The Book (1454-2008?)

Originally published in
Etude magazine

The book is dead.That’s the title of the book I’m currently reading. Of course the fact that this book was written and published, that I bought it and am reading it would seem a powerful argument against its main premise.In fact, 172,000 books were published in the U.S. last year. If you count vanity press and print-on-demand, a new book of fiction is right now being published every 30 minutes in America. How can the book be dead?There are several good answers to this. First of all, most of those hundred thousand-plus books are essentially moribund, gathering dust on the acres of bookcases installed in megastores to lend them gravitas. Actually, as a Viking publisher remarked a while ago, “everyone is reading the same 20 books.” The miles of aisles at B&N and Borders are just, in the words of a B&N honcho, “wallpaper” – background decoration so that the place feels literary. The people coming in to buy one of those 20 anointed books want to browse for a while, sit in an armchair, sip a latte and feel ensconced in the world of books – of which eight out of ten flop in the marketplace. They die – mostly swiftly – moved from the front of the store “new” table to back shelf in three weeks, from shelf to return carton in two months and from there to $1.95 online sellers and Costco remainder bins.But Sherman Young, the Australian academic who wrote The Book is Dead, is mourning the book for other reasons. He argues that the seemingly crowded literary marketplace is mostly jammed with what he calls “functional books” and “anti-books” – not real books. Real books are well and lovingly crafted, emotionally and intellectually resonant. They are the work of people who think and care – authors, editors and publishers – people passionate about both words and ideas. This sort of literary endeavor is dying, the author argues.Functional books, on the other hand, are flourishing. These are the instructional and inspirational tomes that frequently top the best-seller list. You know the titles, from the recent You: On a Diet to the venerable What Color is My Parachute? There’s Who Moved My Cheese and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Just-about-Anything for Dummies. There are mega-selling cookbooks (Better Homes and Garden Cookbook: 38 million) and metastasizing franchises like Chicken Soup for the fill-in-the-blank Soul.What the author calls “anti-books” are also on the rise. These are products manufactured for the marketplace – “cynical creations,” the author says, and I agree – whose existence owes more to sales potential, synergy, cross-marketing and platform exploitation than to the quality (or for that matter, the existence) of the ideas within. Think O.J. Simpson’s blessedly recalled (but unfortunately republished) If I Did It. Celebrity memoir and autobiography fit nicely here. In fact, most books on any subject written by – or about – a celebrity fit here, the idea being that consumers will buy the name whatever the product might be (A Michael Jordan lunchbox, a Michael Jordan autobiography…it’s all the same.). The name itself sells the product – or the celebrity, him- or herself directly sells the product (as in, for example, the egregious advice books written and then shilled on the radio by anti-feminist zealot and call-in show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger).There are also a growing number of books that owe their existence to an aggressively entrepreneurial strain of literary agent known as the Book Packager. This is a person who, rather than waiting for worthwhile, publishable proposals to come his or her way like the other hard-working, god-fearing literary agents do, instead becomes a book “producer” by glomming onto hot topics, snagging an expert to attach his or her name to the project, corralling an out-of-work writer to write the text and selling the “package” to a publisher. Recent packaged projects include The Elvis Treasures (Yes! There are many.) and Doga (I regret to inform you that this is a book about yoga for dogs).Functional books and anti-books do little to support what the author of The Book is Dead calls “Book Culture,” the great and ongoing human conversation about what matters that takes place between the covers of books and among the people who read them. But nowadays these conversations are taking place in other media, often online, and the book has become (he argues) increasingly irrelevant to how we learn about the world and experience our culture. He is not arguing that the ideas in books are irrelevant, or the collected wisdom, or the resonant emotions. He is arguing that the book as delivery system that has seen its day.I get it. Books are expensive and time-consuming to produce. They are an environmental nightmare, made of paper, which comes from trees that are cut down, transported by gas-guzzling log trucks to stinky factories where energy-sucking machinery pulps them into the mush that becomes the pages that, after transport to another stinky factory, go through other energy-sucking machines that stain them with the combination of chemical dye and petroleum-based solvent known as ink. These objects are packed in thick paper boxes and loaded onto trucks that barrel down interstate highways taking the cargo to big warehouses, later to be transported to megastores or, via your internet-placed order, to be placed in the back of a truck that makes a private stop right in your own driveway.It is difficult, even for a book-lover (not to mention book-writer) like myself to argue in favor of the book-as-delivery-system given all this.But let me give it a shot.From a reader’s point of view, the book is a terrifically tidy little package, handy, portable and accessible in practically all conditions at all times. It is user-friendly (no instructions needed!) and ergonomic. It doesn’t break down. Baring catastrophes (a house fire, your brother overturning your inner tube in the pool while you’re reading Atlas Shrugged), a book will last as long as you need or want it to. It can be collected or traded. It can be used as both gift and door stop. (But not at the same time, one hopes.)From a researcher’s point of view, there is no delivery system yet available that is as convenient. You can flip back and forth with abandon. You can dog-ear pages for future reference. Underline or highlight the good parts. Write notes in the margin. You can do this anywhere – in a tent by the river, on a lounge chair in your backyard – without electricity, without special equipment, hard- or software, or any device other than the lowly and dependable pencil.But the key to my defense of the book is that the book is not just an idea delivery system, it is a significant cultural artifact and a free-standing work of art. I am talking about the book itself, the object, apart from what exists as text. Book cover design is an art; interior page design is an art; typography is an art. I admit it. I am one of those typography-geeks who read the colophon in the back of the book. (For the non-geeks among you, that’s the final-page statement that tells you about what type was used and who invented it.) One of my books, for example, was set in Sabon (designed by a 20th century German typographer who named it for a famous 16th century typefounder); another was set in Ehrhardt (based on the design of a 17th century Hungarian type designer). This is great stuff! I feel richer for knowing this. I feel that my work is connected across centuries to these men.So I have a modest proposal that will both help the environment and honor the world of the book-as-art: Have publishers use alternative delivery systems for functional books. Functional books are not works of art. They do not endure. Users – which, for these books is a better descriptor than readers – can download the material to the device of their choice, thus saving paper, trees, oil, etc.As for the anti-books: Don’t publish them at all. Okay, so that’s not exactly a modest proposal. But so many of these books are so entirely brainless, soulless and artless, such bald-faced efforts at marketing and branding that I’m willing to tweak the First Amendment a bit and ban them. That would leave only the real books – perhaps 10,000 a year rather than 170,000. This would preserve and honor the world of the real book while yielding a much more delicate – and defensible – carbon footprint.