 |
|
THE IMPLICATIONS OF
THE E-BOOK For years, the solution has always been to build or acquire a new warehouse. We go through the system and identify all the books that haven't been borrowed for a certain amount of time, those unpopular and neglected volumes that gather dust through student disinterest, and move them to a dark place out of sight where they can still be borrowed through courier service. That was always the assumed next step. However, for several reasons that might include the recent financial crisis, the plan changed this time. Earlier this year I unlocked the door to one of our warehouses and found it packed tight with dozens of orange wheelie-bins. They're the same type that we have in our office for the disposal of sensitive documents. I soon heard the details of the university's ambitious space-making project - effective immediately, tens of thousands of books were to be marked for destruction, removed from the warehouses, and mulched. I don't think you can truly feel the pang of that concept until you see the scale of it, see those dozens and dozens of orange bins lined up in a row, and watch a large team of casual employees walk along the stacks with arms outstretched, knocking books to their doom without glancing at their covers. I asked another employee why, if we were determined to jettison these volumes, did we not instead try to sell them? Or at least donate them? The response, as far as she understood it, was that Big Boss thought that digital books were the way of the future. There was no reason to feel any attachment to these cumbersome objects with the knowledge that, eventually and inevitably, we were going to move toward the full digitisation of our entire collection. Unless we wanted to appear as some relic stone-age institution, we would have to participate in the modern technological era. That means, death to the books.  The books were then destroyed by a rampaging werecat. I admit I'm a romantic about books. I love them. I have a collection of books that includes mint-condition volumes that I will never open, because they are more a symbol to me than a tool. But I am not a luddite. I understand that media has to die. I understand the reasons for it, and generally I accept it. When I was young, I had a "pen pal" from Scotland. I would write her letters, and she would write back to me. Though we stopped conversing after only a couple of years (my laziness), I was always excited to hear from her. I'd tell her about Australia, she'd tell me about Scotland, and though we didn't really have anything in common, nor was there any real substance to our conversations, we exchanged about four or five letters a year. The entire novelty was in the fact that we were living on opposite sides of the world, and sending letters to one another, and how amazing that was. This idea is absolutely absurd today, for two reasons. Both involve the internet. I work for an online publication that is based in the United States, and I converse with my editor a couple of times a week. I've never met any of the people I work for. I didn't know what my editor looked like until a couple of months ago when a mutual friend tagged him in a photo on Facebook. The fact that I can now hold down a job in the USA highlights the absurdity of the pen-pal concept - not only is it no longer even remotely interesting that I converse with people living on another continemt, but the idea that I would use pen, paper and envelopes to do it is laugh-out-loud insane. And yet, there was a time when lots of people had a hobby that involved writing letters that said nothing in particular to people living in other countries just because of the novelty of that idea. And that time was fewer than twenty years ago.  I'm digressing, but my point is that digital technology kills media, and kills it quickly. Ten years ago, "snail mail" was just called "mail". These days, I frequently forget the price of stamps and have to embarrassingly ask the post office clerk how much it costs to send a letter, because I use the postal service about twice a year. It's a little sad that letters died, but the convenience of e-mail is such that I don't mourn it much. The internet opened up the world, and I'm okay with that. What causes me anguish today is the fact that the book is the next item on the chopping block. The Google megaconglomorate is working on a project to convert every book ever written into a PDF document, while the Kindle and the iPad are revolutionising the way people consume print media. I was in a lecture the other day in which we discussed the technological revolution and its implications for hard-copy media - the internet is killing print newspapers, enough so that Rupert Murdoch is shivering under his Armani suit, and Amazon is holding the great international publishing houses for ransom through its monopoly over the e-book. There is crisis in the publishing industry - since around 2008, book sales are plummeting. Amazon is currently selling more e-books than physical books. The thing about business is that nobody is going to fight this - they're going to go where the money is, and any venture that fails to make money is going to be thrown into an orange wheelie-bin. It seems completely unbelievable to those of us growing up in generation-Y and older to suggest that books will ever go extinct. They're books. There is no more potent a symbol of human civilisation crawling out of the filth, walking upright, and becoming aware of themselves. Books are older than the printing press. One of the great tragedies of history has always been the destruction of the Library of Alexandria by Roman conquerors, so many books and scrolls burned or cast away that the Nile ran black with ink. Think of the stigma attached to the habits of the Nazis to burn books - burn books!! - and the dystopia of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Burning a book is as potent a horror as burning a flag. Surely we'll never let the book concept die. I don't think that a lot of people realise the extent to which the younger generation laughs at us for our stagnant devotion to a dying media and eagerly anticipates the day we finally die and let progress continue unhindered.  