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| Commandment number eight. 5-23-2006. |
| I recently received a copy of the large print edition of Sunstroke. There’s nothing like size 20 font to up your page count. The large print version is almost 200 pages longer than its standard counterpart, appearing to have improbably grown into a Russian novel. There are lots of ways to get your books these days. You can buy them on CD or download them from iTunes, purchase an e-book or go the old fashioned route and check them out of the library. Something for everyone. The proliferation of forms evokes, for me, nothing so much as the Cambrian explosion. While I applaud the multimediafication of books, there is something about it that I find vaguely threatening. To wit: it’s just a matter of time before somebody comes up with a way to efficiently pirate reading material in much the same way as movies and music. Whenever I mention this to people, I encounter two standard rebuttals. The first is that people like to hold books in their hands. Another form of this argument is to say that people don’t like to read off a computer screen. Both are ways of saying that, unlike listening to music, reading has a physical component, without which the act becomes uncomfortable or disconcertingly strange. The problem with this argument is that we’ve already seen it fail once, with respect to newspapers. Blame TV; blame the internet; blame decreasing public trust of the mainstream media. But whatever their motivation, people seem happy to get their news elsewhere, especially if it’s free and doesn’t smudge their hands. How long will it take for someone to invent a technology that either mimics the “feel” of reading a book, or presents the words in a distinct yet visually appealing way? My gut tells me sooner than you’d expect. I’ve never seen an e-book, so I don’t know how far we’ve come in that direction. I think it would be foolish, though, to assume that it will never happen. The second argument is that free (or cheap) alternatives to book-buying have existed for a long time, in the forms of libraries and used bookstores. The basic problem with this notion is that it fails to appreciate our era’s breathtaking increases in both speed of transmission and market efficiency. Back in the good old days, a used bookstore was a crapshoot if you had a specific title in mind. But now you can go on Amazon or eBay and find my book in virtually brand new condition starting at fifty-one cents. (Please don’t. Buy retail!) And while I love libraries, I find Google’s attempts (in cooperation with universities like Michigan) to digitize entire libraries very frightening. Yes, I can exclude my work from the project. Yes, fully searchable texts are—for now—limited to work in the public domain. But surely people should understand that the ideology informing this and other likeminded projects aims to “free” much, much more than just the works of Shakespeare and Milton. Without getting into the legal mumbo-jumbo, let’s recognize that there is a fundamental conflict here, between those who don’t believe that authors (artists, etc.) own their ideas and those who do. It should be obvious which side I come down on. All I have going for me is my imagination and my ability to put together words. In a universe where those skills no longer yield profit, I’m better off learning to build chairs. Large industries such as Hollywood or music are excellent at denying the inexorable march of technology. Publishing is no exception. In fact, based on my limited experience, publishing seems like the creakiest dinosaur of all, a charmingly people-driven business resistant to change and—celebrity insta-books aside—more than a little bewildered by the speed of the modern world. Since my publisher is my first line of defense here, I’m not feeling terribly safe at the moment. Anyhow. The moral of the story is, don’t steal. How’s that for a neat conclusion? I’m tired and I gotta go to bed. Forthcoming posts may come forth rather sporadically, as I have begun work on a new book, and will likely be absorbed in it. Keep checking, constant readers. Both of you. (Hi, Ema.) |
