Gutenberg's Fingerprint

by Merilyn Simonds

  A few years ago, Hugh McGuire took a stab at what he calls “a format-agnostic” definition of a book that would articulate what the various kinds of books have in common: “A book is a discrete collection of text (and other media), that is designed by an author(s) as an internally complete representation of an idea, or set of ideas—emotion or set of emotions—and transmitted to readers in various formats.”

  Both the writer and the reader have a place in his definition. I wish I’d thought of that.

  In the beginning, ebooks were little more than printed books in digital form. Copycats. But think about what software can do and apply that to books. When we open a book, whether paper or pixel, we expect it to be the same as when we last opened it. But an ebook could be automatically upgraded, the way our Adobe Readers and operating systems are. Applications now tell us when an upgrade is available, but future upgrades may well be seamless and invisible, versionless. Or maybe with books, versions will still be part of the picture. Academics revel in different versions of a text, and so do readers. We love the glimpse into process that multiple versions afford. My editor was recently in Rome where she stumbled across a library in an old palazzo museum that had a display of fifty or sixty of the earliest versions of Orlando Furioso (Roland’s Rage), the sixteenth-century Italian epic poem that was a major influence on Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Each version in the exhibit was different, and beautiful in its own way.

  So-called “enhanced ebooks” have been evolving for two decades. At first, the approach was essentially info-loading, embedding links to anything remotely related to the text. This has evolved until now, the embedded “assets” feel like natural extensions, deeply relevant to the narrative. They don’t take you out of the story, they drive you in deeper.

  Early on, digital storytellers spun their narratives around the “choose your adventure” model of alternate story paths and endings that put creation into the hands of readers. The latest digital stories, however, preserve the role of the author who constructs the original narrative, start to finish, but readers are encouraged to explore and engage with the text. The reader’s role is no longer passive, it is active, even though he or she can’t actually affect the outcome.

  The latest catchphrase—which may well be obsolete before this book is printed—is “augmented reality,” or AR: virtual images laid over real ones to create an “augmented” display. AR integrates graphics, sounds, touch (haptics), and smell into a real-world environment, blurring the line between the actual and the computer-generated. Caitlin Fisher is the Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture and co-founder of York University’s Future Cinema Lab. Digital technology, she says, has already transformed narrative and storytelling. I listened to her speak on the subject for over an hour, and she never mentioned the word “book,” instead referring to “story worlds,” “story frames,” “narrative spines,” and “interactive narratives” with the unrestrained enthusiasm with which people must have talked about the first printed books 600 years ago.

  Serialization and platforms such as Wattpad have given new urgency to reading, a sense of “I have to read this now, I have to be part of this conversation.” (Some books on Wattpad get over a billion reads.) There’s a spirit of community to this kind of reading, of reciprocity when readers can engage directly with the story. “What does a novel look like,” asks Caitlin Fisher, “when it is spacialized and hundreds of thousands of readers own a piece of it?”

  We get a glimpse of this narrative future in Inanimate Alice, a digital novel I’ve been reading since it was first released in 2005. Developed by Canadian novelist Kate Pullinger and British graphic designer Chris Joseph, Inanimate Alice uses images, text, and sound to tell the story of a young girl who travels the world. The reader/viewer determines the pace of the story and has to perform certain actions for it to continue; there are embedded puzzles, games, and other “digital assets.” The storyline is riveting, told in six episodes, the most recent released in 2016, free to read on a computer browser or purchase to download with purchase.

  Book apps have been around for a while. The first one I downloaded was for my granddaughter, who was seven at the time. Now Google’s Editions at Play hosts “books” that are essentially websites built to be experienced on a mobile device. With music and visuals, reading has the quality of world-building games. One of the 2016 titles, Strata, was developed in partnership with Lex Records and Penguin Random House U.K.: clearly, traditional publishers are banking on this becoming a trend.

  Read—or more accurately, participate—in a digital story, and a printed book will seem as old-fashioned as a player piano. My generation may still prefer a static text, but children growing up today expect media to be participatory. They add comments to everything they look at, whether it’s a simple “like” on Facebook, a retweet, or a full blog discussion. A multidimensional digital book will seem as normal to them as a paperback did to us.

  As a writer, this excites me. I’ve always maintained that a book isn’t finished until it’s read, that writing is a collaboration with readers who ultimately read a different book than the one I wrote, finding themes that I wasn’t consciously aware of developing. But traditionally, a writer rarely communicates with readers: a life with words is a solitary one. When The Convict Lover was adapted for the stage, I went to all the rehearsals and came home deeply envious of playwrights who have actors to help them work out their dialogue. Since then, I have dabbled in collaboration, from reading with jazz bands to producing the foundational script for an experimental-music symphony that included huge projected photographs, narration, an opera singer, and multimedia effects.

  The letterpress and digital versions of The Paradise Project were also collaborations of a sort. I can feel myself edging along the book continuum: it’s only a matter of time until I move past print and digital to dive headfirst and full-body into whatever lies beyond.

