Is It Really Books That We Love?

Mike – Debates like this make me miss being in the digital publishing world…

I’ve been saying this for years (ever since the first PalmPilot came out and I was reading eBooks on that device). There will always be shortcomings in the device (how many people have the “one true” cell phone they want?). First it was no color, then it was bad color, then it was poor graphics, then it was internet/wi-fi and on and on… The excuses will always be there. What will cause a revolution in digital publishing is a radical change in consumer mindset. Then, and only then, will the device flourish.

By continuing discussions like this, and generating news articles, you continue to broaden awareness and sway public opinion. This will lead to the predicted digital revolution.

Eventually…

The death of the book isn’t what concerns me; it’s the death of reading I worry about.

In a recent column, Sara Nelson noted that “the percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled over a 20-year period (from 9% in 1984 to 19% in 2004). Watching television eclipses reading as a favorite leisure-time activity for men and women of all ages, but for 15–24-year-olds, reading is particularly avoided. On average, these teens and young adults spend less than 10 minutes a day on voluntary reading.”

As editorial director for a publishing house, I’m far more interested in the changes in reading habits than in reading technology.

How do we get more people to read good books–in any format–that’s my question.

I think you are probably right. Just the other day, I made a comment about one of Mark Twain’s books and I didn’t have it with me, so I looked it up on Google. I wasn’t intending to get hooked, but I had read through chapter seven and I was well on my way to chapter eight of A Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court when I came to my senses. Given a preference, I would have chosen to have the paper book in hand. It would have been more comfortable, but the browser didn’t detract from the story.

Will digital publishing encourage new readers? I don’t think the Kindle 1.0 is going to encourage many new readers, but as devices and software begin to incorporate new features and authors begin to dream up ways to make reading more of an experience, as the printers are replaced by the software developers, I think people will return to reading as a form of entertainment. Then again, it could be that the Nothing will come and swallow us all up and we are all doomed.

For me, the story is the most important thing. I enjoy telling the story even more than I enjoy hearing that someone has read the story. As long as people experience the story then I am happy.

I don’t think “removing the audience from the author” is really an issue. We still communicate with the spoken word, face to face, a step away. Parents tell children stories. Go to church and pastors and teachers communicate by speaking. What books and audio recordings have done for us is provided a way for people to communicate with a much broader audience. Through electronic media, I have been able to share the gospel with people in countries that I will never visit. To me, that is just cool! Being able to read a book, finding something that a passage that you don’t understand and being able to e-mail the author and ask “what do you mean by that?” without leaving your chair. Or maybe you can discuss the book with other people who are reading the book. We aren’t there yet, but Amazon appears to be headed in that direction. E-readers will not remove the reader from the author, rather they will facilitate a much closer connection between the reader and the author.

Your analogy of how music has progressed reminds me of an experience I had many years ago. I have worked in two, Christian film companies. While at Ken Anderson Films, we watched the transition from 16mm film to video. I say watched, because the debate raged about video causing the eventual death of 16mm film distribution. Even though we didn’t participate in the transition to video, until it was too late, the distributors were right. The truth is, no one could have stopped it if they tried. You won’t find any 16mm film distributors renting films to churches today.

I suspect that the fight, as it relates to books, is similar. Major distributors, and the bookstores that still remain, will argue that their business is in jeopardy specifically because they fear that the electronic book is going to kill their business-ministry. I predict they’ll be right.

As an author, I’m not so concerned with how books will be distributed as I am in knowing that the largest potential market has the opportunity to buy them, and to be touched by their content. It should be obvious to most of us that the Internet is where people will be shopping in the future.

Since I grew up hating to read, I don’t share the nostalgic notion of the feel and the smell of a book. I do enjoy those senses whenever a new book of mine is delivered, but the easier it is for consumers to find and purchase one of my titles, the wider effect my work will have with boys 8 – 13.

Max Elliot Anderson
http://booksandboys.blogspot.com/

Have you heard about One Laptop Per Child and its Give 1, Get 1 program? Check out this link on its use as an e-book: http://www.olpcnews.com/content/ebooks/internet_archive_laptop_ebook.html

Like others, I don’t agree with comparing books to music directly, apples to apples, yet I find it interesting that the comparison was made. My husband is an audio engineer. Despite all of the advancements in digital recording technology, there is no replacing the sound of tape hiss that comes from recording to tape to warm up a track. Many music diehards have tried to replicate the sound of tape hiss digitally. They still end up recording to tape to recapture that old, warm, romantic sound that evokes such an emotional response to the music. Lovers of such sounds aren’t responding directly to the tape hiss – they respond to what it does to the music. It’s a reminder that the medium is important to the delivery of the message.

I will be thrilled if someone ever invents a leather bound laptop. Now that would be a feat!

“Eventually” is not — after all — much of a statement.

It’s like saying that eventually we might no longer use cotton. Sure picking cotton is “inefficient” but that doesn’t mean your cotton t-shirt is going away any time soon.

You might be interested in BoingBoing’s review of Kindle (see: here).

