Elegy for the Book
Written on 4 January 2010
Books are dying, we hear.
I think we’ve got this wrong.
I for one won’t be joining the elegy for the world of books, or the vigil against their extinction, or the search for a cure among the new e-Reader gadgets.
Among the obituaries for the year and decade this holiday, I see obituaries for the book itself, and the world of books. The president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux writes What is an e-Book? Print may die, he says sadly, but we will still need editors and publishers. Take William Styron and his first novel, he says. Lie Down in Darkness, 1951. Cue the violin. Take down your reading glasses. Rub your eyes. They gleam.
By print he means paper, print on paper, stitched and bound and sandwiched between covers (“dustcovers”) of cardboard if not fabric or leather.
No one reads from paper now, we hear. We want digital print. Electronic, on a lighted screen. On glass, not pulp or weave.
Paper versus electronic? Wrong question, I think.
I’m going to a book launch in Manhattan Friday. A book on paper. The author, Seth Godin, knows books. Books are souvenirs, he says. Most of us at the book launch have read the book already, day by day and week by week as he wrote it on his blog. We want the souvenir. We want people to see us with the book and ask about it. We want to tell the story.
“Yes, I’ve been following this book for months…” Now the story stars me, and Seth Godin is a spear-bearer upstage, standing guard over my importance.
If you have a souvenir for me, I’ll take paper.
A book on paper catches the eye, yours or your visitor’s. An electronic book is invisible until you go looking for it. Souvenir has the French for ‘come’ in it. A souvenir should come to you, whether or not you go to it. Paper comes to you. Paper gets in the way. You have to find a place for paper. Electrons stay out of the way. They don’t force themselves on you. Of paper your visitor says “Oh, what’s that?” Of electrons, you ask “Where’s that?” Your visitor never knows to ask that. After a time, neither do you. Electrons don’t work as souvenirs. They don’t come until called. You recall them, they don’t recall for you.
So books on paper have their future: the past.
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