The Future is Bookless(?!)

(photo courtesy of GirlyGeekdom from Flikr)

You think people will still read books in the future?

Yes, of course they will.

I mean books that are in actual books, not in electronic readers.

Maybe. Who knows.

(I overheard this actual conversation in a coffee shop the other day.)

The future of publishing is foggy. Mobile devices are increasingly prominent and versatile, electronic readers are finally at a point where people want to buy them (but that could prove to be a fad), bookstores and publishers are reaching into deeper and deeper crevices to find inane filler to print something reasonably marketable, et cetera et cetera. How much longer, if at all, can the business of The Book go on?

It's a question a lot of people are asking, and only a few are trying to answer. And that's usually a good sign that everyone doing the talking is an idiot. Idiots like Richard Nash as quoted from this io9 article.

BEGIN QUOTE: "The book retail chains will disappear, just like Circuit City, Sharper Image, Tower Records disappeared... a couple of front list publishing enterprises will likely be operating trying to emulate the Hollywood blockbuster model with just about enough success to be able to stay in business"

Actually, that doesn't sound like an idiot talking. That sounds like a relatively intelligent prediction, however grim it may be. And oh god, that view is pretty damn horrifying and grim. But is it possible? Realistic? Likely?

How should I know????

What I do know is American culture loves a good ol' head-to-head battle. Everything is a war, a landscape of opposing sides pitted against one another to the death. Conservatism vs. Liberalism. Yankees vs. Red Sox. Toaster vs. Microwave. And now, BOOKS vs. E-READERS.

But here's the thing: this isn't an actual battle, it's more like a fucking advertising campaign. It's a battle of business, not of literary media. It doesn't matter whether you read Charles Dickens' Great Expectations in a serialized periodical, a book, a laptop, a Kindle, or a scroll, because the literature will always be the same.

What will be different between those mediums, those platforms for reading? The user experience--whether or not you enjoyed the act of reading: did you hate rolling and winding the scroll, was the book binding too loose, did your laptop get too hot, did your eyes hurt, and so on. Nevertheless, always remember that Charles Dickens probably doesn't give a fuck about your user experience.

There are traditionalists who love the book. They believe it is the best and only way to read, that electronic readers are a sin and a perversion against text and literacy, that the printed word will become trivialized and archived and forgotten. Funny thing is, Plato had rather similar feelings about written text itself. That's right, he felt that media is best kept confined to those pink squishy things between our ears (the original mobile device!).

But I think there's a reason why books are so loved and adored and successful: the book is the first perfected mobile media device. It's compact, it contains a lot of media, and you can access it anywhere anyhow (sitting, standing, lying down, hanging by your feet, et cetera). That's tough to beat.

The Book is still an invention, a technology, a platform to present a particular form of media: literature! And honestly, I don't care how people read, I only care that they do read.

Books will never go away even if ereaders become a more profitable platform for the publishing industry, though. But the most important reason why books will always remain is that if you're trying to fool people into thinking you're very smart and well read a giant bookshelf with snooty titles will do much better than an iTunes-esque playlist.