  THE PRICE OF TEA IN CHINA

  At the launch of The Paradise Project, friends mill about, picking up their books. They each paid $150 for this slim volume of stories. When we set the price, I felt embarrassed. Would I pay that much for a book, even one that is made by hand? I’m not sure.

  Rita Dove had the same reaction when it came time to price her letterpress book of poems.

  “Rita, how much time did you put into each word, each line?” her printer asks. “They’ve been set by hand and handprinted on fine paper and the bindings glued by hand and sewn by hand. How long have you worked on this book? How long have we worked on its conception, and now, the book?” Then, very gently, “This book is worth more than you can ever ask for it.”

  Hugh says almost exactly the same thing to me after I send an email to friends and colleagues announcing the book.

  “I notice that you apologize for the price of the book,” he writes. “May I suggest that you point out the unique characteristics and suggest that, in view of the fact that such books occur only once every twenty years or so, this book is very well priced. If you bought a folio of Erik’s linocuts alone, you would expect to pay at least this much. Seen from almost every perspective, your book is a bargain.”

  He’s right. This isn’t a book, it’s art. And you can’t put a price on art.

  Even so, I’m not used to thinking about the price sticker on my books. That’s one of the arguments for going with a traditional publisher: they take care of all financial matters. Not with Hugh. As I’ve discovered, he expects the author to put her finger on every pulse point of the process.

  In the early days of printing, books were sold before they went on the press. Printers would advertise that a subscription was available. Sometimes writers went door to door, as American ornithologist and painter John James Audubon did. In 1820, he decided to paint every bird in North America. While he painted, he knocked on doors to solicit financial backers for the project. Finding none in the United States, he trav
elled to England, where he garnered little monetary support but did come across an excellent engraver and printer. Audubon travelled for three years, giving talks and meeting people whom he signed up to receive 435 prints of his life-sized watercolours of birds, five at a time, in a pay-as-you-go subscription. A dozen years of painting and knocking on doors, and still he was able to print only 200 sets of the treasured Birds of America.

  It was during the nineteenth century, as the mechanization of bookmaking progressed, that the various trades involved in the process became specialized. The writer wrote, the designer designed, the printer printed, the publisher (as a role distinct from the printer) arrived on the scene to oversee production and distribute the book. By the late–nineteenth century, bookstores became the go-to place to purchase a book. Even then, the local general store would usually stock a few psalters and almanacs; street kiosks would sell popular fiction and political treatises; and itinerant hawkers would have some engravings and calendars among their wares. Increasingly, though, bookstores sprang up in cities, towns, and villages as reading and literacy spread.

  In its early days, no doubt because of the threat of sedition, bookselling was strictly controlled. In France, Napoleon created a system whereby a bookseller who wanted to set up shop had to supply four references and a certificate from the mayor attesting to his morality, as well as four further references that confirmed his professional abilities as a bookseller. If successful in his application, the bookseller then had to swear an oath of loyalty to the regime.

  Restrictions relaxed towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the number of bookstores proliferated. In England, W. H. Smith set up bookstalls in every railway station in the country; in France, Hachette followed with Bibliothèques des chemins de fer. In Berlin, just before the First World War, there was a bookstore for every 3,700 citizens; in Leipzig, one for every 1,700. Kingston, Ontario, the city where I live, has a population of more than 100,000, and until five years ago, it had six bookstores. Now there are only four: two used and two new, including a chain and an independent. That’s one for every 25,000 citizens. Online megastores that deliver books electronically or by mail order (and soon by drone) have changed everything.

  Hugh’s profit margins are so slim, and often non-existent, that there is no room for a middleman. He sells his books himself, on his website and at the book fairs where he sets up his stall. He relies on the author to pass business his way. When we were selling The Paradise Project, he left it to me to stir up interest. Since then, he has taken a card from Audubon’s hand and offers a discount for pre-purchased books, with solicitations sent by email—the portal-to-portal equivalent of door-to-door.

  Hugh may be more forward-thinking than he knows. In Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, media consultant Brian O’Leary argues that in the content-flooded near-future world of books, sales may change from fee-per-purchase to a subscription model, where for a monthly payment readers can have access to books of a certain type, or by a certain author, or unlimited choice, models that already exist in some form with Kindle Unlimited and Scribd. He counters the complaint that the Web, already filled with lolcats and ego noise, is no place for selling books. “The question isn’t what stupid things people have put on the Web in the past but what great things we could do if books were connected on the Web in the future. That’s what sets people who love books, and the Web, to dreaming.”

  POOF!

  Paper is a plastic screen; type is a million shifting, floating balls; ink is seen as pixels; Gutenberg’s press has disappeared; local bookstores are vanishing, too. But all of this is just window dressing to the truly fundamental change that ebooks have wrought.

  Stephen King called books “portable magic.” Now the magic is truly ephemeral.

  Ebooks have set words loose in the ether. Words no longer have substance, shape, heft. I can’t feel them as a series of marks on a page. I can’t hold them in my hand, knowing they will be there tomorrow and the day after and a hundred years from now, barring floods and fires and the negligence of my species.

