Linger a bit with that page in your fingers

The other night my family and I watched on DVD “The Day After Tomorrow,” a disaster thriller made in 2004 about the calamitous effects of global warming. While only six years old, the movie dated itself with its computer monitors the size of Coleman coolers. It made me wonder what commonplace item in six years will so glaringly date our time.

One answer may have come a couple weeks ago in New York City, at the annual trade show for the book industry. An industry expert, addressing the booksellers, authors and publishers unwrapping their box lunches, predicted that by 2016 digital books will account for half of all books sold.

Will someone sitting on a park bench reading a book made of paper date our time?

Flying high on apps

On my flight home from the conference, I happened to sit next to a young mother flying with her 22-month old daughter. Her little girl started to fuss as we began our initial descent, until Mom handed over her iPhone. The toddler, while sucking on her pacifier, handily swept word-image flash cards—from turtle to giraffe to duck, the latter quacking when the girl poked it.

The next day, my family and I went to dinner at an old Florida diner. The sign out front said “since 1950.”As we walked to our booth, I spotted an old salt eating alone at the counter, reading on a Kindle.

Predicting the future is tricky business, even for professionals like Paul Saffo.  “Good forecasts always seem wildly unlikely before the fact, and crushingly obvious after they have come to pass,” warns this oft-consulted Silicon Valley sage. Paul also cautions against mistaking a clear view for a short distance. Future events unfold along an s-curve: they take forever to arrive, but when they do, they occur literally overnight.

Change was in the book-fair air, and it’s hard not to admire much of it. Booth after booth was showing demos of digital books whose illustrations moved like pictures in a Hogwarts wizard manual. At one booth, the vendor showed how students could share their textbook annotations with friends on Facebook.

Amy Hertz, the editor of the book section of the Huffington Post, told me, “The evidence is that reading is up—reading on screens as well as reading in print—and that’s exciting.”

Yet young people who will live most of their lives in the present century will not well remember the golden age of printed books. They may only dimly recall seeing books stacked like cord wood in stores and stuffed into impossibly heavy backpacks shouldered by college students.

The writing is (still) in the book

No one today remembers what it was like to cross the Atlantic on a ship powered only by sails. You’d have to be 100 to recall the golden age of silent movies. Only through histories such as Scott Eyman’s The Speed of Sound (available in both print and electronic formats) can we learn that silent movies had their own art. In some ways it was superior to the art of sound movies we know today.

Will future generations assume that books printed on paper must have been inferior to the digital books they know? Don’t we assume that ancient readers must have happily given up their scrolls when shown books on pages? Don’t we assume they must have applauded the boon of movable type?

At Levenger, we are designing new products for iPads and the other magic tablets to come. But we’re also conspiring to make our Levenger Press books more beautiful than ever. We hope readers will want to continue to give paper books as gifts—especially if those books are compelling in content and appearance, especially if they accentuate textures and other attributes still hard to trump by digital devices.

In a recent article in the New York Times (still thrown onto our driveway), Peter Khoury mused on how charming and mysterious handwritten inscriptions in paper books can be. It’s ironic that writing in books, so frowned upon by our teachers, is one way likely to preserve their value.

In our lovingly produced Levenger Press books, we’ll be sure to leave room in the front for writing inscriptions to your loved ones. I invite you to join us in our little conspiracy to keep printed books lingering a while longer.

And for all you children of the 20th century now living in the 21st, how do you think you’ll be reading six years hence? I’d love to hear your comments. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

And because some of you are already e-reading, I’ll let you in on a secret: we’re currently working on adding a fifth “e” to “Levenger Press,” and will soon be offering our first electronic book.

Comments

[Robert Ferguson]

What you failed to mention is that other option, audiobooks. This is a great way to experience literature--by having someone read a book to you.

