“Can I Kindleize that Velveteen Rabbit For Ya?”

Like most writing and reading households, The Missus and mine has books way in excess of the available bookshelf space. We’ve lived in this house for more than eight years now, yet still — still! — somewhere around six or eight cartons and big plastic tubs of books take up space in our (mercifully dry) garage.

On the one hand, as The Missus soberly points out, we’re never going to (re-)read all the books we’ve already got. Why not donate them to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or just sell the damn things in a garage sale or on eBay?

And yet, and yet…

In just the six or or seven months I’ve been writing here on RAMH, on probably 15 or 20 occasions I have longed to put my hands on a book. Not just any book but a specific one for a specific occasion. A book containing a quote I know, sorta, but don’t know. Or a book containing some random fact which I don’t quite have the words for.

Every one of those books is in one box or another in the garage. I know exactly what their covers look like. Frustratingly, because some of them are in big translucent plastic containers, I can actually see some of them.

(Aside to The Missus: Don’t worry. I’m not about to start rummaging. We both know what will happen: I’ll find another book I wouldn’t mind having to hand, and then another, and then another… Within a half-hour I’ll have an empty box and even less space upstairs in the office for trivial activities like, oh, say, standing and sitting.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if I had all those books on… hmm… online, maybe? or digitized and placed on a little six-inch stack of Amazon Kindles?

A recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, by James Gleick*, tackles this problem. The piece begins by discussing the woes besetting the publishing industry (writers, agents, and editors as well as the faceless corporations themselves):

The gloom that has fallen over the book publishing industry is different from the mood in, say, home building. At least people know we’ll always need houses.

And now comes the news, as book sales plummet amid the onslaught of digital media, that authors, publishers and Google have reached a historic agreement to allow the scanning and digitizing of something very much like All the World’s Books. So here is the long dreamed-of universal library, its contents available (more or less) to every computer screen anywhere. Are you happy now? Maybe not, if your business has been the marketing, distributing or archiving of books.

If you’ve spent any time at all recently looking at the blogs of editors and agents, the angst will be familiar to you. It’s rampant not just among the bloggers and other opinion leaders, but among the commenters — often writers, nearly always passionate readers — upon their opinions.

Strangely, what is at stake — driving the panicky stampede over the cliff — isn’t the future of literacy, the real linchpin of civilization. It’s the future of books.

Gleick again:

…one expects to hear a certain type of sentimental plea for the old-fashioned book — how you like the feel of the thing resting in your hand, the smell of the pages, the faint cracking of the spine when you open a new book — and one may envision an aesthete who bakes his own bread and also professes to prefer the sound of vinyl. That’s not my argument. I do love the heft of a book in my hand, but I spend most of my waking hours looking at — which mainly means reading from — a computer screen. I’m just saying that the book is technology that works.

[…]

For some kinds of books, the writing is on the wall. Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia. Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the Oxford English Dictionary, has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever. And those hefty objects called “telephone books”? As antiquated as typewriters. The book has had a long life as the world’s pre-eminent device for the storage and retrieval of knowledge, but that may be ending, where the physical object is concerned.

Even if you’ve no personal stake in the publishing industry, the above may cause your liberally-educated soul to break into a sweat.

Yet Gleick takes it even further, tightening the thumbscrews for authors — all us airy creative types, for whom the making of books just serves as an everyday-ugly commercial reminder of the need to share our art (our art goddammit!) with our eager public: He discusses the Google case which he mentioned in the opening paragraphs. (Gleick was among those representing authors as parties in the case, so he presumably speaks with authority on the topic.)

Google has been pushing the idea for some time, through its Google Books project: For most practical purposes (but even for many aesthetic, squishy-philosophic ones, like simple nostalgia), committing words to paper as a way of ensuring the words’ permanence is not dead, exactly, but at a dead end.

