This Friday marks the start of another BookExpo, Canada's annual four-day celebration of books. You remember books, don't you? Those inert, bound, rectangular stacks of paper covered in neatly printed rows of words on sequentially ordered pages?
Actually, there's no reason why you should have forgotten. Despite the rise of the Internet, dematerialization-by-digitization (Hello, Napster; goodbye, CD) and the proliferation of new leisure-time tools, activities and substances (MP3 players, GameCube, DVDs, cameras disguised as phones, satellite TV, ecstasy), books seem to be holding their own.
Going into the 2006 BookExpo, being held June 9 to 12 at the vast Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the industry ought to be pumped. A 2005 report by Hill Strategies Research using Statistics Canada numbers found that, at $1.13-billion, the value of book purchases in 2001 ranked third among overall cultural expenditures, just behind newspapers ($1.22-billion) and movie-going ($1.18-billion) and ahead of “live sports events” ($451-million) and museum and gallery attendance ($375-million).
As well, in 2003, expenditures on books and magazines accounted for almost 21 per cent of the $22.8-billion Canadians spent that year on cultural goods and services, second only to the $11.8-billion dropped on home-entertainment products. Another Hill Strategies study published last year reported that 16 million Canadians said they read books for pleasure “every day” or “almost every day.”
Yet there seems little joy in the book biz these days. People in the industry — writers, agents, publishers, distributors and booksellers — seem to worry as much as those in the music industry, conventional TV broadcasting, AM radio and all the other cultural ecosystems supposedly on the endangered list. When Roy MacSkimming published his well-regarded history of Canadian publishing in 2003, he called it The Perilous Trade.
Sure, book types say, more books are being published than ever before, and more people want to write them. But the books that are being published lack literary merit while their marketing and promotion are a poor man's echo of what General Mills does for a new cereal. The worriers point out that, per capita, fewer people are buying books, serious readers are a minority, authors don't have the cultural importance of Lindsay Lohan and George Clooney, and if their book isn't noticed by Oprah or the Giller Prize judges, fuggedaboutit.
U.S. novelist John Updike summed up some of the dismay this week in an interview in Time. (He appeared on the magazine's cover in 1978, and again in 1982, but never since.) “Books are still bought, and you see them being read in airplanes,” he tells Lev Grossman, “but it's a last resort, isn't it?
“The category of ‘literary fiction' has sprung up recently to torment people like me who just set out to write books, and if anyone wanted to read them, terrific, the more the merrier. But now, no, I'm a genre writer of a sort. I write literary fiction, which is like spy fiction or chick lit.”
Some might dismiss Updike's plaint as the “when-I-was-young” musings of a 74-year-old man. And, indeed, that's probably how most publishing types will take them. There will always be authors and readers. What's worrisome is how the two connect, now and in the future. Will the book remain in the bound form that we've used for centuries? Or are the new technologies that have already altered our lives in the last 15 years dissolving both the book and the infrastructure that creates, distributes and sells it?
BookExpo is hosting a day-long confab on precisely this topic on Friday. Guest speakers include Michael Cader, who a little over four years ago started publishersmarketplace.com, a highly influential daily Internet newsletter; Tom Turvey, strategic partner development manager with Google Book Search and Dan Rose, director of digital media at Amazon.com.
It's a pretty safe bet much of their conversation will refer, directly or otherwise, to an 8,000-word article by Kevin Kelly, the so-called “senior maverick” with Wired magazine, in the May 14 New York Times Magazine. Called Scan This Book! — a riff on Abbie Hoffman's incendiary tome from 1971, Steal This Book! — Kelly's article argues that the stand-alone book is going the way of the dodo as corporations and libraries scan millions of books each year, “turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen” anywhere at any time. In Kelly's future, it's the text that will count, not the book, since virtually every word in a scanned text will be “cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled.
“In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world's only book,” Kelly declares. And woe to those conventional book publishers and copyright lawyers who raise cavils about digital interlinking.
In a sense, Kelly's manifesto is an update of another work of prophecy published at the start of this century. Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future caused a fuss in large part because it was by Jason Epstein, the famous creator of both the “quality trade paperback” (in 1953) and the Library of America as well as co-founder of the immensely influential New York Review of Books. He was, in short, “a man of the book.” Yet in Book Business he evoked an imminent world where books would be sold electronically “from a single source directly to readers. Readers would then download onto screens or, more likely in [Epstein's] opinion, purchase them from machines ... that would print single copies on demand at point of sale wherever in the world electricity and an Internet connection exist, in effect ATMs for books.”
The proliferation of the book kiosk hasn't happened (yet), and that's no surprise to Michael Cader. “Talk of the end of the book and similar scenarios is way overwrought,” he said in a recent interview, “just as it was overwrought five or six years ago. . . . The Internet does change everything — it's certainly a disruptive technology — but it doesn't necessarily destroy or replace everything. So far, I would argue, the Internet has been a boon to publishers, authors and booksellers.” Moreover, he adds, “the book as a platform remains quite healthy. Certainly those who prefer long-form reading prefer to do it with books rather than on a computer.”
Cader's view is supported by Ben McNally, who's been in the retail book business for 30 years and is now manager of Nicholas Hoare Books in Toronto. “I don't foresee the day in my lifetime when kids are walking around with iPods carrying the collected works of Charles Dickens on them,” he snorted last week. “I think the exercise of reading is habit-forming [and] it's going to take a lot more than technology to break that addiction. Yes, there are all sorts of people who don't read. But there have always been people who haven't read.”
There are warning signs. In part because of electronic technologies, “we read less deeply, we read shorter” than 10 or 15 years ago, Cader observes. “It seems the more that is available to read,” he adds, “the less we want to read.” Indeed, a 2004 U.S. National Endowment for the Arts report showed a precipitous drop in reading, especially of literature “among every segment of the adult population.”
But Hill Strategies reported last year that reading rates among Canadians “have not changed” since Canadian Heritage conducted a similar study in 1991. “I went to university when Marshall McLuhan was still around and making his predictions,” McNally says. “I've been hearing this shit about the end of books and the death of reading my entire life, and I'm 57.”
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