Cultural Development and Creativity in the Digital Revolution

Books and personal (and cultural) development

The book, originally as a scroll, then as a codex has been critical to the transmission of ideas, narrative, information, beliefs for 2500 years, from the time of Homer, Gilgamesh and the Pentateuch. Judaism, Christianity and Islam were all ‘faiths of the book’. Printed books have been important in religious practice, learning and recreation for 500 years. Books, whether in traditional or electronic form, are a vital part of our culture, a metaphor for individual, autonomous learning, in which the reader can stop, annotate, ponder, start again, re-read an earlier passage, reconsider and continue at an appropriate rate. This capacity is now available in some forms of eReader device such as Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iPad and tablets running Google’s Android operating system. These new devices, however, could have the capacity to transform the nature of writing, reading and learning.

Reading, especially of books, has a profound influence on personal development from infancy. According to Sir Michael Marmot, an eminent Australian health researcher in England, parents’ reading to children contributes to happiness and longevity. It remains to be seen how far this practice will survive or flourish in the Digital Revolution.

Reading has been central in growth, self-discovery, cultural transmission, literacy, aesthetics, values, creativity, personal development, narrative power, cultivating the imagination, pursuing the poetic, achieving psychological insights, encouraging evidence-based judgment, preservation of memory — both personal and collective, and acquiring essential knowledge. Traditionally, books were central to the creative process, involving writers, artists, designers, editors, publishers and support staff, then printers, distributors and booksellers. The book became deeply significant for readers, in schools, universities, libraries, and at home, for recreation, stimulation or instruction, especially after literacy rates rose in the 19th Century.

It is essential to make sure that in the name of the revolution we don’t clear-fell the old regime. Irreplaceable aspects of traditional publishing should be identified and preserved.

We live in a cultural, economic and political context where creativity seems to have fallen out of the lexicon and our approach to issues is increasingly managerial, instrumental and material — and this situation is characteristic of most advanced economies. We look for instant communication, instant responses and instant gratification, in which Twitter speed is central.

Book culture operates in a longer time frame with its emphasis on reflection. Books are read, but not consumed and have the capacity to become a permanent element in our values, our understanding and how we view the world, sometimes decades after the first reading.

‘Deep reading’ and ‘skimming’

Surveys suggest that as reading online has increased, reading of print has declined, especially for people in the 25-34 year age group. In the US and the UK, book sales, including eBooks and books bought online, have been flat-lining for a decade. Malcolm Knox speculates (Sydney Morning Herald 2 April 2011 ‘Driven by Distraction’) that this may be more than a mere market variation but a response to the changing nature of work and leisure in which ‘deep reading’, the concentrated pursuit of linear stories and thought, ‘is being trained out of us’ and may reflect a ‘rewiring the human brain’. Norman Doidge argues a similar case in his book on neuroplasticity, The Brain That Changes Itself (2008).

The English neuroscientist Susan (Baroness) Greenfield predicts a generational change from linear reading to non-linear skimming. The web teaches us to process information very quickly but also inconsequentially.

Seth Godin, an American on-line marketing guru and prolific author, argues persuasively that readers comprise two distinct personality types: ‘farmers’ and ‘hunters’.

‘Farmers’ are committed to deep reading and serious time commitment, concentrating, reflecting, with long attention spans and avoiding distraction. They are likely to remain committed to print books and to enjoy visits to bookstores.

‘Hunters’ are more likely to be ‘skimmers’, taking in material diversely and discursively. They often ‘multi-task’ and move rapidly between a variety of electronic forms, with limited time investment; the intake is wide but shallow and dependent on a diversity of external stimuli. They are less likely to be serious users of the traditional book. Of course, some readers will have characteristics from both categories. Older consumers are more likely to be ‘farmers’, younger ones ‘hunters’.

As Knox observes, the isolation required by serious reading is interrupted by constant distraction, including ‘email, digital news alerts, SMS, phone calls…RSS feeds, tweets, blogs, social networking pokes.’ The American writer Nicolas Carr estimates that office workers check their emails 30 to 40 times per hour. We read and write differently on screens: to read and write on them exclusively might have a profound effect.

Jason Epstein, the veteran editor of The New York Review of Books, asserts: ‘Far more than any other medium, books contain civilization, the ongoing conversation between present and past’.

