reader loaded with textbooks was given to every student at Blyth Academy, a private school in Toronto, Ontario—the first high school in the world to distribute digital texts to its classes.
When Apple introduced the first iPad tablet in 2010, I was at the sales counter. It was bigger than a cellphone or any dedicated ereader and had a better screen. The iPad came with a built-in app called iBooks, but I could also download Kindle and OverDrive and Kobo. Since then, tablets have proliferated and no wonder. They unchain us from a single mega-retailer monopoly. We can buy stories from iTunes, novels from Amazon, download a nineteenth-century novel from Project Gutenberg, share EPUB files of our self-published ebooks. My Kindle languishes on the shelf. I can’t give it away. I’ve tried.
In the first quarter of 2012, according to the Association of American Publishers, ebook sales surpassed hardcover sales for the first time. By 2014, fully half of all American adults had an ebook reading device, either an ereader or a tablet. (Forty-five percent had tablets, nineteen percent owned ereaders, some owned both.)
But here’s the thing: although half of American adults owned an ereader in 2014, that same year only twenty-eight percent claimed to have read an ebook. This makes me wonder if the tide has really turned. Maybe this is just another case of techno-lust: in a few years, people may be tossing their ereaders into the same box in the basement that holds their Game Boy, their Discman, and their eight-track tapes.
Only about four percent of the people who read books are digital-only. The rest are like me and my friends, people with both ereaders and shelves of printed books. A very unscientific poll reveals that my friends prefer ereaders for travel, for genre fiction—fantasy, mystery, romance—and for research, because digital is so searchable and text can be highlighted and bookmarked onscreen as you read. With literary fiction, people like me tend to buy the ebook first and, if we really like it, we’ll buy the print edition, too. Knowing this, many publishers now bundle an ebook in with the print book. A website called BitLit started up in 2014 to put readers together with these publishers. BitLit now offers an app, Shelfie, that will take pictures of a bookshelf so a reader can download free ebook or audiobook editions of paper books.
The advantages of ereaders are legion. They are lighter than printed books, less likely to cause bruising for those of us who like to fall asleep with stories. Ereaders now have vast memories, capable of holding not five, but 15,000 books. In the early 1990s, when I travelled to Mexico for the winter, I took one small suitcase of clothes and one very large suitcase crammed with books. Now I take my iPad and a print book or two not yet released in digital format. I am exactly in the demographic that is the most active consumer of ebooks: seventy-five percent are women and seventy-seven percent are over forty-five. Most are between fifty-five and sixty-four. Not kids, then, and not techno-geeks. Women of a certain age.
I read a lot of ebooks, but even so, I score the experience fairly low on the literary aesthetic scale, compared to holding, smelling, feeling, and turning the pages of a printed book. The thingness of a printed book is still important to me. A paper book presents ideas and stories in a way that is increasingly unlike any other way I receive such information. There are no links to lure me down one rabbit-hole after another. No electrical cords to tether me. No Big Brother to decide what I can buy and whether I can keep it. A printed book is a world I can hold in my hands, a world I can step into and out of as I choose. It is limited and self-contained, which changes how I interact with it. The experience isn’t necessarily better, but it is qualitatively different. Print books encourage depth; digital encourages breadth.
Naomi Baron, in her book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Books in the Digital World, reports on her studies with university students in the United States, Japan, Slovakia, Germany, and India. Ninety-two percent of them said they concentrate better when they read in print. And it’s not just concentration that’s affec
ted. “The problem with reading digitally is that it encourages us to keep going,” she writes. “Print gives us the leeway to pause and think.”
Ereaders, dedicated or not, are almost certainly a transitional technology. We’ll look back on the so-called state-of-the-art digital technology we’re using today and see these ereaders as Model Ts compared to the ways we’ll be reading in twenty, ten, even two years from now. Ereaders may end up like television: astonishing when it came into my living room in 1956, essential through the moon landings, assassinations, famines, wars, and Downton Abbeys of the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and the first two decades of the new millennium, then suddenly and swiftly made obsolete by Internet streaming. Who knew we would abandon television so completely, with hardly a backward glance? It is equally impossible to predict the future of ereader technology, but I suspect ereaders will eventually leave our lives, too. Before they do, they will drift even further from the discrete thingness of printed books, further from the traditional publishing model that today informs ereaders as much as it does paper books.
At the moment, ereaders are a lot like printed books partly because of copyright laws. But suppose notions of ownership around written text change. Suppose readers could control not only what they read and how they read, but how they engage with the text. Suppose the boundaries that make reading a print book a discreet, isolated experience come tumbling down. Suppose ereaders fully embrace all that digital can do.
Hugh McGuire, co-founder of Rebus, founder of PressBooks and LibriVox, and co-editor of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, listed his own future-book-reading wish list during a talk at the WWW2016 Conference:
I would like to connect the books I read to a service of my choosing that helps me view and track the books I have read, and organize that experience in different ways.
I would like to be able to make links between the books I am reading, to arrange, say, my annotations from multiple books from a particular topic into a single place.
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