In his book The End of Absence, Michael Harris quotes The Justification of Johann Gutenberg, a novel by Blake Morrison in which the inventor argues with an abbot not about the content the printing press is spewing forth, but about the way that text can now be read. “The word of God needs to be interpreted by priests,” the abbot exclaims, “not spread about like dung.”
According to Alison Gopnik, a Berkeley psychologist, the act of reading reshaped our brains long before the Internet came along. Parts of the brain once devoted to vision and speech have been “hijacked by print.” Instead of learning through doing, through apprenticeship—the way Hugh learns—I’m dependent on books.
As evidence, Gopnik points to dyslexia and attention disorders and learning disabilities. All signs, she says, that our brains were not designed to deal with such a profoundly unnatural technology as reading.
Marshall McLuhan, who spent his life studying the relationship between the medium and the message, seems to blame reading and writing for drawing us away from our natural thinking selves. “The eye speeded up and the voice quieted down.” He attributes our “shrill and expansive individualism” to Gutenberg’s invention.
The printing press let loose an explosion of books. Digitization has turned that grenade into an atomic bomb. I wonder how much of that disruption is obvious at the time it is going on. A shift in jobs is one immediate indicator: 500 years ago scribes were thrown out of work almost overnight; the herders who produced the vellum were made redundant. At the same time, the printing press created a burning need for typesetters and inkmakers and papermakers and bookbinders, trades no one had imagined a decade before. Similarly, as print shops close down, computer programmers, ebook designers, electronic marketers, and software developers are filling the gap with entirely new kinds of work.
There was a time when we thought computers would usher in a paperless world, when we believed those who said the book would soon be dead. We may not be able to anticipate the fallout from these dramatic paradigm shifts, but one thing is inevitable: there will always be someone on the podium, shaking their fist, warning of dire consequences and an impoverished future. Yet no one predicted that the social media revolution would create a culture in which everyone reads, and that includes books.
According to the twelfth annual Publishers Forum, 2016 marked “the end of the digital beginning.” Perhaps we have enough experience now to make some viable predictions. For instance, Ingenta, a publishing software provider, predicts that the print book will have staying power and so will the ebook: the two will diverge as each finds its own readers. (Agent/publisher/author/critic Andrew Lownie is less optimistic: he predicts traditional publishing’s share will drop to ten percent.) New on the horizon are digital audio book formats and audio podcasts: both are expected to grow exponentially. Andrew Rhomberg at Jellybooks is using data collected on digital reading devices to tell us how books are being read. (Ninety percent of readers give up after five chapters; readership declines sharply during the first hundred pages; those who make it past a hundred pages will likely keep going to the end.) David Crotty of The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog published by the Society for Scholarly Publishing, predicts that in our age of ever-expanding media abundance “the value of curation will continue to be increasingly vital.” Readers will be looking for networks, bloggers, reviewers, publishers they trust to filter the flood of books, to point them to what they want to read.
More readers, more writers, more books. Who can complain about that?
MOVING INTO OVERDRIVE
I went searching for the collective noun for books, hoping it would be something fanciful, like a shimmer of hummingbirds or a quiz of teachers, a cloudier of cats. I imagined a puzzling of books, a provocation of novels, a delight of poetry. But no, a gathering of printed pages bound on one side is exactly what one would expect: a library of books.
The word “library” was coined in the late fourteenth century, after the wholesale copying of books in scriptoriums made collections possible but before Gutenberg invented his mechanical press. The word comes from the Old French librairie, meaning a collection of books, which comes from the Latin librarium, meaning a chest containing books—at the time, as many volumes as a person was likely to own. The root of librarium is Liber, Latin for “book,” which derives from leub, meaning to strip or peel bark, which is ironic, given that books today are made from trees. The word “library” now stretches to cover the collection of text bytes in our digital devices, and Amazon continues to use the word “library” to refer to my personal collection of ebooks. (I also have an app called Delicious Library that digitally tracks and manages my collection of physical books by scanning their bar codes.)
At the beginning of the shift to computers, I was wary of digital libraries—what if the power goes out?—but surely the libraries of the future couldn’t be any more fragile than those of the past. The most famous ancient book hoard, the library at Alexandria, accidentally burned to the ground during the Siege of Alexandria in 48 BCE, when a fire set by Julius Caesar’s troops spread from the docks into the city.
By some estimates, ninety-nine percent of ancient Greek literature has been lost through fire, war, and the whims of history. Of the nine volumes of verse written by the Greek poet Sappho, only one complete poem survives. Of Livy’s 142 books on the history of Rome, only 35 can still be read today. Ovid’s version of Medea, Gorgias’ philosophical On Non-Existence, seventy-four plays by Euripides, some ninety plays each by Aeschylus and Sophocles, the entire works of the Greek philosopher Epicurus—all gone. And these are just the books that we know are missing because we’ve found some reference to them. There must be tens of thousands of works by authors we don’t even know existed.