Responding to the Digital Revolution

Historically, Australia has generally been slow to adopt new technologies but, once adopted, the take-up rate is very rapid. Often, we have been rather passive in the development of new technology, preferring to adopt existing technology from overseas. Black and white television transmission became common in the US and Great Britain after World War II but began in Australia as late as 1956. However, the adoption was unprecedentedly rapid. Colour television, relatively common in the US and Great Britain in the mid 1960s, only began regular transmission in Australia in 1975: by 1978, 64 per cent of households in Sydney and Melbourne had colour sets. Although Australia had its own large stored memory computer (CSIRAC) by 1949 and some pioneering capacity in transistors, we failed to exploit either and were late to adopt mainframe computers or — decades later — personal and then portable computers.

If precedents are followed, it is reasonable to assume that even if the take up of eBooks has been relatively modest until 2011, it may well be very rapid in the immediate future. There have been exceptionally rapid transitions in the retailing and production of videos and recorded music – from 78 rpm discs, to LPs to CDs to MP3s and now to online stores that allow the purchase of individual tracks, rather than the complete performance.

The impact of globalisation and technology (quite apart from the Digital Revolution) on the book industry, from authors through to readers, and the complete supply chain in between, remains entirely speculative. However, we must find ways to change production that will stimulate and grow the opportunities for creativity, rather than stunting them.

A series of important technical changes will transform the book industry as electronic processing or creation becomes cheaper and more ‘user friendly’. Currently it costs around $1.50 per page to digitise a printed novel, but more for textbooks with illustrations. Similarly, electronic publishing services are being established to help produce eBooks more easily.

Higher labour costs and relatively small production runs in Australia are serious, if not fatal, impediments to overseas competition – exacerbated by a strong Australian dollar.

It is significant that people are rising to the challenges presented by the digital revolution and trying new ways of communicating and story telling, in an age where many people think information should be free. That raises the question, ‘What is a fair price?’

Price and Choice

The high price of books in Australia is an elephant in the room, compounded by the VAT/GST factor, subsidised postage on books from overseas, small production runs and the high $A.

When the VAT was introduced in the UK in 1973, books, newspapers and magazines were specifically exempted because of their contribution to education, culture, personal development and literacy as a social good.

For most commodities — food, fuel, low cost clothing, toiletries — purchasers expect immediate availability at point of sale. This is not true of books, and is of decreasing relevance with newspapers and magazines. Booksellers report that potential customers enter their shops, photograph publication details of books on their iphones so that they can order them, VAT and GST free, by computer, either a physical book online (with the benefit of subsidised postage) or downloaded as an electronic book. More technologically advanced customers may also use freely available software such as RedLaser and Booko to scan the ISBN of the book into their iphone or Android and check price and availability from online suppliers (both domestic and international) and often find a supplier with a more competitive price than the bricks-and-mortar shop offering a range of titles.

Some commodities — shoes, designer clothes, jewellery — are being bought online but they attract VAT or its equivalent in Europe at point of sale. In no product area is the gap so wide -30 % (–20 + 10) in the case of books imported from the United Kingdom.

Implausible as it sounds, importing an Australian book online from the United Kingdom can be cheaper than buying it from a local bookshop. A striking example is The Cook’s Companion (Viking/ Penguin) by Stephanie Alexander: the hardcover edition sells in Australian bookshops for $A130.00. The Book Depository in England offers it, airmail postage included, for $A92.83. If Australia imposed 10% GST on books ordered online from overseas, then the price to an Australian purchaser would be about $A101.25 – still a substantial margin against the local bookseller.

Books and the Digital/ Information Revolution

James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Pantheon, 2011) is sold in bookshops in Australia for $65.00 in hardback and $35.00 in paperback. Amazon offers the hardback for $US17.43 (plus postage) and it can be downloaded on Kindle at $US14.15. It is not difficult to decide what is the quickest and cheapest way to get the book.

Gleick’s The Information is a valuable overview of the Information Revolution. Gleick refers to Claude Elwood Shannon (1916-2001), the American mathematician who pioneered information theory and promoted the term ‘bit’ (from ‘binary digit’) for the basic unit of information. In 1949, Shannon calculated that the US Library of Congress contained about 100 trillion bits of information and could be regarded as the sum of acquired knowledge at the time. By 2011, an equivalent amount of information can be stored on a disc drive selling for less than $A1000.

