Book Doomsday: The March of Progress and the Fate of the Book
John Potts
November 15
We’re all aware of the doomsday (or rosie, depending on your perspective) scenarios that paint a sleek, if not shallow, paperless picture of a world without physical books. But is it really true? And what is the likely course of this technologically driven reader-evolution? In Meanjin’s September issue, John Potts ponders progress and offers his own forecast on the future of the book. A brief extract is below and you can view the full article on our editions page.
The future of reading, the proponents of digital technology tell us, is in the cloud. The cloud is the datasphere, the immaterial zone where digital words, images and sounds reside, waiting to be accessed.[3] There will be no need to turn trees into paper, no need to clutter homes with dust-gathering books. All that will be needed is a receptacle: small, hand-held, portable, stylish, an essential part of your digital ensemble. This device will bring the cloud down to the reader: any book, newspaper, magazine, poem, essay or chapter, in electronic form, will find its wireless way onto your device and into your hands.
We can see how digital reading will work by noting the path already taken by music. The downloading of music files has been the intermediate phase in the trajectory that extends from record store to the cloud. Consumers of music download digital files from iTunes or other online stores—or from file-sharing sites. The former is the legal option, in which consumers pay a small amount to download each track; the latter is the free and illegal option, laughing in the face of copyright. For several years, the breech of copyright has been the biggest—or at least loudest—story in this domain, led by cries of outrage from the record companies and their battalions of intellectual property lawyers. But now the situation is settling down, as many young consumers agree to part with a couple of dollars for legally acquired songs. The next phase of music consumption will move beyond downloading to online subscription services such as Spotify, which offer unlimited access to a vast online music library. In this scenario, there is no need to download, because the virtual music collection is always on, always available, a ‘celestial jukebox’. We can now take in the features of this new ethereal landscape, including the losses and casualties of the digital transformation.
The object is gone: the compact disc, like the vinyl record before it, has no reason to exist. With it have gone the small record stores and specialist music shops that once stocked these objects. Instead of objects, there is now a vessel—the iPod, iPhone or equivalent device. The vessel accesses thousands of songs or music tracks; it can download them as files or immaterial objects, if that is the preferred mode. Millions more wait in the cloud to be transferred to the vessel. Hi-fi is another casualty: nobody, apart from a few old-timers, cares much about audio quality. The digital audio file is inferior in sound quality to the CD, which was inferior to the vinyl record. Music is heard through cheap ‘lossy’ ear buds that reduce even further the listening experience; we have taken great steps backwards in acoustic quality. The priorities have changed: quantity, availability and portability—access to the great jukebox in the sky—are deemed more desirable than sound quality.
If the music industry has drifted into the cloud, the publishing industry must, according to digital logic, follow. The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, has declared ‘the physical book and bookstores are dead’.[4] Their replacement, in the vision of Bezos and his fellow captains of information, is the vessel for digital text. Amazon’s candidate is the Kindle, launched in 2007, while there are many other reading devices, the most publicised being Apple’s iPad.
Notes
3.Brad Stone and Claire Cain Miller, ‘Music’s next step: Listening to the cloud’, New York Times, global edition, 14 December 2009, p. 15. Back
4.Quoted in Ken Auletta, ‘Publish or Perish: Can the iPad topple the Kindle and save the book business?’, New Yorker, 26 April 2010, p. 26. Back
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Comments
15 Nov 10 at 9:48
I’ve been thinking about this since I read it in print. This distinction between ‘object’ and ‘vessel’ is interesting to me (apart from the obvious point that a vessel is still an object).
The book has always been a container of knowledge, and seems now to be moving more towards object status, valued for its decorative qualities rather than for its contents. Witness the trend for repackaging classic — or just popular (seems that Valley of the Dolls has made classic status) — texts in fancy bindings so that they are more attractive on your shelf.
This is reflected in the book arts world, where artists are shifting from the notion that the idea within the book is less important than the presentation of the book. In the 60s and 70s, the format of the book was secondary to the idea being explored (Ed Ruscha, Robert Jacks), but this seems to have reversed in recent times. Just a quick flick through the photo pages of Artists Books 3.0 will show how elaborate artist’s books have become with very little meaningful content. Of course, there are exceptions to this in both artist’s and commercial publishing, but they are just that: exceptions.
...15 Nov 10 at 12:51
While the industry wrings its hands and frets for the future, readers get on the the task of, you know, reading. And it is readers making the decision on how to go about it. Some choose digital, some choose print.
While discussion and debate of digital publishing in the industry is necessary and healthy, characterising the advocates of digital as mindless hype-parroting rah-rahs of ‘progress’ is not the way to kick off. The changes in publishing are far more nuanced and complex than the umpteenth re-run of VHS vs Beta.
So let the discussion commence and leave the sweeping generalisations and typos (“…breech of copyright”? Seriously?) behind.
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