Why? Because paper is a finite resource, and we’re asking it to serve as a medium for what appears (daily more convincingly) to be an infinity of ideas and their expression. Converting forests to paper, and then laying words upon the paper, and finally delivering it to readers (and vice-versa) — this all isn’t just costly, it’s astronomically costly. Profit margins are slim-to-none. And we’re not just paying all the direct costs (materials, labor, distribution), we’re paying all the indirect ones as well, especially the environmental ones: the trees, air, and water consumed in the making of every single book.

Along comes Google, with it Google Books project to convert (ideally) every book in print into digital and searchable form. And at first, Google had great success with the project, signing up numerous large universities as partners in the digitization of their contents.

So why would authors object to this? If we’re artists, and Google Books makes sharing our art easier, then shouldn’t we—

Not so fast. We do have commerce on our minds, too. Gleick, on the approximately seven million books digitized so far:

…the vast majority, four million to five million, are books that had fallen into a kind of limbo: protected by copyright but out of print. Their publishers had given up on them. They existed at libraries and used booksellers but otherwise had left the playing field.

In the settlement, Google has agreed to compensate authors and their estates — whoever owns the rights to the material — for the privilege of putting their works online, in searchable form, where readers and researchers will be reading ads, clicking on links, and so on, just as they do on regular Google search pages.

But where will this leave publishers?

Gleick suggests that the processes of publishing will be de-coupled from the processes of printing. New material will continue to be in demand: editors will still need to make acquisitions, agents will still need to know the markets, and so on. But what we now think of as publishers, he says, will almost certainly just feed their products directly to Google or some competitor.

The end of books, then? No, says Gleick at last:

Forget about cost-cutting and the mass market. Don’t aim for instant blockbuster successes. You won’t win on quick distribution, and you won’t win on price. Cyberspace has that covered.

Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.

This sounds utterly heavenly to me, to tell you the truth, and I was going to stop right there with an “Amen!” But I’ve had second thoughts, or maybe just qualifications, on two grounds.

First, there’s the issue (mentioned earlier) of literacy as opposed to that which literacy currently rides on — to wit, the printed word. But democracy doesn’t need the printed word; it needs words. More importantly, it needs to make those words available to as wide an audience as possible.

A commentator on NPR this morning mentioned in passing that “eighty percent of the US population has access to the Internet.” You may feel differently, but I worry about the missing twenty percent. If all books are only online, and/or available for download to Sony Readers and Amazon Kindles, what good is that going to do someone who can’t afford to pay for either medium?

Both the Sony and Amazon devices sell for hundreds of dollars, and each is capable of holding many books at once. (Currently, the Kindle can hold up to 200 books; the Sony, well over a hundred.) Wouldn’t it make better sense for a democracy if one could obtain a Kindle for one-tenth the price — but capable of holding only two or three books at a time? Couldn’t the damn hardware be rented out, pre-loaded with a title or two but locked from further downloads? Couldn’t they be donated to libraries?

Second — and the reason for this post’s title — mightn’t the all-digital publishing world of the future do absolutely horrific damage not just to children’s books, but by extension to the kids themselves?

Is it just a romantic old fuddy-duddy idea that great kids’ books really are meant not just to be read but to be held, thick cardboard pages turned by fumbling little fingers?

When Playskool comes out with its first Kiddle or whatever they call it, you know, the thing that looks like an Etch-a-Sketch but with big bright red-and-yellow knobs and a bright, easily readable E-ink screen — when that happens, will anything be lost?

Is reading reading just because of the way our eyes and minds work? Or is it reading because of the way our fingers work, too?

________________________

* The image at the top of this post is a rendering of the so-called Lorenz attractor which, per Wikipedia, is:

…a 3-dimensional structure corresponding to the long-term behavior of a chaotic flow, noted for its butterfly shape. The map shows how the state of a dynamical system (the three variables of a three-dimensional system) evolves over time in a complex, non-repeating pattern.

Gleick’s bestselling book Chaos, originally published in 1988, made Lorenz attractors and other concepts of chaos theory accessible to thousands of readers.