  Three thousand years of creating an alphabet, learning to write, experimenting with damp clay and rolls of donkey hide, stirring lampblack into egg white and grinding cinnabar into oil, carving letters from wood and lead and antimony, rubbing and pressing and stamping, sewing and gluing and fixing one surface to another have brought us full circle. Once again, words are ephemeral, disappearing as easily, as completely, as if spoken into the wind.

  I have approximately 1,200 books on the shelves at my back as I write. Imagine if I turned around one day and poof! they were gone. That’s what happened to Allene, who tells her sad tale on the Amazon forum “Books Disappeared from my Kindle.” True, she only had 340 books on her Kindle, and SReads only had 71, and someone named Castro doesn’t say how many were on his Samsung tablet when it froze.

  A quick call to customer service can usually restore accidental deletions, but it is chilling to know that digital retailers can—and do—delete ebooks that a reader has bought and stored in her digital library. On Friday, June 12, 2009, anyone who had purchased an ebook of George Orwell’s 1984 from Amazon woke up to find it gone from their Kindle. This was not a prank, although it was highly ironic given that in the Orwell novel, Big Brother gets rid of embarrassing stories by sending them down an incineration chute called “the memory hole.” In real life, it was Amazon.com that remotely deleted both 1984 and Animal Farm from the Kindles of their paying customers. The company later explained that it was a legal issue—Amazon had bought the ebooks from a company that didn’t hold the rights—and they refunded the cost of the books. But nothing could take back the sudden, absolute realization that ebooks are not ours to keep, not even when we pay for them.

  Like most people, I rarely read the fine print of user agreements before clicking, “I agree.” A close inspection of the Amazon agreement, however, reveals this clause:

  “Unless otherwise specified, Digital Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.”

  In other words, an ebook is not purchased in the way that we buy a physical book, which we own once we pay for it. What we buy from Amazon and Kobo and their ilk is a perpetual license to read an ebook.

  Our transactions in a physical bookstore are completely different. They are anonymous. They can’t be traced. If a bookseller discovered the books he was selling were illegal merchandise, he wouldn’t be able to find you to take back your copy. And even if he found you, he certainly couldn’t break into your house and take it off your shelf. Because Amazon is selling you a license, however, they can revoke it at any time, and because the transaction is tracked, they know exactly where to find your book. Perfectly legal, but unsettling nonetheless.

  The terms of ebook ownership are constantly being tweaked in response to what readers want, what is economical, and what is possible. At the moment, Amazon allows a Kindle owner to share five ebooks with other owners and so does Apple through its Family Sharing program, although with Apple, only entire libraries can be shared, not individual titles. Bloggers like to paint eretailers as power-crazed Big Brothers, but the truth is that it is still too technically complicated to tether unconnected devices without compromising individual privacy.

  Outside the mega-retailers, self-published authors are thinking up new ways to sell their digital-born books. Pay-what-you-want pricing, for instance, is a sales strategy so common now that, like BYOB, it has its own acronym: PWYW. Basically a book is offered for sale with a suggested price that buyers can pay or not, as they choose. Most people tend to pay the suggested price or more, but they go away feeling like they got a deal because they chose the price tag.

  My own financial arrangement with Hugh was loose. Very loose. We had no contract. This is uncharacteristic: I’ve taught financial workshops for artists. I would never recommend such a thing. But the book project evolved erratically: there was never a good time to bring it up, and, besides, my relat
ionship with Hugh seemed to have so little to do with money. When the book was finally published, he sent me an accounting. He would earn back his costs as soon as the first hundred copies were sold. After that, he suggested, we should split the proceeds. That sounded fair to me.

  The truth is, I won’t likely make any money from The Paradise Project. Not from Hugh’s letterpress edition, and not from the ebook version either. I will have to sell a lot of $10 ebooks to earn back the $2,000 I spent to have the text professionally designed, edited, formatted.

  For a few years in the 1990s, it seemed reasonable to expect to make a living as a writer of books. That no longer seems realistic, except for the very few.

  Writers are still trying to grasp the financial fallout of the transition from physical to digital, which has occurred, for some of us, within the span of time it takes to conceive and produce a book. In certain genres, such as paranormal, romance, and “new adult,” ebooks now account for up to ninety percent of sales. Even for literary fiction, a third of my royalties are from ebooks.

  The shock waves from this transition continue to push at what we’ve known. Author and editor tools are so easy and accessible that everyone, it seems, is now writing a book. Professional writers’ incomes are dropping as copyright laws are being dismantled and publishers are starting to release DRM-free ebooks. DRM stands for digital rights management, which is basically a lock put on digital books to prevent a reader from sharing or creating course packs and mash-ups. Increasingly, independent publishers are releasing books without DRM or any other form of copy restriction.

  The debate around DRM is both moral and financial: should a creator have rights to what they create? Should someone who uses a creator’s work for another purpose pay for that privilege? Maybe some new way will be developed to prevent unauthorized use, but my guess is that all text will soon be available to anyone who wants to share or reassemble it.