If you’ve been following our coverage of the disruption of the publishing industry, you know that the meaning of the term “book” has become pretty fluid, thanks to the e-book revolution; and it’s not just the Kindle, but new offerings like Byliner and Atavist, which blur the lines between books and magazines, and even new variations on an old format like serialized fiction. So do physical books really matter any more? Is there something special about them, or are they just a historical artifact whose time has come and gone?
Internet curmudgeon Nick Carr attacked this particular question in a recent post on his blog, and got into an interesting debate with digital-media theorist Clay Shirky via the comments. Ironically, while Shirky is often criticized as a purveyor of wishful thinking about media, it is Carr who argues there is something ineffable and mysterious about the format we know as the book, while Shirky’s argument seems more based in reality
(Note: we are going to be discussing the future of the book and potential business models for book-related content at our paidContent media conference in New York on April 18, with a panel discussion featuring Atavist founder Evan Ratliff and Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks).
In his original essay — entitled “Will Gutenberg laugh last?” — Carr notes that research shows e-book reading is still on the rise, but also shows that print reading continues to command a large share of the market, and that printed book sales are “holding up relatively well.” Some publishers and distributors have even noticed a slowdown in e-book sales, says Carr, who then goes on to propose some reasons why that might be the case, including:
“We may be discovering that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction)… the e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been.”
Shirky says even e-books themselves are transitional
Among those who showed up to comment on Carr’s piece was Shirky, who argues that it is more likely the book format itself is simply going to die out as a result of the web and other developments — and not just the printed book, but the whole concept of a book, which he describes as nothing more than a “production unit” for content, like the album was for music.
As Shirky puts it:
“Maybe books won’t survive the transition to digital devices, any more than scrolls survived the transition to movable type… what the internet portends is not the end of the paper container of the book, but rather the way paper organized our assumptions about writing altogether.”
In a comment of his own, Carr responds that whatever might happen to reference works like encyclopedias or phone books — which he agrees would make more sense in digital form — books that consist of an “extended narrative, either fictional or factual and almost always shaped by a single authorial consciousness and expressed in a single authorial voice” would always remain, even if it is in digital form, because there is more to it than just being a convenient container for content.
“Your desire to see cultural artifacts as mere technological artifacts, as “production units,” leads you to jump to the conclusion that because the narrative art of the book is resistant to digital re-formation, the narrative art is doomed to obsolescence.”
In a follow-up comment, Shirky maintains that the novel — fictional or not — is a content model that is “pretty decisively wrapped up in the affordances and limitations of print,” from their length to the idea that all of the content has to be delivered at the same time and for a single price. He argues that given the “native grain of the internet,” those features would not be transferrable to an online environment in the long term. In other words, e-books themselves might be just an interim step towards something else.
“If I’m right about this, the fate of the printed book will have less to do with competition from ebooks (at least in their ‘digital copy of print’ versions) than from competition with Longreads and New Inquiry for the time and attention of the reader of extended narratives.”
Will books follow the epic poem into oblivion?
This doesn’t sit well with Carr, however, who responds with a comment that (among other things) accuses Shirky of having an almost nihilistic approach to cultural artefacts like books, and of failing to see that in some cases having a new product or platform replace an old one might be a loss for humanity rather than a gain:
“I’m certainly not suggesting that uniquely valuable forms of media, or the modes of thinking or expression that they promote, are immune to destruction or alteration by historical forces, particularly ones driven by utilitarian concerns. But if such a medium is lost or diminished by technological or economic change, we shouldn’t simply say ‘who cares; other shit will come along.’”
In a response to an email from Wired magazine founder and author Kevin Kelly on the subject, Carr gives some examples of valuable forms of media that he believes have been lost or diminished: namely, “the oral epic poem, the symphony, the silent film with live musician accompaniment, the dramatic play, the short-form cartoon, the map [and] the LP.” And he argues that the book, the movie and the video game could also fall into this category.
In the end, Carr’s argument comes down to a belief that old forms of expression like the traditional book are better than anything that might have come along to displace them from their position of dominance in our culture — and his belief forms part of the argument in his book The Shallows, which argues that digital media is actually changing the way we think, and in general making us more stupid (a view I have argued against).
Are we seeing the rise of new artistic forms that will be as beneficial to humanity as the epic poem was, or the symphony, or the silent film? I think we are, and Clay Shirky seems to as well, but Carr clearly disagrees. Who is right won’t be known for some time, if ever.
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Marcus Hansson, retro writer and Frederic della Faile
Nice writeup Mathew. I think the “if ever” should be emphasized.
Nice writeup Mathew. I think the “if ever” should be emphasized.
A personal joke of mine is to end a conversation with “No, your opinion is wrong.”
Just try it sometime next time you are in a disagreement about taste. It feels very empowering ;)
Thanks, Dave — that’s a good one :-)
In general, I hate when people stop by and drop links into comments, but I just wrote about this very topic at Mashable on Wednesday.
http://mashable.com/2013/01/16/e-books-vs-print/
In general, my view probably aligns more with Carr’s — I think there is still value in the printed format beyond just as a cultural artifact.