An encyclopaedia might be regarded as the perfect example of a non-fiction reference that would survive in print — with regular updates of new material. However, in barely a decade, Wikipedia has displaced Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Columbia Encyclopaedia and other paper-based reference works. Wikipedia has, as Freeman Dyson observes, ‘… become the biggest storehouse of information on the planet and the noisiest battleground of conflicting opinions’.

Gleick (p. 409) sees the digital revolution as a ‘symptom of omniscience’. It is what the critic Alex Ross calls the ‘Infinite Playlist’, in which all recorded knowledge can be accessed by the touch of a button, a mixed blessing which brings ‘anxiety in place of fulfilment, an addictive cycle of craving and malaise. No longer has one experience begun than the thoughts of what else is out there intrudes.’ Gleick comments: ‘The embarrassment of riches. Another reminder that information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom’.

The book industry and cultural development

In addition to their content, books have been important as possessions, as physical objects, important mementos of childhood, as gifts or for display, collectors’ items distinguished for beauty or rarity, the treasures of great libraries.

According to Don Watson, ‘[b]ooks are objects of love, especially among children. What they draw from them therefore probably cannot be replaced by an iPad, which they may love as a piece of technology but not as a book, an object of enchantment or knowledge in itself.’

Publishing provided careers opportunities for designers, binders, illustrators, photographers, but it is not yet clear what new professional opportunities will be created in electronic publishing.

Public libraries, physical depositories of books, journals, magazines and newspapers, were essential elements in community education, especially self-education, for three centuries. They were places where readers were exposed to chance encounters with unfamiliar material and – if they were lucky – the assistance of librarians. But the very concept of a public library is under threat and may appear to some readers as remote as the medieval monastery, especially when they can access the contents of the Library of Congress from their iPads. The Fisher Library at Sydney University plans to eliminate 500,000 books from its collection. The University of New South Wales Library is converting library space to lounges, more user friendly to eReaders. It is difficult to imagine any government in 2011 committing large capital sums to the construction of new libraries.

In publishing, many books are printed and promoted even where there is a low expectation of profit because publishers want to encourage younger writers and because a large success for a few titles — the Harry Potter, Twlight, and Girl With the Dragon Tattoo phenomena — can enable publishers to survive even where many books with small print runs do not recover cost.

Finding out about books and book content will change: theoretically access will be much wider, but without person-to-person contact in a library or bookshop. The future of literary journals such as The Australian Book Review (now available online) will be challenging, as will the book review pages in our major newspapers. Book shops, word of mouth recommendations and access to libraries will remain significant for older readers, while electronic systems will dominate choices by younger readers.

The intellectual challenge of the digital revolution

Australia, like every other advanced economy, faces confronting challenges to how we perceive the world, learn, communicate, work and form relationships at every level, from the personal and intimate to the public and global. If we are to peer into a dimly illuminated future, what can we see? When we look at computers, Moore’s law has relentlessly increased the computing capacity in ever smaller and cheaper chips. But we still have mainframe computers, minicomputers, personal computers, tablets and smartphones. They all co-exist in their own niches. So it may be with books. The taxonomy of books may become better defined and in some areas printed books may thrive. eReading is not an either/ or choice. People with eReaders are likely to continue buying printed books.

We must encourage creativity, or as the dynamic English educator Sir Ken Robinson calls it, ‘applied imagination’. If something as new as email can be reimagined in the 21st Century, it is not a big stretch to think that the book industry can be transformed by creative Australians. Where do we find these creative Australians? We grow our own, from native or imported stock, in schools (and universities).

As Watson has argued, ‘[w]e should be teaching a love of words and ideas from the very beginning — that, and training teachers to do it, is the best guarantee of a healthy publishing industry — and a more than useful contribution to a successful economy and a richer culture.’

The Digital Revolution should be welcomed, and the publishing industry should be moving fast to adapt and take it up. However, we should not be looking at publishing in isolation, but in its relationship to culture and education in general. Publishers, governments and institutions should be looking for imaginative links between them. Perhaps Australian universities should combine to create a major academic publishing house, using both digital and traditional modes.

Knowledge is an area of the economy that will still be crucial long after the mining boom is over. Whatever else the 21st century brings, we will still need imagination, art, civil society, comforts beyond material consumption. Indeed the countries that will do best overall are likely to be the countries that do best at these.

Books are more than an industrial output, as conventionally defined. The book culture needs to be encouraged rather than protected, transformed rather than subsidised.

Adapted from an article published by the Book Industry Strategy Group, 2011

© Barry Jones 2011