The Nation: The Long Goodbye? The Book Business and its Woes

The Long Goodbye? The Book Business and its Woes
By Elisabeth Sifton

May 20, 2009


Humanity has read, hoarded, discarded and demanded books for centuries; for centuries books have been intimately woven into our sense of ourselves, into the means by which we find out who we are and who we want to be. They have never been mere physical objects--paper pages of a certain size and weight printed with text and sometimes images, bound together on the left--never just cherished or reviled reminders of school-day torments, or mementos treasured as expressions of bourgeois achievement, or icons of aristocratic culture. They have been all these things and more. They have been instruments of enlightenment.

Once the invention of movable type and various commercial advances in the early modern era enabled printers to sell books to anyone who could and would pay for them (no longer reserving them for priests and kings), they became irresistibly popular: their relatively sturdy bindings gave them some permanence; the small-format ones were portable and could be read anywhere; and they transmitted sensory pleasures to eye, hand and brain. Children learned to read with them; adolescents used them, sometimes furtively, to discover the secrets of grown-up life; adults loved them for the pleasure, learning and joy they conveyed. Books have had a kind of spooky power, embedded as they are in the very structures of learning, commerce and culture by which we have absorbed, stored and transmitted information, opinion, art and wisdom. No wonder, then, that the book business, although a very small part of the American economy, has attracted disproportionate attention.

But does it still merit this attention? Do books still have their power? Over the past twenty years, as we've thrown ourselves eagerly into a joy ride on the Information Superhighway, we've been learning to read, and been reading, differently; and books aren't necessarily where we start or end our education. The unprofitable chaos of the book business today indicates, among other things, that slow, almost invisible transformations as well as rapid helter-skelter ones have wrecked old reading habits (bad and good) and created new ones (ditto). In the cacophony of modern American commerce, we hear incoherent squeals of dying life-forms along with the triumphant braying and twittering of new human expression. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/sifton?rel=hp_currently

better at times.

:hide:

I borrowed the kindle from a friend to try it out....I quickly gave it back.

I am saving serious money to get the big one.

But I have friends who love the Kindle....they swear it's the best thing since frozen pizza.

Thanks for the review.

and I've got thousands of them.

is happening. I read far more on my ebook reader these days than I do on an actual paper book

Paperbacks were once considered cheap enough to be by the cash registers as an impulse buy.

As wages stagnated over the last 20 years (compared to inflation) the book industry erroneously believed they had no reason to reduce costs so prices could remain affordable enough to remain impulse buys.

I still dont see the current small pc styled bookreaders as an alternative.

There probably wont be a viable alternative to paper until the OLED paper thin, flexible displays are in the market in another 5 years, and even then it will be a few years from their release before the economies of scale make them affordable.