My conclusion, though, ultimately backs up both Carr and Shirky, to an extent. I feel that e-books and printed books might end up being more divergent as mediums than one replacing the other. There have yet to be many artists who have truly explored what is possible with digital storytelling. Instead, we’re mostly just given facsimiles of the printed format, which lacks much value over convenience and portability.
Shirky is right that the web will ultimately allow artists to tell stories in ways that don’t match our current conceptions of what makes a “book” or a “novel” (though it doesn’t matter if we call these things e-books or shmoobies — that’s just a name, so it’s a mistake to say that e-books are a transition to something else… they could just be a transition to something else we still call e-books ;)).
Where I think he is wrong, is that you don’t have to discard one art form to make way for another. If that were the case, no one would ever go to the theater. We’d all just watch movies. Those are two different art forms, though they share common genetics. The same will be true of the novel — which won’t die — and whatever new methods of storytelling artists develop.
Thanks, Josh — some good points in there. Thanks for pointing it out. Links that are of value to our readers are always welcome :-)
I totally agree, and I will add that many readers I know value books in all forms. Pursuing and creating books and artefacts in as many forms as possible is just another tribute to the story itself. Digital encyclopedias have seen tremendous improvements and I will never go back to it in its ridiculous paper volumes. As far as fiction goes, I still lug my giant Tolstoy novel around all day next to my laptop. I also love pop-up books, which is a great medium in itself.
I think Mathew should check out Ben Popper’s great insight on the Verve about how animated gif teaches teens the art of silent film – I think we haven’t seen the last of anything just yet.
What killed the epic poem? A number of factors, obviously. But print, with its requirement of a minimum number of copies per run, was surely one of them. Digital distribution is liberating. If you are able to create an epic poem, write it and put it up on Smashwords. Put an audio version on Podiobooks. Will it be identical to the oral epic poems of past centuries? Of course not. And perhaps only 100 people will read it. But if they are the right 100 people a lost artform can be revived, free from commercial restraints.
This discourse seems to neglect the aesthetic of a book. The feel of the book in your hand, the physical turning of the pages and, especially in reference books, the ability to visually reference related content easily by flipping back or forth in the book. Bookmarks in e-books do not provide this visual and tactile ability. So I think that both have their place and will continue to do so.
I agree, Larry — even if that place is with a declining group of older folks, like the people who collect pocket watches :-)
Ebook reader clients provide the ability to bookmark, and also to highlight with notes and aggregate those automatically for instant access, and even share these socially with other readers, so i don’t follow your point about physical books having an advantage in that regard.
Civilization is about more choices, not about replacement. What is ending is the monopoly of the book, not its existence. Digital creation and display add a quasi infinite series of possibilities for storytelling with words, images, sound, video, from Twitter to 3D immersion. Great. The paper book and the book as digital format will stay, only marginalized among 1000 other choices. The book is dead. Long live the book.
Were you born yesterday! The Dead Sea Scrolls may just be written on old paper….but with out that paper…the Dead Sea would be…well just the Dead Sea.
Storytelling existed for thousand of years (since the caveman probably). It survived many transitions including the movable type. I can’t see why it can’t survive the digital transition.
Whether “book” will survive, it really depends on how narrowly “book” is defined. Encyclopedia still exists in the form of Wikipedia, but this net-native version of encyclopedia killed both the paper and digital version of the old (Britannica and Microsoft Encarte).
The net-native version of “book” is still in its infancy. I believe it will kill paper books and e-books (in its current form) in similar fashion.
The economic and associated interactions environment is as important as the format and also part of the medium.
And about this what is happenning is first an extreme concentration around a few “vertical monsters”, and the fact that ones bookshelf isn’t private anymore.
Seperating “private bookshelf holder”(only references or contracts), and creators/sellers/hosters would probably do more in favouring new content, why not simply websites to be bought (access to) “for life”, for instance.
http://iiscn.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/concepts-economie-numerique-draft/
Fascinating topic an one that hasn’t really reached wide distribution yet. There are those that hold that the loss of books equates to the loss of history, but I struggle to see how that’s the case when we’re saving everything..meaning history becomes a database of facts and ideas rather than a ‘view’.
What I have seen when browsing through B&N is that there are a lot of crappy books. I think what will happen is that “disposable” books will to the e route while there will still be printed books of quality. Note that I am not assigning quality to books I like, just what any segment might assign to a book or work.
Photographs did not do away with paintings and neither will ebooks do away with printed books. Both will cont. to have their place.
One factor no one has brought up is economics. Market substitutes tend to push out their forbears if they offer an equivalent product experience at lower cost. Physical books are fundamentally much less efficient than their electronic counterparts. This is because of the manpower and energy required to generate and transport the raw materials for printing and assembly, and then the impact on fossil-fuels for delivery to the distribution point and then to point of sales. Frankly, it is ludicrous to continue to mindlessly ship around physical representations of media that can be copied and shipped instantly electronically at infinitesimal cost. Books will continue to be printed and acquired, but will become more a luxurious curiosity.
Its interesting that Science Fiction is so varied an example here