11.26.11

The End of the Printed Word

Posted in Uncategorized at 7:23 am by Administrator

My apartment is filled with books.  By my count, I have more than a thousand of them and, estimating conservatively, I’ve probably read about eight hundred of those thousand (a result of many of these books having been picked up in large batches either from used book stores or remainder sales and then later passed over in favor of newer fare that seemed more interesting).  I’ve long taken pride in this, having forced friends to help me to shuttle dozens of boxes packed with them through four homes throughout my 20’s.  If anyone in the social circles I run in qualifies as a bibliophile it’s myself.  But, regrettably, like so many other things, I regret to inform you that, so far as I am concerned, that’s probably a thing of the past.  In the last year, I’ve bought but a single physical book – the Parks and Recreation tie-in “Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America” and, at most, I’m likely to buy one more before the year is out – the annotated edition of Star Wars: Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn.

That’s not to say that I’ve stopped reading.  Going through my list of Kindle books, over the last year I’ve purchased – and read – George W. Bush’s Decision Points, Ron Chenow’s Washington: A Life, Edmund Morris’ Colonel Roosevelt, Joseph Ellis’ First Family, Ronald White’s A. Lincoln, Manning Up by Kay Hymowitz, Mad as Hell by Dominic Sandbrook, 1920: The Year of Six Presidents by David Pietrusza, Eisenhower 1956 by David Nichols, End Game by Matthew Glass, A Bright Shining LIe: John Paul Vann in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan, Bismarck: A Life by Jonathan Steinberg, In the Plex by Steven Levy, Idea Man by Paul Allen, The Social Animal by David Brooks, The Secret Knowledge by David Mamet, Mr. Speaker by James Grant, The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Yes, Prime Minister: a play by Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, One Minute to Midnight by Michael Dobbs, Then Everything Changed by Jeff Greenfield, The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, LIfe at the Bottom by Theodore Dalymple,, Carthage Must be Destroyed by Richard Miles, Gladstone by Roy Jenkins, After America by Mark Steyn, Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America by Chris Colin, In My Time by Dick Cheney, Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, Confidence Men by Ron Suskind, An Empire of Wealth by John Steele Gordon, Lone Star Nation by H.W. Brands, The Blast of War by Adam Teiichi Yoshida (yes, had to include that), The Time Machine Did It by John Swartzwelder, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, and The Forever War by Joe Halderman.  As a long-time fan of conservative-leaning science fiction publisher Baen, I bought from them advance reader copies of Extremis by Steve White, The Amazon Legion by Tom Kratman and A Rising Thunder by David Weber, which I plan to read next.

If you add up my total reading from the year, which includes a few re-reads of old favorites (I’m presently working my way through the second volume of William Manchester’s lamentably-unfinished The Last Lion) I’ve probably read somewhere between forty-five and fifty books over the last year.  I bothered to write them all to simply make a point – if someone who is in the top percentile of all readers (and I think I pretty much have to be) can only be moved to buy physical books for novelty reasons (the Parks and Recreation book is big and glossy and seems to be designed to be physically appreciated and the annotations in the special edition of Heir to the Empire are difficult to read physically), then is there really much hope at all for printed works in the future?

Obviously the exact figures vary but, given an average Amazon price of about $10-$20 for eBooks coming from traditional publishers, let’s say that I’ve spent $600 on books through Amazon over the last year.  By way of comparison, buying those books at retail – which I would have had to do in order to have them immediately (I am not a fan of waiting for books to arrive in the mail, once I have set to reading I wish to finish the book immediately), would have cost well over $1000, perhaps approaching as much as $1200-$1600.

The economics of it are simply too good for people who have to print physical books to compete.  Sure, it’ll be years before you get everyone to convert over but it seems quite clear to me that the math adds up: the days of the ordinary physical book are over.  They’re going to go the way of the vinyl record – a novelty item clung to by a handful who insist upon the superior qualities of (and are willing to pay a premium for) tangible media.

Insofar as this essay is already incredibly self-referential, I see no reason to stop now and will continue to set loose my thoughts.  When I set about writing my first real book, The Blast of War I didn’t give even the slightest thought to attempting traditional publication.  There were a number of reasons for this: I always intended to write it in a format (as a faux-history book) that would be difficult to place on the shelves, the time-frame in which it sought to tell the story was approaching too quickly for traditional publishing timelines, and the audience for the sort of work I was proposing was probably  too limited for most publishers.  But there was another overriding reason: publishing electronically would allow me to keep 70% of the retail price of the book (meaning that I make as much off a $3 e-book at a traditional author would off a full-priced physical book) and I could, the control freak that I am, retain complete control of the content of the book.  Given these facts, why would I want to take on the hassles of selling physical books?

