THE TROUBLE WITH BOOKS

JENNY LEE ARGUES THAT BOOK CULTURE IS CHANGING.

DEBATE is again swirling around the book and its future, with two recent US events making headlines worldwide. On 19 November 2007, Amazon.com announced the US release of the Kindle, an e-book reading device with a mobile connection to Amazon’s store. The launch sparked about six hundred news stories in a matter of hours, amid much speculation that the Kindle was the ‘killer application’ that would supersede the printed book. On the same day, the National Endowment for the Arts released the latest instalment in its long-­running research project documenting the decline of recreational reading in America. The conjunction of these events again brings up a question that has been asked for more than a decade: does the book need to be reincarnated in a virtual form to avoid being crowded out of the twenty-first century media landscape?
    In this issue of Overland, Emmy Hennings suggests that a popular e-book culture is still at least a decade away. I’m not so sure; for all its virtues, the printed book is beginning to look like the odd one out as other media rush into the electronic domain. There are also question marks over the sustainability of book culture as we know it.
    Audiences were already on the move long before Amazon released its much-publicised device. People are reading extended texts on specialised e-book readers, on computers, PDAs and mobile phones. Project Gutenberg’s free library of public-domain texts claims more than three million downloads per month through one portal alone. Demand for commercial e-books has also been growing, with US sales quadrupling in the two years to 2007.
    In a prescient essay published back in 1996, George Landow argued that Western culture was already moving beyond the book: “[W]e find ourselves, for the first time in centuries, able to see the book as unnatural, as a near-miraculous technological innovation and not as something intrinsically and inevitably human.”
    Yet in the decade or so since Landow wrote, a rhetoric of resistance has built up against the idea of electronic books, much of it dependent precisely on not being conscious of books as a technology for reading. The authors and readers of novels have become a bastion of resistance, with Annie Proulx famously declaring: “Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever.” Reading novels involves a continuous, absorptive, imaginative response to texts, and literary readers seek the familiarity of the book. But if we are to take its proponents at their word, it seems the ideal reader of a novel is one who falls for all the publisher’s three-card tricks at once, absorbing the subliminal messages embedded in the material form of the book without even being aware of doing so.
    A different set of objections comes from book aficionados who understandably resent the visual homogeneity and loss of aesthetic appeal that accompany conversion to electronic formats. Yet, as Landow points out, it’s a mistake to deride electronic publishing by contrasting the e-book with some idealised (usually old) printed volume that is an enduring source of value and pleasure. The fact remains that most books today are manufactured as disposable items. Even hardbacks are simulacra of the ‘real thing’ – printed on paper that discolours when exposed to light, their cardboard covers coated with paper textured to look like cloth, their glued spines hidden by woven bands. As an experiment, I recently set out to dismember a John Grisham hardback and a 1907 evangelical tract (it’s hard to find books you can conscientiously carve up). While Songs of English Praise resisted my assaults on its sewn binding and cloth cover, the Grisham book succumbed to a swift blow of the Stanley knife; its most durable element was the dust jacket, which was so heavily laminated that it merely stretched when I tried to tear it. With a narrowing quality margin over digital books, such printed volumes can no longer claim longevity as their trump card.
    In any event, as Sherman Young argues in his recent volume The Book Is Dead, new media forms do not need to match old ones; they merely need to be good enough at the price, as paperbacks were when they first appeared. This has become clear in scholarly publishing. In the 1980s, scholarly publishers entered a vicious circle of declining print runs and increasing cover prices as the volume of journals and monographs outran demand. Average US monograph sales fell to about 750 per title by 2000, and in the UK they plumbed depths of 250 to 300. Journals too became unaffordable for all but the best-endowed academic libraries, and sales to individuals collapsed. In the years since then, even venerable scholarly houses such as the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge have turned to e-books as a way out of this dilemma.10 The shift has gone further in scholarly journals, where the dominant model is digital publication with electronic transmission over the web. To supplement the static electronic texts, the big ‘content aggregators’ make their contents more accessible through electronic databases, search facilities and RSS feeds. Here, a demanding audience that was traditionally a haven for printed works has accepted digital texts that are ‘good enough’ rather than lose the diversity essential to intellectual exchange.
