I Could Never Sell

New Years is the season for obituary and elegy.  This New Year, a decade of obituary and elegy.

Books themselves are dying, we hear.  The world of books.  No one has time.

Unless perhaps the right book-reader gadget comes forth to save books and reading and writing and the life of the mind, we hear.

I just saw my cousin the doctor, a teaching doctor and author, for the first time in years, and he was full of Middlemarch.  I had to ransack my memory.  But he listened to the Audible book while driving.  There you are!

I have lost my taste for elegy now that age has surrounded me with death and loss.  I get that shiver of love and sadness everywhere I look.  No need to sip it from books, as I did in youth.  The obituaries are full of authors every week, my oldest friends.  The Updike of “Leaf Season” is just as dead as Shakespeare now.  As dead as Desdemona and Othello.  As dead as Homer, and Paris and Helen and their infant on the walls of Troy, saying farewell.  If John Hughes is newly dead, can the kids of The Breakfast Club be far behind?

Is the Internet killing books?  Books on paper and on shelves cannot keep up with the dancing electrons of the Internet, we hear.

Well, maybe.  I  find library book sales sad.  Books on science, for example, from twenty years ago.   Descent of Woman, for example, so jolting then, such a fossil now.

But no.   The Internet has the same problem.  The Internet stinks with rot, some of it mildly toxic.  Research your divorce, but make sure you look at dates and states.  Do you want the scoop from Washington State 1998?  If not, you’ll suffer from a bellyfull of shrimp gone bad.  The Internet is clouded with dead matter settling into fossil-bearing layers of sediment.

So no, the Internet is not killing books.  Something else is killing books, on shelves or on the Internet.

Here’s Joel Spolsky talking about why he built the wildly-popular web site StackOverflow:

If you’re very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies are actually useful, and someone whose name is “Anon Y. Moose” has posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is buried amongst a lot of dreck.

StackOverflow borrowed from the success of Wikipedia.  Articles are continuously edited, unlike the “expert answers” he describes above.   They creep towards greater accuracy and reach, and they stay up to date.

To the Wikipedia model Spolsky then added voting.  Readers and contributors at StackOverflow vote on answers, up for useful, down for not so much.  As, by the way, you vote for articles here.

They also vote on questions and topics.  Useful?  Silly?  Trivial?  StackOverflow particularly values good questions.  Those are harder to come by.  A fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer.  StackOverflow encourages questions that can be answered, and answered with measurable accuracy.  Not, for example, which is the better language for science, English or Chinese?  Interesting question, yes, but not to be settled while any of us still live.

Finally, contributors to StackOverflow accumulate votes themselves, measuring the regard the community has for their questions and answers.  Somehow this attracts high quality contributors at no cost.  A mystery of human nature!

This may clean up the murky Internet.  Could it work for books?  Not for paper books, clearly.  Once printed, a book can only get worse, not better.  But maybe for electronic books.

One of our questions here is much more useful than the other.  Producing books, not consuming books.  We can babble endlessly about how best to consume words, from paper or a lighted screen or a headset.  Maybe we could produce books in a better way, though, and get more quality from authors.  StackOverflow thrives because of its contributors and writers.  StackOverflow gets quality contributors because it gives contributors a way to keep quality high, and to measure that quality.  Could book publishing do something similar?

We were all horrified when Amazon connected to our Kindles and removed a book without our knowledge or consent or confirmation.  But that hints at what we are looking for: books that can still change in our hands.  Books that get better over time, not worse.  More accurate, more complete, more current.  Not books like new cars, that lose half their value the moment you drive them off the dealer lot.  Books the author can keep improving for us, as software makers keep improving our software (often without our knowledge, consent, or confirmation).  Maybe we want books that other readers can improve for us!  Why not?  We read their reviews before we buy.  Maybe we could read their thoughts while we read the book.  As with a book group.

So there’s the problem with books on paper.  They can never get any better.

Or not much.

Until last August I lived surrounded by a personal library on sixty yards of wooden shelving six feet tall.  A sandbagged bunker could not have protected me better against bullets or blasts, I would laugh as visitors stood in awe, putting on their best library manners.  Each new place I lived, I threw up that same wartime blackout.

I signed and dated my books for fifty years.  1957, the first.  I saw the changes in my signature and handwriting through the decades.   On many of those pages I wrote more than the author did.  I could make out the three different times I read my copy of Anna K.  When I held a book, it gave me back a long-ago time in my life.  I remembered where I got it, and where I read it.  It recalled for me the places I lived, the people I knew.  I saw something I wrote in Anna K to show Gail Draffin, who first introduced me to Anna.

The books are gone.  I saw that no one would give them a home after me.  But I could dispose of them myself, before a stranger did.

But couldn’t electronic books do all of this better?  Get continual updates from the author?  Store my thoughts as I read and reread?  Collect the thoughts of other readers, and add my thoughts to theirs?   Make every book a book group?

Almost, Anna K whispers to me.  Except about those updates.  Descent of Woman may need updates, and get better with time, but Anna K will not.   That could almost be our definition of fiction and non-fiction.  Non-fiction must fit something outside itself.  A book on Madagascar can be invalidated by a coup there, an event outside the book.  A book of fiction need only fit with itself, one part with another.  Nothing outside can invalidate the fiction.  Not on the first day, and not centuries later.   Updates might be welcome, but not needed.  If, for example, J D Salinger delivered an update to Catcher in the Rye tomorrow, after decades of silence;  and we could read the two versions in a side-by-side comparison.

Hold the elegies, please.  The best for books and book-lovers is just ahead.

That book of the future?  You’re looking at it.  This moment, as we speak…

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