TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

NY Times Op-Ed: How to publish without perishing

By Chris Meadows

From BoingBoing guestblogger Clay Shirkey comes a link to and commentary on a New York Times op-ed by James Gleick, an author, member of the Authors Guild, and participant in the negotiations with Google over the Authors Guild lawsuit.

The op-ed itself rambles a little. It starts out comparing books to e-books and talking about how the book is a perfect technology—”a tool ideally suited to its task.” He compares it to the hammer, in that while nailguns may drive nails faster and more efficiently for construction tasks, every household still needs a plain old-fashioned hammer. But he doesn’t go the sentimentalist feel-of-the-pages, smell-of-the-leather route either:

Now, at this point 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.

He touches on semantics: how we might say “book lover” and “music lover” but we don’t say “text lover” or “record lover.” He goes into the settlement with Google, and how the Authors Guild “persuaded” Google to commercialize out-of-print books. (That’s got to be a first, someone else persuading Google to commercialize something!)

He concludes:

What should an old-fashioned book publisher do with this gift? 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.

The BoingBoing Response

Shirkey’s BoingBoing guestblogger commentary seems to fixate upon a relatively small part of this op-ed—those last two paragraphs quoted above.

There are book lovers, yes, but there are also readers, a much larger group. By Gleick’s logic, all of us who are just readers, everyone who buys paperbacks or trades books after we’ve read them, everyone who prints PDFs or owns a Kindle, falls out of his imagined future market. Publishers should forsake mere readers, and become purveyors of Commemorative Text Objects. It’s the Franklin Mint business model, now with 1000% more words!

It is worth questioning exactly how Gleick’s advice to publishers—concentrate on books as objects d’art—squares with the fact that it is also publishers who will be providing grist for the e-book mills by acting as gatekeepers long after print books have become oddities to be read by Captain Picard while drinking a cup of “tea, Earl Grey, hot.”

But I don’t think Gleick means to suggest that publishers should concentrate on books to the exclusion of e-books and other media, or even that they should make books fancy and collectible in the “Franklin Mint business model.” Books are already collectible by their very nature. That’s what a lot of book lovers do already. Gleick doesn’t say to “make it as fancy and costly as you can,” but to make it well. Acid-free paper, decent bindings…really, these are things publishers should be doing already.

As much as we love e-books, Gleick does have a point that the paper book is fundamentally a perfect technology. A well-made book will last a long time, and will be readable long after the Kindle is obsolete. It will not have DRM to prevent anyone from reading it, it does not come in confusing multiple formats (apart from hardcover versus paperback), it will not malfunction or break down, it is still accessible in a power failure, and it is perfectly and legally transferable from one person to another. These things are worth remembering.