The other day I was wandering through the remnants of one of the last video stores in Vancouver, now shoved into the back of one of the last record stores in Vancouver – Zulu Records in Kitsilano.  I never had much of a physical music collection – by the time I was a teenager we were already at the beginning of the digital era – but I used to have a large collection of DVD’s and, before that, VHS tapes.  I was an avid customer of the video stores of days of yore – I had cards to rent at both Blockbuster and Rogers Video before I could drive.  I used to walk half a mile up a hill to rent movies (and even the occasional television show) on VHS.  Now the video store is practically extinct, over the last year and a half I’ve watched as the scattered survivors of the breed, like isolated Confederate armies and posts after Appomattox, have surrendered to history one-by-one.

As much as I admit that I use and approve of the change – how much easier is it to find a movie on Netflix or a thousand other digital services than to trudge to the store, search the racks to find a copy of something in stock, and then to return home? – I must admit that I find something about the process awe-striking.  As an ardent capitalist I must admire how efficiently the market has found a solution – a product with superior qualities replaces in inferior one and life goes on – there is something strange in seeing an institution that had been something of an anchor point in a short life vanish off the face of the earth with such startling speed.

When will the end of the book store come?  I believe that it will be much sooner than anyone expects.  The readers who sustain them – those who buy more than the latest (heavily-discounted) bestseller will be driven to adopt the alternatives quite quickly – the economics of the matter are just too attractive for it to be otherwise.  Already, in the United States, we’ve seen the Borders chain shuttered.  I imagine that there we’ll see more of the same in the near future and, as they go, so will the vast logistical chains that nurture them become unviable.

That, I am not afraid to admit, I will mourn.  I learned to read when I was three and, by the time I was eight I was a sufficiently proficient reader to end up carrying a chewed-up copy of Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins to the 3rd Grade.  I’ve had books with me – and generally carried one or more almost everywhere – for as long as I can remember.

There was a thrill – a sort of tactile pleasure – in the old world that is impossible to replicate.  Recently, on a stroll down Granville Street, I noticed a painted sign on the side of a building advertising a bookstore that \no longer exists.  When I saw it, I flashed back to a very distant past – I remembered that sign.  I remembered that store.  Once, on some Saturday or Sunday in the distant past – I was probably twelve or thirteen or fourteen years old – I spent two or three hours romping through that used book store and finding amongst it some treasures that I had never seen anywhere else.  In particular, I recall that I acquired my first copy of C.M. Kornbluth’s Not This August there and chanced upon a hardcover first edition copy of Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising that, alas, carrying a price worthy of a Clancy first edition (that is to say, perhaps $30) was beyond my youthful means.  That copy (or perhaps one from somewhere else, I don’t think I ever asked) would later show up under the Christmas tree.  I suppose that such pleasures will now be denied to our children – that such scenes will be a distant to them as kerosene-lit Victorian Christmases seemed in my own childhood.

There was a thrill of discovery in old books that is difficult to replicate today.  I do wonder if we should lose something there.  As a child I learned so much from the books that I had available to me – the old copies of Jane’s Fighting Ships* that the Coquitlam Public Library stocked by refused to allow to be checked out, the worn copy of Herman Kahn’s Thinking About the Unthinkable that opened up a world of cold-blooded strategic thought to a young teenager.  When information was harder to get, it carried a greater heft than it does today.

Alas, the times change and we ought to change with them.  Given this, I’ve made a difficult decision – at the first opportunity, the books I’ve lovingly collected are going to be carefully stored away somewhere.  It really just doesn’t do to have a collection of something so live and vital displayed that just abruptly halts in 2009 or so.  I have no desire to be the resident of the museum.  But I’m going to keep them and, someday (given my present circumstances, in a future distant from now) and in some other place, I’ll put them back out and use them to inspire future generations with the story of the worlds that came before them.

Adam Yoshida is a Vancouver-based blogger and the author of The Blast of War.

 

* Incidentally, if someone is trying to find a Christmas present that I would find charming and moving, I see that old copies of Jane’s sell fairly cheaply online these days.  I’m not really partial to any particular year – I have always been fascinated by having the chance to read up on the service life of old ships, especially veterans of the Second World War that continued in service somewhere in the 1970’s or 1980’s, though.

 

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