    The vicious circle of declining print runs and increased cover prices in scholarly publishing may presage developments in the wider book trade. Though readerships have been stagnant or falling, the number of new releases has continued to multiply until recently, particularly in English-language countries, where the big US and UK houses were joined by European conglomerates seeking global audiences. The annual tally of new US titles rose by 82 per cent between 1993 and 2004, while the UK figures more than doubled between 1990 and 2004. The surge was partly a response to the use of digital production methods, which made it possible for publishers to operate profitably with smaller print runs, but the resulting abundance of choice has proved difficult to sustain. Many large conglomerates have refocused their lists on popular fast-selling titles, to the detriment of works in ‘serious’ genres.
    Meanwhile, book prices have risen faster than inflation for the past thirty years or so, with the increase particularly evident outside the mass market. Under the sale-or-return system, publishers bear the costs of unsold new releases, and pass them on through higher prices. The increase in costs is especially acute in countries where few titles sell in sufficient numbers to achieve conspicuous economies of sale. In Australia, the average trade paperback now costs almost as much in real terms as a hardback did fifty years ago. The ‘paperback revolution’ that brought cheap books to mass readerships has fizzled out. At a time when the real cost of most other leisure activities has fallen, owning books risks once again becoming a preserve of the well-to-do.
    There are also concerns about the environmental sustainability of printing books and shipping them to retailers, only to have a proportion return unsold, often to end up in landfill. In Britain, climate scientist David Reay has estimated that book publishing emits as much carbon as putting another hundred thousand cars on the road. Electronic delivery and print-on-demand have been proposed as ways of reducing this kind of waste, but until recently the idea has found little support among the mainstream publishers.
The significance of Amazon’s intervention arises from its role as a channel between the old medium and the new. Individual online ordering, even with physical supply, had the edge over bricks-and-mortar bookshops in matching readers to the books they wanted; at the same time, Amazon kept print prices under pressure by offering discounts and advertising second-hand books. Above all, though, the company used the interactive potential of new media to encourage online discussion of books and draw attention to the niche reader communities that make up what is now termed the ‘long tail’, whose preferred titles and genres seldom appear on the mainstream media’s bestseller lists. The logical next step for publishers was to adopt some form of digital delivery so they could make works permanently available in relatively small numbers at affordable prices.
    The infrastructure for a shift of medium was also building from the publishers’ side. In the 1990s publishers redrafted their standard contracts to cover e-book rights (most offering a higher royalty rate). Though they remained sceptical, the conglomerates secured the rights to most of the intellectual property that might become available for recycling in e-book form, just in case.
Another crucial part of the infrastructure for electronic delivery is matching the range of titles available in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop. As a retailer, Jeff Bezos of Amazon knew that this had hamstrung many other e-book ventures, including the recently released Sony Reader. When Amazon revealed the range of titles available for the Kindle, it was clear that the company had used its market power to carry a large number of publishers along. Some 90 000 titles were made available in e-book form. The selection far exceeds that of its main rivals, though it remains surprisingly patchy compared with the range Amazon offers in print.
    But in another crucial respect Amazon appears to have fallen into the same old trap that has long prevented e-books from competing effectively with books in print. The company has used a proprietary format to tie its Kindle files to the use of an expensive dedicated device. This makes its e-books significantly less useful than paper books. Readers take it for granted that they can give books as presents, lend them to friends, sell them second-hand or even leave them in out-of-the-way places for strangers to find. But none of this is possible with Kindle files. (You can’t print out, either.) There is no provision for libraries, and it is difficult to see how there could be. As Emmy Hennings points out, Amazon has constituted reading as a private, atomistic activity divorced from readers’ social and cultural networks. This is an extraordinary step for an organisation that has built its business around encouraging communication among readers.
Amazon’s efforts have drawn vitriolic criticism from new media practitioners and progressive publishers. The Kindle quickly acquired the nickname ‘Swindle’; software commentator Mark Pilgrim posted a scathing ‘Play in Six Acts’ highlighting the contradictions between Amazon’s stance and Jeff Bezos’ earlier statements; author Cory Doctorow attacked Amazon’s use of electronic surveillance to monitor customers’ activities and punish miscreants, describing Amazon as “one of the dumbest companies on the Web”. Other critics leapt onto Amazon’s website to post negative reviews and comments. The Kindle’s average customer rating in January 2008 was only 3.5 stars, weighed down by more than 300 excoriating one-star reviews. Predictably, the device was hacked, and details of the procedure were posted on the internet.
