Whither The Book??

A group I belong to currently is discussing the perilous state of book publishing, particularly fiction. A week or so ago I put in my two cents' worth, which struck one of the members as "sad, sad, sad".

I countered that it was "realistic, realistic, realistic", which elicited the further comment "A sad but incisive commentary. Any solutions you see on the horizon?"

I am not sure there is a solution. My husband is an artist and for the last three years we have been discussing the situation almost non-stop. We are in the middle of a transition from a verbal to a visual society. The first strands tying together literacy, culture and social standing began to be cut with photography and were greatly accelerated with the onset of movies, which might have remained a novelty except that they acquired sound. Once television was in almost every home we were already more than half-way down the road.

Of course there were still endless gorgeously produced books containing illustrations, following the honourable tradition that began in largely illiterate times. And - sadly - it appears that the only books one will be able to sell will be those that are illustrated, and rare. . . .


illustration (c)Garrick Palmer, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Folio Society, London 1994. Does one really want it in Kindle for 98 cents???

Where once one bragged that one's children were reading books at age five the emphasis now is on computer literacy, which is entirely different, engages a different part of the brain and is a much more immediate experience. In order to understand the story in a book one first must recognize and understand letters, then words, then concepts. A significant part of society has always had trouble with that. Think of the comparative ease with which they are able to grasp a movie's story!

Many countries have developed multicultural societies, for the ease of which foreigners' comprehension pictographs were developed and standardized internationally. (The International Standards Organization in Switzerland was very busy with this in the Seventies.) Soon people will approach education visually as opposed to verbally. Computer program writing also uses a language, but - again - one that is different enough from English or French etc that it does not compare.

As you can see, the entire thrust of communication has gone away from the verbal precision upon which we prided ourselves to the perhaps sloppier and less articulate, but still understood, visual.

I personally see a contradiction in "eBooks", never mind any technical aspects such as a lack of engagement for someone like me. You can install the sounds of pages turning, you can adjust your screen to simulate lovely acid-free paper, but you can not sever the thought in the front of your mind that if you had a real book in the tub with you it wouldn't even matter if it fell in, for example. The entire experience of reading, with its sensual component, is being declared obsolete.

Do I see any solutions? Sure. Pull the plug. Yes, that will not happen. (As an aside, anyone else struck by the imbecility of wiring the world electronically, finding this new use for electricity everywhere, at the exact moment when we have to be cutting back?)

If I were a publisher I would undoubtedly go bust. There are too many people who can't, won't, or don't want to read, who see it as a mark of societal privilege against which they rebel, who have wholeheartedly accepted the electronic world.

That being said, there still are good stories, complex characters, epic histories and other subjects we have to protect and bring into being, however possible. The chief difference between the visually told stories and the published ones is that the visual brings everything to the viewer's eyes; the book stimulates and invites one to recreate the read word vividly in one's mind.