As usual, NPR has a point: In her article, Lynn Neary points out, ”you can’t put a pretty bow on an e-book — and that’s where traditional booksellers still have an advantage.”
But that’s probably cold comfort given that the article fully acknowledges the growing popularity of e-book readers: Neary quotes Amazon’s Russ Grandinetti as saying that the Kindle is the company’s best-selling product overall - ”in both units and revenue” – and Barnes & Noble’s e-book reader, Nook, has already sold out for the holidays. On top of that, of course, buying books online – particularly from Amazon - is still a major threat, too.
I’d be devastated to lose indie bookstores like The Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, MA – or, my current haunts, Dickson Street Bookshop and Nightbird Books here in Fayetteville. No question about it. But I’m also broke enough that it’s hard – if not downright dumb – to say ‘No’ to Amazon, even if it does mean paying for postage.
But it’s even harder to justify buying a physical copies of some books at all – say, Shakespeare’s Collected Works. I could just as easily read it in its entirety online – or even download the iPhone app dedicated to Shakespeare’s work, or more easily still, I could just bring it up on an app I’ve already downloaded, like Stanza.
So, if I had a Kindle proper, I can imagine it might be hard to convince myself to spend significantly more for a paper copy. In some cases, I’m sure I would, but it wouldn’t be a matter-of-course anymore – maybe more like a mark of honor. Something like that.
But when it comes to e-book readers, Steven Johnson seems to think that the entirety of the way we experience books might be at stake. In his article “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write”, which was published in The Wall Street Journal in April 2009, he explains that doesn’t just see e-books and physical books as competing for the same territory. He sees the potential for e-books to provide an entirely different – and entirely unprecedented – reading experience all together, sparking a new vision for the publishing industry as a whole.
For starters: Your library? Every word could be searchable. I think that’s beautiful – but Johnson sees that as just the beginning: What if every word in a book has the potential to be a hyperlink?
With books becoming part of this universe, “booklogs” will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. [...] You’ll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage’s true meaning.
Johnson points out that this could, in essence, become “a permanent, global book club,” and he also notes that it would mean that “nobody would read alone anymore.” But we’ve learned from Oprah that bookclubs aren’t all bad, and are exactly what some readers need to get started - or to keep going.
However, Johnson sees these potential hyperlinks as being the catalyst for more dramatic changes to the way we read – and even write:
This great flowering of annotating and indexing will alter the way we discover books, too. Web publishers have long recognized that “front doors” matter much less in the Google age, as visitors come directly to individual articles through search. Increasingly, readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote on page 157, instead of an interesting cover on display at the bookstore, or a review in the local paper.
That’s where Google rankings come into play. Ultimately, Johnson foresees books themselves competing for Google rankings, and each one will need to generate links or citations to become the first or second hit:
In this world, citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today. An author will write an arresting description of Thomas Edison’s controversial invention of the light bulb, and thanks to hundreds of inbound links from bookloggers quoting the passage, those pages will rise to the top of Google’s results for anyone searching “invention of light bulb.”
In Johnson’s view, this leads to “every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked.”
He assumes this will entail serious changes for writing and publishing: Publishers will want high Google rankings, and that’s bound to affect the writing that gets published. For authors, would it only mean being sure to pack a solid punch in every paragraph – or, as Johnson suggests, would it result in “entire books written with search engines in mind”?
What does that even mean?
More: Because books won’t be unified any more, but seen in terms of successful chapters, great paragraphs, etc., it might not even make sense to sell books as a whole package. Johnson notes, “many books offered for the Kindle, for instance, allow readers to download the first chapter free of charge.”
Drawing on this, he imagines a la carte pricing – selling a chapter of a book the way the iTunes store sells a song from an album. Chapters would need to learn to stand on their own – or would, at least, be lauded in the marketplace for doing so – and a book would have to give its reader a clear incentive to buy the next chapter. What might that incentive be? Johnson says it plain: “Clearly, we are in store for the return of the cliffhanger.”
Now, Johnson doesn’t address the question of poetry, but I can’t help wondering. Will we be buying a poem or two online for 99 cents each? Will every erudite word or classical allusion be linked – and would that be limiting or freeing for poets? Would poets try to avoid those reader-distracting hyperlinks – and at what cost to, say, poetic diction? Question after question after question! It boggles the mind!
Bizarre!
But, even given these prospects, there is a certain joy to what Johnson describes as “the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading.” There is a pleasure in reading as a solitary act. I don’t think that will be terribly easy to forget.
After all, as Johnson points out, even the Kindle currently tries to preserve this kind of reading experience, not even including a dedicated e-mail client. So, maybe this hypertext vision won’t catch on?
Either way, I have a headache now, but, regardless: Buy your poetry collections from your local indie bookstore when you’re able, enjoy folding corners to mark a good poem while you can – and try not to imagine that every other word is bright blue and underlined. Good luck!