New Life for Old Books?

James Gleick recently penned an interesting opinion piece over at the New York Times online about the the future of the printed book in an age of digitization and declining sales. As he states, the gloom and doom being voiced in the publishing industry is different than that in other fields, because, for publishers, the future of the medium itself is in question.

Well, Gleick has a more optimistic take, saying we have reached “a shining moment for this ancient technology,” which “has a chance for new life: as a physical object, and as an idea, and as a set of literary forms.”

He goes on to describe what changes are taking place, and how the writing really is on the wall for some kinds of books — such as dictionaries and encyclopedias. But he also points out that books are a perfected technology, like the hammer; and he doesn’t wax sentimental so much as practical:

Phonograph records and CDs and telegraphs and film cameras were all about storing and delivering bits — information, in its manifold variety — and if we’ve learned anything, we’ve learned that bits are fungible. Bit-storing technologies have been arbitrary, or constrained by available materials, and thus easy to replace when the next thing comes along. Words, too, can be converted into bits, but there’s something peculiar, something particularly direct, about the path from the page to the brain.

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

And on the fundamental difference in types of reading:

There’s reading and then there’s reading. There is the gleaning or browsing or cherry-picking of information, and then there is the deep immersion in constructed textual worlds: novels and biographies and the various forms of narrative nonfiction — genres that could not be born until someone invented the codex, the book as we know it, pages inscribed on both sides and bound together. These are the books that possess one and the books one wants to possess.

He then talks about the settlement agreement between the Author’s Guild and Google, and details just what Project Gutenberg has been doing that has caused so much speculation as to the future of publishing. The settlement would have Google able to do more with many of the out of print titles it brings back into circulation, and means the rights holders of those books will actually get the majority share of the income from advertising and licensing for those titles. Gleick suggests what this might mean:

This means a new beginning — a vast trove of books restored to the marketplace. It also means that much of the book world is being upended before our eyes: the business of publishing, selling and distributing books; the role of libraries and bookstores; all uses of books for research, consultation, information storage; everything, in fact, but the plain act of reading a book from start to finish.

This may be good news for many authors, whose work will be granted a second life after being squeezed out in an age of shorter shelf life and emphasis on hype and blockbusters. Gleick suggests this will neccessitate a change in the way publishers do business, perhaps forcing them to go back on concentrating on the importance of books as desirable objects. One thing is for certain, times are changing in publishing, but I share Gleick’s view that books themselves will still be a vital technology long after all of us worriers and hand-wringers are gone.