Wandering Stiff ~mainstem~

A current article on the website version of Yale Alumni Magazine adds another two bits to what has become an ongoing debate: are eBooks, and electronic media in general, the wave of the future, or do they represent the end of civilization? The article “Psychology of the bookplate: Why book owners mark their literary territory with personalized art” comes down decidedly on the side of those who decry the publishing world’s ongoing attempt to move book publishing into electronic formats.

Among other observations, the author notes:

“For centuries, books were precious. The first book printed with movable type, the Gutenberg Bible, was and is an object of veneration, and even three centuries later, books (as opposed to pamphlets) were artisanal productions. Samuel Johnson’s famous Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, initially sold at a rate so low it was reissued in affordable weekly installments. Books retained scarcity value for almost another century, until the era of the nineteenth-century “dime novel,” the throwaway precursor of today’s paperback.”

Hmmm, that’s an interesting one. Let’s sit on our stump and think about that one for a moment.

So, books were precious. –Yes, we can agree with that to a point, except that we would add that printed books were in a sense less precious than the previous technology: manuscripts copied by hand.

Previous to the printing press, unless you could find your desired source manuscript and either had the ability (and penmanship) to write it out legibly or knew someone who could copy it for you (or more likely had the prestige to procure the loan of the source manuscript and the wealth to hire a scribe) you could not own the world’s great treasures in writing. Fairly wealthy merchants could likely afford no more than a sparse collection of time-consumingly copied volumes.

Even after the printing press the truly wealthy and powerful continued to pay for hand-copied manuscripts for some time. When they bought a printed book, they wanted it to resemble a manuscript. Why? Because they preferred the lavish thought that someone had written every letter just for them. This was loving the book as luxury object, not necessarily loving it for what it held between its covers.

But isn’t it often said that the printing press made books available to the masses for the very first time? That it took the book from being a commodity owned by the few to an object of communication accessible to all? Well, yes, actually, I think I remember hearing that somewhere.

So Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary wasn’t a big seller — big surprise! — but that doesn’t change the fact that the printing press gradually changed the sheer amount of reading material available to people of less means. And ironically enough, a lot of people didn’t like it. Debates raged about the evil effects of allowing just anyone to read books.

(Click here for some background on manuscript culture. Also, don’t forget Plato’s assertion that writing itself would destroy the human capacity for remembering and erode our ability to discern mere information from understanding. If you’re of the same opinion, we’ve already gone way beyond the pale! But don’t forget that Plato was one of the most prolific Greek writers/poets of his day….)

Perhaps Mr. Alex Beam (and everyone else who keeps taking up the same depressed eBook chant) should rather ponder the irony that his own article appears in electronic format and is readable only because web publishers have decided on a single code (or medium) to display websites, namely, HTML. Perhaps he should remember that HTML only came to be the standard for websites over a period of years of debate and development, a period not dissimilar from the current period of eBook debate and development, much of which turns fundamentally on what code should be used and who owns that code.

In further irony, Mr. Beam’s article links to a slideshow of Yale’s catalog of old bookplates. Yes, in full electronic glory, here are artifacts that would not be available for you and I to peruse from afar without that damned internet (do check them out — they are the true interest of his article; he should spend more time celebrating them in full). And by the way, the eBook promises a similar encyclopedic enrichment of content beyond what the printed book can offer.

So now that we’ve sat and thought on it, why is Mr. Beam so uncomfortable? Perhaps he, like many of us, senses how up in the air the eBook phenomenon is. Change is coming, but what will it look like?

We all sense the restless fingers of large corporations vying for market dominance. Names like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, etc., haunt the dreams of both writers and publishers. Corporations seeking intellectual property rights by which to profit from are the kit in the caboodle, the qualitative difference-makers between today’s upstart eBook industry and the upstart print industry of the past.

If print culture had to overcome the whims and prejudices of wealthy and powerful individuals of church and state, eBook culture has to vie with the profit-seeking drive of huge corporations who already have a tight grip on distribution and marketing forces, not to mention the political ears of those in power. The point Mr. Beam brings up is actually better related to the question of open-source versus strictly licensed software — say, Firefox versus Internet Explorer or Linux versus Windows.

Open source allows users to play around and make their added marks of ownership, while a closed system of strict licensing like that put in place by Amazon’s Kindle is designed to ensure one corporation’s exclusive control at all levels. But even open source applications end up more like the bookplates about which Mr. Beam waxes sentimental and of which one might critically say that they were an avenue for those who were not authors to take some imagined ownership of a thing they did not produce.

When I download an add-on theme for Firefox, do I somehow think I’m responsible for it and that it truly reflects me? Apparently I do, and this point of Mr. Beam’s is well-taken, if not carried far enough.

And so Mr. Beam ought to ask, what is the eBook equivalent to the bookplate? How about the equivalent to scrawling in the margins and turning down corners (for those of us who do that sort of thing)? Will it let me access my Facebook and Twitter accounts with little excerpts and my own annotations? These are some of the questions potential eBook readers care about, and the answers that more than a few readers will demand of eBooks before the printed book has any chance of being supplanted on a large scale. But solve some of these technical issues, and watch out world!

There is no question that the eBook format, properly executed, has many advantages over print.

For students and for those who want to reduce their physical footprint in a world going mobile, eBooks may be the best thing since sliced bread.

For authors, the potential to get their works into the hands of an increased audience at a reduced price is an attractive possibility, with the increased audience more possible all the time and the reduced price less likely.

No doubt there will be perceived wins and losses on all sides of the equation, but for now, most of us still treasure our favorite printed books and always will, and many of us will nonetheless be taking the eBook plunge in the near future.

One only hopes that we treasure books for the right reasons: the content, that of the best human thought and feeling passed on to posterity. For while I agree with Plato that many who read books don’t possess an ounce of understanding, it is possible that the printed word can preserve little paths to the understanding we all need.

And Plato of all persons wanted his words remembered and understood just as he laid them down, whether on clay tablets or scrolls or an iPad screen he maybe could not have imagined.