    Publishers interested in e-books also greeted the Kindle’s release with dismay. It transpired that Amazon had not even consulted the International Digital Publishing Forum, the prime mover in developing consistent, open e-book standards to simplify the production of digital books. In Publishers Weekly, David Rothman attacked Amazon for adding yet another incompatible system to “the tower of eBabel” that had cramped the growth of digital publishing. Publisher Tim O’Reilly announced that his titles would not be available for the Kindle because of the ‘hassle’ and expense of converting them. He estimated the cost at US$200 per title, a significant burden for independents and for specialist books with small sales.
    But this is not the only way in which the Kindle represents a strategic departure for Amazon. Far from encouraging niche readerships, Bezos has aimed squarely at an affluent middlebrow audience – perhaps anticipating that e-book cognoscenti would be a lost cause. The web promotion makes much of the device’s paper-like screen, its ease of use (“You just turn it on”) and the fact that those with ageing eyes can view the text at larger sizes. A big drawcard is that most New York Times bestsellers are available at a flat price of US$9.95. The events accompanying the launch targeted precisely the mainstream media organs favoured by traditional book buyers. Newsweek ran a breathless cover story titled ‘The Future of Reading’, and Bezos was interviewed on the non-commercial PBS network where he said, “The customer set we most want to love this device are the heavy readers, those people who have a lifelong love affair with books”.
    The reviews on Amazon’s website suggest that Kindle fans come from this quarter. Only about 10 per cent of the one-star reviews expressed resistance to e-books; most came from people who were already reading on screen. By contrast, the five-star reviews tended to come from book lovers for whom the idea of reading an e-book was new. Some spoke of “falling in love” with the device; ‘Love My Kindle’ was a common headline. A few detailed the dollars they could save by buying cheaper Kindle books to feed their reading habits. It seems Bezos’ pitch has hit its mark.
    The consumer response has far exceeded the reaction to earlier devices. The first shipment of Kindles sold out in a few hours, and there was still a queue of would-be buyers two months later. The buzz even extended to countries where the Kindle was unavailable. In France, Bookeen sold out of its Cybook reader, and in Australia Dymock’s bookshops quickly disposed of their iLiad readers at the hefty price of $899. Both these devices, unlike the Kindle, read e-books in a variety of formats. While the environment seems to be shifting in the e-book’s favour, it is conceivable that Amazon’s competitors will reap the benefits.
    Amazon’s current approach may be a temporary expedient. Its twin aims seem to be to reassure publishers that they can safely make their titles available digitally and to secure a base of affluent, technologically unsophisticated customers who are prepared to pay high prices for an experimental device. Both goals are likely to be superseded as publishers accept the medium and customers become more savvy. Some commentators believe that Bezos will follow the lead of Apple’s Steve Jobs, who has recanted his original support for digital rights management music, describing it as inconvenient to honest users and ineffective against piracy.
    As it stands, however, Amazon’s strategy risks dumbing e-books down, much as the emphasis on fast-sellers has done in print publishing. By focusing on the middlebrow bestseller market where the conglomerates have their stronghold, the company is playing to their strengths, not to those of the new medium. True, Amazon has encouraged small publishers to offer works in Kindle format, but it has set the payment rate at an ungenerous 35 per cent. Even the company’s main advantage, its range of electronic titles, has been compromised by its insistence on treating Kindle buyers as less trustworthy, more in need of control, than other customers. Essentially, Amazon is gambling that middle-aged book lovers will be prepared to trade their privacy for the sake of greater convenience.
    Whether this strategy emanated from Amazon itself or was imposed by the publishers as a condition of supply, it is unlikely to benefit either. Producing books in virtual form has the potential to open up new reading publics (read: new markets for publishers) by democratising access to a diverse range of works. Freeing books from the lumbering apparatus of physical distribution should enable authors to insert extended intellectual and creative texts into the realm of cultural exchange in a far more timely way. But the potential will be dissipated if electronic books are hemmed in with conditions that implicitly construct them as second-rate imitations of the ‘real thing’. At a time when the book as a medium risks losing its place, turning the e-book into an expensive proprietary toy is not the way to go.

Jenny Lee convenes the Publishing and Communications program at the University of Melbourne.

© Jenny Lee

Overland 190–autumn 2008, p.17–21

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