The books themselves may be missing, but we have a good idea what an ancient Roman library looked like. When the eruptions of Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 CE, the lava also flowed over Herculaneum, burying the town and a mountainside villa purportedly owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. In 1752, the villa was excavated from under its burial shroud of ninety feet of stone and ash. Among its splendidly intact loggias and galleries was the only private library that survives from antiquity: a small room housing hundreds of papyrus scrolls stacked horizontally on shelves and some packed in travelling scroll boxes called capsae. Eight hundred books in all, with only a precious few culled for an aborted escape from what has come to be called the Villa die Papyri, the Villa of the Papyrus Scrolls. Some believe that this library was only an antechamber, that the main library has yet to be excavated.
In the 265 years since the magnificent library at Herculaneum was found, not one scroll has been read. Ironically, the ash that charred the papyrus also preserved it. The minute these buried treasures are exposed to air they start to deteriorate and disappear, this time permanently. And as soon as anyone tries to unfurl the scrolls, the paper crumbles to dust. So there the books sit in their ashy tomb, tantalizing repositories of some of the world’s great stories, a verbal exposition on the way of life of an entire civilization. Words from the past that could speak to us, but can’t.
Over the centuries, various means have been used to try to soften the scrolls enough to unfurl them: rose water, mercury, “vegetable gas,” sulfuric compounds, papyrus juice, and, most recently, a cocktail of glycerin, ethanol, and warm water. Every attempt did nothing to ease open the tightly wound papyrus and in fact caused significant harm. Archeologists came to accept that the scrolls might never be physically unfurled, but in the mid-1990s, they began to consider digital technology as a way of penetrating the scrolled pages, reading the words without laying a finger on the artifact. They tried multispectral imaging, or MSI—developed by NASA for use in mapping mineral deposits during planetary flyovers—to make the scribed letters stand out from the charred background, but they weren’t readable. Then Brent Seales, a software engineer, proposed putting one of the unopened scrolls inside a CT (computed tomography) scanner, a ki
nd of X-ray used to make 3-D images of human bones and organs. First, he experimented with homemade papyrus scrolls and other old documents and, finally, in 2009, got permission to scan an unopened Herculaneum scroll. Nothing. A physicist at Stanford came across an article about the attempt and thought his synchrotron—a kind of particle accelerator that can be “tuned” to look for certain particles—might make the iron in the iron gall ink legible. Like magic, the writing on the ancient papyrus became visible. In ten years, reading the scrolls had gone, as Seales put it, “from impossible to plausible, even probable.” An article in the January 2015 issue of Nature Communications announced that the “virtual” unwrapping of a Herculaneum scroll had worked: without physically touching the charred remains, a French team had found writing scattered across the papyrus and had managed to make out one chilling phrase—“would fall.”
Digital technology, accused of killing the paper book, may yet succeed in saving whole libraries.
Perhaps it is the ephemeral nature of every sort of communication that makes our species so intent on finding a way to hang onto our written words. Project Gutenberg, for instance, takes as its mission the archiving of all the great cultural works of every continent. When Project Gutenberg was first announced, many writers—myself included—were concerned that it would digitize all books, past and present, and post them online for free download, breaking copyright and compromising the ability of authors to make even a paltry living from their work. But that got sorted early on, and today most of the 50,000 books in the Project Gutenberg collection are digitized only after the rights have reverted to the public domain. The rest are digitized with permission. In the forty-five years that Project Gutenberg has been in existence, there have been massive changes in technology, yet from the beginning, the team was committed to creating downloads in long-lasting open formats that could be read on almost any computer.
The first books were entered manually into computer files by volunteers at Illinois Benedictine University. After optical character recognition scanners were invented, the process became streamlined, and today the site is hosted by ibiblio at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Books are available in plain text and, wherever possible, in formats such as HTML, PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and Plucker. New books are added at a rate of about fifty a week. Most are in English, but works in other languages are increasingly available as Project Gutenberg spreads around the world. When I download from Gutenberg.ca, it is on the understanding that these books conform to Canadian copyright laws.
When Michael Hart invented the digital library, his mission was a noble one: “To provide as many ebooks in as many formats as possible for the entire world to read in as many languages as possible” and to “break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy.” It’s true that Project Gutenberg books aren’t very pretty and often lack colophons to establish which version of a book was scanned. The books selected for scanning may not be the ones I would choose: this is a crowd-sourced project, after all, run mainly by volunteers. And occasionally, Project Gutenberg–scanned books have made their way into the commercial marketplace, especially into the Amazon digital bookshop, where they are sold for a profit.
But it is hard to argue with the extended life this huge, accessible library has given to books that might otherwise be lost to us.