Until the technology becomes ubiquitous and cheap, the “eventually” remains “not any time soon.” One must remember that an mp3 could be enjoyed from any computer with speakers/headphones whereas book-readers only deal with the portability issue and cost of production issues, but not the issue of ease of reading (eye strain, etc.) For example, no one likes reading text-heavy pdf’s on a computer screen). Most still print them out to read them.

On the comparison with music: How did people get mp3′s on their computers? First, file swapping. Content — or, software (think mp3′s) — piracy actually helped propel initial hardware sales of mp3 players by decreasing the cost of music acquisition. Mp3 players simply solved the portability issue. At this point, however, there is not much likelihood of people swapping eBooks since few want to read them with or without specialized hardware, thereby limiting the demand for such hardware. Second, ripping CD’s onto computers. Now, nor in the foreseeable future, is there a parallel way to get one’s books onto a reader.

[One can turn books into pdf's and read them on a eBook reader, but what would this add to the already portable and accessible nature of books, other than having multiple books accessible at once. One may want to skip between songs every 5 minutes, but one rarely wants to do the same with books. If the average American reads (being generous!) less than 3 books a year, it is unlikely that they will be carrying multiple books around with them, which an eBook reader would make more convenient.]

There remains the issue of the cost of production of books. However, people are not choosing not to read books based upon the high cost of books. Sure book production is inefficient when compared to the production of a eBook, and it is true that I’m commenting on this post through a paperless medium, but perhaps that has more to do with the fact that the web, unlike books, rarely has large quantities of information to communicate. In the near term, if the book dies, it will be because our attention spans have been shortened by the immediacy and ubiquity of ‘communication’ tools like blogs, news soundbites, and advertisements. Most corporate leaders, politicians, and clergy have become market-driven bureaucratic managers incapable of sustained and substantive deep thinking. This searing technocratic heat has always promised us more my banishing “inefficiency” regardless of whether more could be absorbed. It has also evaporated the focus on learning from our halls of education and will be the death of the book.

One day we might only produce books in eBook format, but the traditional book will already be dead if we cannot read.

I just can’t believe that parents and children will have as beautifully meaningful experiences with a digital version (no matter what the device is) of The Ox Cart Man, or The Giving Tree, or Farmer Boy, or The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey as they have with the current ink on paper format. I can’t believe that digital will replace children’s picture books.

However, I am sure that all reference books will be digital within 5 years. I haven’t opened a dictionary, concordance, or encylepedia in 2 years: All that info is available online.

As for wanting the contents and not the medium, well, that’s a hard one. Certainly didn’t have room for my 2,0000 volume library when I moved into a little San Francisco apartment, it would have ben nice to hae had those books in a digital format. But then I would have missed out on the pleasure of giving them away.

With the death of my father, who was a pastor for 50 years I have been giving away his books to young pastors he influenced. They are all extremely thankful and are putting the books to good use, especially the notes he wrote in margins. I just can’t see that with digital.

And what about Modern Library and Everyman’s Library? Half the fun of those books is the cloth binding, the highquality paper, and watching your collection grow over the years, and again, giving a much loved volume to a much loved friend. That will be lost with digital. May it never happen.

I have to admit that I haven’t thought much about digital books before yesterday. The more I think about it the less I like the idea.

It seems like technology for the sake of technology, change for the sake of change. And change for the worse, at that. Will no good thing be left good? Must all be overturned for the sake of ‘progress’?

When I was 12 years old I picked up a century old title called “The Apostolic Church” that I saw sitting on my Dad’s shelf. At first, it was the binding, the smell of the old paper, the little pages, the odd heaviness of such a little book (I guess it was the binding and the thin paper that contributed to the heft of the volume) that attracted me to the book. I didn’t know a thing about the contents. But the construction and antiquity of the book invited me to take up and read. And I fell in love with history. What a sad literary and intellectual world our children and grand children are going to inherit from us.

I wish we were a half measure wiser and a half measure not so clever.

Christopher makes a good point about the collectability of books. Some people are more interested in the physical object than the content. Some people buy books as decor. These things will be lost with a transition to eletronic books. I have a few old books and I am glad that I have them, but when we are talking about new books, rare books are easy to come by.

I write rare books. Many other authors do as well. There are thousands of new rare books out there. The ones that are considered valuable by collectors are the limited edition copies of popular books. For everything else, the true value is not in the paper, ink and glue. The true value of a book is in words that are on the pages. Which is more valueable, a Gutenberg Bible that is stored in a glass case so no one will touch it or a Gideon Bible that is stored in the nightstand at a hotel, so anyone may read it?

The goal of every author, of every publisher should be to produce products that are more valuable to the person who is reading it than to the collector. Books should be written with the intent that a person who reads it will walk away changed by the experience. Perhaps he will know how to do something that he could not do before. Perhaps a novel helps him see things in a different light. Perhaps he is just entertained, but the words should impact him for what they say rather than how they look. As an author, I couldn’t care less if one of my books becomes valueable as a collector’s item. I would much rather have people read my books and gain something more valueable than the book because they did.