[Lynn E. O'Connor, PhD]

I have struggled with this for a while now. In truth I spend a great deal of my time reading online. But still, I print out everything I think is important in hard copy, wasting paper and being very un-green. I purchased a Kindle a while ago, and passed it on to my husband who loves it. It didn't quite suit me, I skim (academic, quasai academic, social science, light neuroscience) books very fast, and somehow my method seems to require hard copy, an ability to glance at headings, beginning of paragraphs, things I found hard to do on the Kindle. Then came the I-Pad. It is by far the best e-reader I've seen. And yet still --for example--I purchase a book on Amazon for kindle for the mac. I download it and read it on the mac, or now, sometimes, I transfer it to the I-Pad. But if it really grabs me, has content I need or want to reflect upon, I go back to Amazon and order a second copy, this time hard copy. I'm ending up with two copies of books I deem important to my work, e-version and hard copy version. Maybe this is my age, I'm an older generation. And yet, most of my reading is in fact, done online. There is still this problem of speed reading, or skimming fast that I find so hard to do on e-versions of books. I'm curious what others have to say about the e-book/hard copy thing we are looking at today. Thanks for your blog.

Lynn O'Connor

[ron weekes]

From one who still employs a fountain pen and appreciates the heft of rag-content paper, I mourn the demise of the printed word. Seems more and more folks are visual rather than tactile...but, whatever encourages one to broaden their horizon -- be it hardbound book or kindle -- is to be applauded. The demise of literacy would be a sadder passing, methinks.

[Barb Thames]

Ah, yes, life - and reading - have definitely changed even for us old folks.

I live in a small town in the midst of farm country and spend a good bit of time behind the wheel of my vehicle (and it used to be even more when I worked out of state). Because of the travel, I began renting books on tape - and then CD.

Then about 3 years ago I asked my sister for an MP3 for Christmas - not for music but for recorded books.

Today I have 1530 'real' books catalogued on LibraryThing (not counting read-and-pass-along paperbacks) and 42 in my Audible files on the computer for the MP3.

I love the flexibility of it all. And I'm thinking about getting an e-book reader as well. Why shut myself out of one variety of reading?

[Jon Rosen]

I love paper books and use fountain pens for writing nearly all of the time. But, as someone who has lugged many, many cartons of books around during moves, I plan to only buy eBooks when possible. I've never used a Kindle, but I have an iPad. The reading experience is very good and bound to improve over time as the software and display technologies improve. There are things that can't be done yet with a single eBook reader. You can't open three books at once to compare something, but prices are bound to go lower and lower, so having more than one eBook reader isn't unlikely in the future.

In addition to some obvious advantages, eBooks bring the promise of being able to update books over time. Wouldn't it be great if you could pay an upgrade fee to get new versions of textbooks and other technical tomes?

Electronic books are certainly "greener." Just as mp3s have reduced the need for CDs, electronic books will reduce the need for paper in a big way. It may also mean that new authors will have an easier time finding an audience once distribution is free.

I'm sure I'll always appreciate paper books, but the future is undoubtedly headed for eBooks.

[Lori Brown]

To be honest, I find reading books on screens like my computer and Kindle or Nook very hard; I get an excruciating headache, while reading a hardbound book (or a well loved paperback) tends to relax me and cure that digital headache. I love the smell of books and visit my local library just to breathe the air and look through the stacks. My daughter and I soothe our souls in bookstores or book fairs and I can't image being able to do that with electronic press. I do like audio books and find myself using them to prescreen future additions to my home library and like to listen while driving, but I still prefer a book I can hold and pages I have to grasp to turn.

[Steve Leveen]

What marvelous commentary and ideas!

Audiobooks (and I'm a huge fan who wrote a chapter on them in my book) taught millions of us that books don't have to be printed. eBooks are taking that to the next step. Might ebooks lead to more reading and more printed book purchasing? It already has for some of us. What a reader's world of plenty we have now. We may have passed the golden age of printed books, but we might be entering the golden age of reading.

[W.T. Underwood]

For my 84th birthday, our three children and mates chipped in and gave me a Kindle. It is a marvelous device with a handy dictionary and links to lots of useful
sites. It is great for reading on planes. Never will it replace a "book" that I can hold in my hands and turn the pages and just let flop open to some place and reread from there. A Kindle cannot be lined up on several, or many, bookshelves to wait there for months or years for me to rediscover and read the lovely contents once again. On an allied subject, it is a tragedy that print newspapers are disappearing from the scene. Much fault lies with the papers themselves. Once again a paper at breakfast can be taken apart and shared with your mate, recipes can be cut out to go on the tall stack of others that you are going to prepare "soon." Wise articles which substantiate your political views can be put up on the icebox. Contrary ones with radical views can also be posted with appropriate caustic comments alongside. Electronic gimcracks will supersede print media but they will not replace it.