Libraries full of books provide an interesting meeting ground for technology: old printed books need digitization to give them immortality; the online world still needs paper books to feed its insatiable appetite for content. People want to read, not only new books but old books, too. It was inevitable that commerce would come into the mix, as it has with the ambitious Google Books Library Project, which set out to digitize the contents of all the world’s libraries. Started in 2002, it had scanned some thirty million books by 2015, when it was stalled by an ongoing lawsuit in which authors and publishers contend that Google was infringing on their copyright, scanning books without permission. Google didn’t declare its project as non-profit and so left itself open to the accusation that it intends to profit from the work of others. Authors and publishers continue to struggle to retain control of their copyrights, but despite the challenges, Google carries on. If the moral and legal issues get resolved, by the end of this millennium, Google Books Library Project will have scanned all the world’s titles, which in 2010 they estimated at 130 million.
So many books. So little time.
At the moment, my husband is writer-in-residence at the Haig-Brown House in Campbell River, British Columbia, far up the eastern coast of Vancouver Island. When he first arrived, he was given strict instructions about using the Haig-Brown library. He was told not to touch a book without first slipping on a pair of the white cotton gloves mounded in a basket on the large square coffee table at the centre of the room.
The books are arranged not alphabetically by author or by title. They are arranged by the birth date of the author. This boggles my mind, especially given that the system was developed in pre-digital days when it wasn’t so easy to discover when anyone was born. The oddness of the system is not unique. I’ve seen home libraries shelved according to the height of the books or colour of the spines. The main character in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity organizes his record collection autobiographically, in the order they were acquired. Public libraries use the Dewey Decimal System to shelve books alphabetically by author within numbered subject categories that often makes for strange bedfellows. That system divides knowledge into ten main classes with decimal subclasses. Library of Congress has twenty classes represented by capital letters. B is Philosophy, F is History, P is Literature. Only G for Geography makes any kind of sense.
In our country house, we organized our books in rough categories by room. The dining room was Canadian fiction, my study was international fiction, the hallway was sociology and history, the kitchen was culinary, and the third floor was science and nature. Within each category, books were shelved alphabetically by author. A few years ago, when we suffered our renovation disaster, we decamped to a hotel for six weeks while cleaners in hazmat suits took down every book, cleaned it of silica dust, and packed it into a box; when the air in the house was clean again, the boxes were returned and unpacked. We took pains to describe our shelving system and how important it was for two writers to be able to find their books. Unfortunately, the alphabet was terra incognita for the workers reshelving the books.
As we moved those thousands of books to the house in the city where we now live, I couldn’t help envying friends who have converted to a digital library. Public lending libraries are trending in the same direction. OverDrive’s partnership with local libraries makes digital books available to library members. This is a free service. In 2011, Amazon monetized Carnegie’s philanthropic notion of allowing everyone access to books through public lending libraries by introducing the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL), available only to Amazon Prime members. For an annual fee, Prime members have access to nearly 5,000 books that they can read at a rate of one a month, with no due date.
In 2014, Amazon launched a new subscription service that lets users read Kindle ebooks (on Kindles or through apps) for a fixed fee instead of buying individual titles or becoming an Amazon Prime member. Subscribers to Kindle Unlimited have the choice of over a million books and can read as many of them as they want for $9.99 a month, although they can only have ten on their Kindle at a time. (In 2016, readers buying books from online retailers could choose from 4 million titles on Amazon and 4.7 million on Kobo.) Some of the money earned through Kindle Unlimited is set aside in a monthly pool that is paid out to self-published authors whose books are borrowed, originally on a per-borrowed-book basis, now on a pages-read basis. In February 2016 some three billion pages were read; the pool was $14 million. The amount paid to authors was less than half a cent per page.
Other ebook subscription systems sprang up—Scribd, Entitle, Oyster—but they were short-lived. In 2015, Oyster was bough
t out by Google and closed its edoors, as did Entitle. Scribd ended its all-you-can-read-for-$8.99 subscription plan and now allows only three ebook reads a month for that price. By early 2016, Kindle Unlimited was the only subscription service still offering all-you-can-read for a monthly fee, although the Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Hachette) don’t participate, leaving readers with a reduced pool of self-published books and those from participating small and mid-sized publishers.
The number of books now accessible to an individual reader is astounding. To the thousands of print volumes in my local lending library, I can add millions through ebook subscription services, Kindle Lending Library, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg. Why have a bookshelf in the house at all?
It’s not the weight or bulk of printed books that keeps me from clearing all our shelves in favour of an electronic library, my own or one I subscribe to. I would miss browsing. Not the scattered hunt and peck of a Firefox search, the kind that strains the eyes and exhausts the brain. I would miss the browsing I do when I stand in front of my wall of books, a browsing that is something like daydreaming, an unleashing of the brain to wander where it will, making connections unguided by the rational mind, scanning past Homes, Høeg, Ishiguro, Kingsolver, and in the muddling of those works coming up with an idea for an altogether new kind of literary cocktail.
My books are my brain and my heart made visible.
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