At the moment, I don’t believe we know enough to determine what the market will bear in terms of eBook prices. It would be nice if the razorblade model could be used, Amazon could sell the Kindle for $75, preload it with a couple of books and then sell books for the device for $15. That is not what they chose to do and the publisher sets the price for the book. Some books are priced lower than the default $9.99, but I don’t think they should be. In terms of the effort that goes into producing a book, I believe that books are underpriced already. When you consider that an author may receive $1000, total, for a book and that the author spent weeks working on it, many authors are working for free. I fear that pushing prices down will result in even less money making it to the authors. Even as inefficient as getting 50% of the books shipped to the stories might be, publishers should not set prices so low that they make less money on a book, just to help encourage the adoption of the Kindle. Authors are generally more interested in people reading their books than making money from their books, but authors and publishers deserve to get fair pay for their efforts.

I think, as you said in your original post, that people’s love affair with books is really with the content but they have come to associate those warm feelings with the thing they held in their hand during the experience. If that’s true, then those warm feelings could just as easily associate with an electronic device were it the source of the content.

It may be difficult for those who grew up holding paper books to imagine anything else feeling quite so good. But remember that increasingly younger people will read their first book from a screen and soon whole generations will arise who have known nothing else. For them it will be impossible to imagine getting that same warm feelings from ink on paper. GS

I appreciated your comments on the pro’s and con’s of the Kindle, but was humored by your comment in which I am copying below:
“This is also why Amazon has taken three years to get this product to market. It has taken that long to get the Luddite-minded publishers on-board. (I say this as one of them.) Apple has not been talking to us at Thomas Nelson, and we are one of the largest publishers in the country. So I have to assume they aren’t talking to anyone else either.

Some have suggested that Apple could just partner with Google and offer the thousands of books that Google has scanned from major libraries. You can be sure that won’t happen. Authors and agents already have a major lawsuit against Google. If Google—or Apple—tried to use this material without compensating authors and publishers, they would be buried in thousands of lawsuits.”

I think your statement that just because Apple isnt talking to you so they probably arent talking to anyone else is ignorant and you underestimate the power of Apple. If you dont think that they have their own Kindle and they have people sitting in the back room taking it apart and coming up with their own version (if they havent already)and waiting to pounce on this if its the “next big thing”, you’re crazy.

Apple has an ad in Trafalgar Square that they paid a million dollars for and it doesnt mean a thing to them. I dont see Thomas Nelson throwing ads up around the world, dropping a million bucks like its nothing.

Your comments on your thoughts on how the Kindle works are valuable and has sparked some great debate. Your Napolean Complex comments on how big you think you are, and that you know what Apple is thinking obviously come from a separate agenda which is comical. Thanks for making some of us laugh.

Maybe you’re right on the Napolean Complex. I hope not.

My point is exactly the same as Timothy’s. If you don’t have the cooperation of the publishers, your device won’t be worth anything. We are the sixth largest publisher in the U.S. Maybe Apple is talking to those that are bigger; I don’t know. But if I were running the project, I would want to be talking to the top ten—at least. Amazon started talking with publishers two years before they launched, and we were one of the ones in the group.

When I took public transportation to work, I found standing, holding a book like a small paperback bible, and holding a bar for balance too difficult, especially to turn the pages.

So I downloaded a free bible from gutenberg.org, converted it for my Palm, set it for autoscroll, and then conveniently read it each morning on the way to work.

Eventually, I downloaded other books – usually classics like by Dickens or Tolstoy or shorts by Edgar Allen Poe, and then would read them on the way home.

As I travelled the country for work, I would leave the books at home, and just take my Palm, which was primitive by today’s standards. It took getting used to and there were some limitations, but I read several classics that way.

On one trip, I was in DC for about a month, and found the limitations of reading Anna Karenina on my pda too frustrating, so I went to a local bookstore and bought it.

I recall a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where someone marveled that the captain had paper books, despite their obvious ineffeciencies. Picard said he loved the tactile nature of books, which could never be replaced by the digital experience, and I think that is true. If I could catalog all my books digitally, and have an effecient digital reader, I’d do so. But I’d also lose some of the experience paper has to offer.

For instance, I can use an electronic Thompson Chain reference system for study, but then by not using my copy with the notes scribbled over the years, or even better, my great-grandfather’s Thompson-Chain Reference Bible, handed down to me over the years, well, I’m sure I’d lose something. :-)

I absolutely love books themselves. The feel of the glossy cover, the smell of new ink on the pages, the sound of the pages being turned, the way the pages and corners soften with time and use. I love being able to toss one in my handbag to take along with me while I wait in X location for Y person. I like the fact that if a book gets wet or dropped… no worries! I can pick it up, dry it out, and it's still just fine. I can even read in the bathtub if I want.

An expensive electronic device like a Kindle is going to give me headaches from looking at the screen. If I drop it or get it wet, bye-bye hundreds of dollars! And it's not just the one book that is lost, but all the books stored on it. I won't be able to "read" until it is replaced.

I think that books – real, physical, paper books – will eventually become luxury items, and all the poor slobs who can't afford them will have Kindles.