Keeping Books Alive

There is a lot of talk today about the death of the book, the decline and fall of publishing as we know it. The advent of digital and information technologies, and the ease of desktop publishing are squeezing the profit and, seemingly, necessity out of publishing houses releasing large numbers of titles. A recent NPR piece emphasized this point in an interview of author and publisher Jonathan Karp.

Although it may have the same effect in the end, this is not the result of some conspiracy against books a la Fahrenheit 451. We, booklovers that is, need not fear the firemen. This is a fear born of book burning, the threat of that twentieth-century evil totalitarianism. In the twenty-first century, books are falling prey not to the narrow minds of those opposed to free thought, but to efficiency, technology, and artless profit. There are children entering kindergarten today who look at a book like an artifact out of time. A few, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods, have never seen or held a book. Books are not kept from them by the dictates of ideology, but by the limpness of post-modern culture. This is not to say that books are not being published. More books find their way into print today than ever before. Anecdotally, whenever I go into a bookstore it always seems to be filled with browsers and buyers. Despite this, publishers are finding it harder and harder to sustain profitability given the current model of publishing many works to be paid for by the few that successfully attract a reading public.

In Fahrenheit 451 the booklovers salvaged their beloved works through memorizing them, returning the Gutenberg inspired memory palace of the printed form back to the pliable but imperfect storage shed of the human mind from whence all primeval human stories came. A desire to control through erasure, and the resulting fear, gave birth to this desperate act of love. No such imposition of will lies behind today’s threat. We have a nearly infinite capacity for storage and cataloguing. Rather we suffer from the scourge of too much ease and too utilitarian an attitude. If all the faddish diet, self-help, gossip, and political nonsense books, to name a few genres, are taken out of the local Barnes & Noble, what’s left? Would they still be in business? I doubt it.

Growing up I read voraciously. My discovery of reading in earnest in late elementary school was an epiphany. Books opened whole new worlds to me, as great an expansion of my experience as my first step or bike. As with many avid male readers of my age, it was JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings that opened my eyes. A childhood friend who had moved away for a few years had returned with these books and urged me to read them. I devoured them. They remain a favorite, some of the few books I will occasionally reread. Over the next decade I virtually emptied the science fiction and fantasy section of the local Walden Books, amassing a library of hundreds of volumes. When I went away to college my father sold all but a few for what I thought a ridiculously low sum, and they were gone. As an adult I have expanded my literary interests, but also returned to my adolescent favorites. Finding them once again reminds me of their loss. The original books held both a tactile satisfaction and a historical place in my life. The words themselves, while important in many ways, were not the totality of my reading experience.

The declining place of the book in today’s society does not necessarily indicate a loss of literacy. Our bookstores burst with the latest trendy topics, whether cultural, political, or referential. Contemporary reading habits do, however, signal a decisive shift in how reading happens. By turning on the computer screen we have also turned away from a commitment to the extended conversations and stories offered by books. Perhaps I more accurately mean literature here, but I also mean something more physically tangible. In my mind the tactile reality of opening and entering a book is akin to the patience and imagination necessary to complete the task. Changing the form changes other things as well.

We also risk a kind of elitism by emphasizing these new forms of reading. I grew up the son of a mechanical engineer, educated but not extensively literary. At ten years old, I found myself the only member of the household who really read for pleasure. My mother considered a novel read in a month a test of literary stamina. My father worked too long and too hard to ever really recover a sense of pleasure from reading until rather later in life. In many ways I see my experience as typical of many families and American culture more generally. Literacy was considered important, a skill necessary to the professional lives and vocations desired by the middle class. But this skill was viewed as a utility, something to be taken advantage of for profit, as a means to an end. The benefits of reading ceased to be measured in enjoyment, learning, or enlightenment and more for material gain and practical use. I’m not naïve. People need to eat, make a living. But the creativity and imagination that literature brings to the human mind, along with the patience and mental stamina of reading extended works, is essential to leadership, if not life. If only the select few who can afford a high-level humanities education are exposed to such learning, then we risk creating a cultural divide that has direct economic implications.

If publishers turn to an increasing specialization, putting out fewer books designed to sell to more specific and limited audiences, assuming digital reading will serve the purpose their once mammoth output did, then only an educated and possibly more affluent few will make use of books. If digital reading and book reading are different and lead to different kinds of thinking, then something more than form is lost in translation. What that loss is, is still open to debate. But there is no doubt in my mind that something is indeed lost.