I can see the arguments that will be leveled against me at this point, primarily that this is not the same as burning books. This is not censorship or the destruction of information. This is the same information being converted to another form. Rather than paper and glue, the books of the future will not take up space. You can fit an infinity of them onto one portable device and summon them as needed. It is progress. Fahrenheit 451 isn't going to meet some ironic end in a bonfire - in fact, it will only become more accessible. Against this I argue that the full implications of the digital book revolution may not be fully envisioned by those anticipating it. First of all, and perhaps most jarring, is that it means the absolute end of the concept of the library. Think about that. For centuries, we've been allowed the privilege of free information - we can borrow books and read them at no cost, adhering to the promise that we'll give them back for the advantage of others. We pay for the convenience of owning a book, but its contents are never denied to us if we just want to hold it temporarily. The library is one of civilisation's greatest ideas, and one that has allowed us to progress. Those on the bottom rung of society, who can barely afford a meal, are still never denied access to knowledge. Consider now that you can not "borrow" an e-book. Digital information is a mysterious thing, and the puzzle of it probably became most evident during the rise of the MP3 and the copyright mess that has ensued ever since. The philosophical conundrum is whether or not digital music piracy is "stealing". When you steal a CD from a store, you are depriving the store, the industry and the artist of a physical object that cost money to produce. That object is no longer in their possession. But when you download an MP3, you are cloning data. Nobody has been deprived of anything, there is no object to begin with, what you stole was imaginary from the outset. The music industry has always been faced with the difficult task of explaining how the duplication of media can be considered theft. Most music-sharing advocates make their point with the common argument that they download MP3s as a kind of "try before you buy" system. A lot of people claim that, if they like what they hear, they will support the artist by paying for the album. And I don't dispute that people do this. The problem is that it's impossible to enforce. It's an honour system, and capitalism abhors an honour system. You can't force people to consume digital media on a loan basis, because unlike a physical object, you can't make people give it back. You can't rely on them to delete the file. That is why media companies can't and don't accept the trial argument for digital music and movies. For digital media, it's all or nothing - either you pay for all of the music you download, or all music becomes free and the recording industry collapses. Which option do you suppose the recording industry leans toward?  Likewise, the concept of the library becomes absurd in the world of the e-book. You can't just "lend" somebody a digital book. Libraries are usually a service offered by governments and institutions at a loss for the greater good - they exist in a kind of superposition between free media and capitalistic industry. After the digital conversion, I don't see any way around the fact that either all books become free, harbouring the collapse of the publishing industry, or it's the library that dies and all books cost money. It's one or the other, and don't you doubt that industry will win. (Addendum: Since I published this, I have had friends set me straight about "borrowing" e-books. Apparently, it is happening, with special software that automatically kills the file after a certain amount of time. Also, the process is so cumbersome and awkward that almost nobody I've asked who has tried it is interested in trying it again.) There is another thought that I've had, and perhaps as a writer it is the one most terrifying to me. That is the possible death of literary prose. Now, I want to back up here and admit that I'm going to start to sound exactly like the people I abhor in the world, those literary snobs who frown upon the "low-brow" arts and quietly call for the death of popular culture. I am a notorious apologist for genre fiction, among my idols are the widely and vividly consumed authors such as Stephen King, who reach millions of readers to the scorn of those who consider themselves among the intellectual elite. That's not to say that I don't see the argument that the elite make about popular culture - I can't make it through five pages of Twilight or Eat, Drink, Love, and a few years ago I would gladly have kicked the author of The Secret right in the face and arms.  Thanks for single-handedly ruining everything, Rhonda. What haunts me is the fact that so much of what we now consider classic literature was absolutely despised in the time it was written. What chills me is that Huxley's Brave New World was an absolute flop when it first went to press. The reason that we appreciate these great works today is because someone picked up a dusty old second-hand book at some point and realised that, holy shit, this is incredible. That brings me to my second argument - that the e-book ultimately means the death of the second-hand book. When people read a book that they don't appreciate, it's rare that they'll throw it in the garbage. This links back, I guess, to the social stigma that we feel about book-burning and defacement. Books are recycled. The highlight of my every year is an event called the Lifeline Bookfest, reportedly the largest second-hand book sale in the world, where millions of donated books are re-sold to tens of thousands of avid readers. I've never attended one at which I didn't pick up some kind of jewel. But you can't re-sell an e-book. An e-book never fades, never wears out, it's as good second-hand as it is direct from the publishing house. If you buy an e-book and it doesn't appeal to you, you don't sell it back to a second-hand bookstore or donate it to charity. You delete it. You wipe it from your memory. You erase its existence. Would Huxley, or Poe, or Steinbeck, Golding, Salinger, Melville, or even Shakespeare still exist if their work had been so easily discarded in its time? I can't really say. But it frightens me that the digital revolution might possibly come at the cost of the concept of the immortality of the author. As a writer, I'm comforted by the idea that, should I achieve the holy grail of publication, my work will live on. My imagination will transform into a physical object that can be stocked in a library and never die, even after I do. What we face is the idea that the only books that will perpetuate are those that make it to the New York Times bestseller list, and anything less will suffer deletion at the hands of the future's limited attention span, editing most of our literature out of existence before it has a chance to make an impact. Barthes didn't have this in mind when he talked about the "death of the author", but I think it's an interesting quote to make here. If not death, we might instead appeal to forgetfulness. The digitisation of media might usher in the new age of short attention spans, and that is something I fear, if only selfishly. But then, the future is yet to be written.
HTML Comment Box is loading
comments...
|