[Carol Hill]

"It may also mean that new authors will have an easier time finding an audience once distribution is free."

If distribution is free, how will authors be paid? And, if authors can no longer make a living, will there be any new authors? Also, one of the ongoing debates in the book business the past few years has been the issue of quantity vs. quality. So, won't the easy addition of e-books just add to the quantity, making it that much harder for quality writing to find an audience?

I own a small bookstore, so am obviously partial to printed books, but do accept that e-books will have a place in the book world. For example, issuing students e-readers when they begin first grade, and then updating them as they proceed through school seems like a reasonable idea.

However, on a personal level, I have several reasons for clinging to printed books:
(1) I read a lot of non-fiction, for pleasure and research, and I really use my books--they are chock full of highlights and margin notes, and I rely on visual cues, such as whether something was on the left or right facing page (which I usually remember) when I have to look something up. Sometimes, just looking at the bookcases will jog my memory. I don't know how many times I've scanned my books relying on the unique visual appearance of every individual book to remind me of where I read something.

(2) I have a houseful of filled bookcases, and when I imagine those shelves emptied and all those books (and memories) replaced by an e-reader, it feels very cold and sterile. There's something 'cuddly' about a printed book--I love to curl into a corner of the sofa with a book, and it's comforting to turn the pages of a book I originally opened forty or so years ago. I can't imagine getting that same cozy feeling holding an electronic device. Printed boooks are personal. I gave my son all his childhood books when my first grandchild was born. Sure, I could have easily given him new copies, or e-copies, of Winnie-the-Pooh, Dr. Seuss, Curious George, Pippi Longstocking, etc., but they wouldn't have had his name inscribed by his 7-year-old hand, or his crayon "drawings," or the jelly stain from one of his PB&J's.
Electronic data is something meant for robots, not people.

(3) I live in the mountains, and I've been reading outdoors for as long as I can remember (I had to have something to do on all those fishing trips). I realize you can use an e-reader outdoors, but why risk damaging or losing an expensive device, or relying on batteries to keep you reading, when all you need is sunshine or a kerosene lamp (or sometimes a good campfire)? And, if your book happens to fall into the lake, big deal. You'll be out $8-$15 if it was a paperback, and about $26 if it was a hardcover, not hundreds for an e-reader or I-Pad.

4) Can children really engage with a book that's part of an electronic gadget? I try to imagine future kids (my grandkids?) packing for camp and tucking their 'favorite' e-reader into a duffle bag, and it doesn't even make sense to me. How does a child connect with one book when his/her only access to it is through a device that holds hundreds (maybe thousands) of them. How can 'Call of the Wild' become a child's favorite book if it is little more than data buried in some piece of electronics. And, does anyone really want five-year-olds playing around with expensive electronics? Also, think about a Caldecott book, where the art is frequently as fundamental to the story as the words. Will the reader experience and appreciation of that art be the same on a screen as it is on paper?

5) As any real book junkie knows, the first thing we do with a book we love is shove it into someone else's hands, telling them, "You've got to read this book!" But, how do you do that with an e-reader?

As a 60-something, I don't have to get too worried about the print vs electronics debate. I'm about as techie as I'm going to get and I'm more than happy with my printed books, especially the books that I've packed and unpacked many times over the years.

A book is so much more than its words.

[J Bradshaw]

I love my Kindle, but still order the "real thing" when I read a book I want to remember forever.

My library of 'real books' is now concentrated on those I wish to keep and want others who stop by to adore.

Ps: I own copies of almost all of the Levenger books available for my permanent library. They look beautiful, and contain timeless info. J. Bradshaw

[Ann Dees]

As a librarian for 35 years, I too have had a hard time letting go of a hardback book. I for one believe (and hope) that there will always be libraries with books of paper. Living in Mississippi, there are many who can not afford the electronic books, readers, etc. A public library fills that gap. I do own a Kindle (for about 6 months now) and truly love it. There is great joy in downloading a book in 60 seconds while I am sitting on the patio by the lake. There is also joy for my husband who does NOT have to cart my bookbag that weighs on ton on vacation. I still own a book bag, and it still contains books. He asked what I needed it for...my answer, those are my emergency books.