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Where's the Bailout for Publishing?
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Books are essential to American life, and if publishing perishes, Stephen L. Carter argues, democracy itself will soon follow.
Like a lot of writers, I am wondering when Congress and the administration will propose a bailout for the publishing industry. Carnage is everywhere. Advances slashed, editors fired, publicity at subsistence levels, entire imprints vanished into thin air. Moreover, unlike some of the industries that the government, in its wisdom, has decided to subsidize, the publishing of books is crucial to the American way of life.
Seriously.
Books are essential to democracy. Not literacy, although literacy is important. Not reading, although reading is wonderful. But books themselves, the actual physical volumes on the shelves of libraries and stores and homes, send a message through their very existence. In a world in which most things seem ephemeral, books imply permanence: that there exist ideas and thoughts of sufficient weight that they are worth preserving in a physical form that is expensive to produce and takes up space. And a book, once out there, cannot be recalled. The author who changes his mind cannot just take down the page.
One did not only read God’s word; one touched it. Many of us are old enough to remember when families routinely kissed the Bible. It is difficult to imagine lavishing the same loving attention on the computer screen.
A couple of years ago, an enthusiast of the digital revolution wrote in the Times that Google’s project to digitize all printed books will lead us to “the creation of virtual ‘bookshelves’ – a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf’s worth of specialized information.” No doubt this is so. But the reduction of books and their contents to mere “information” helps illustrate the risk of the method.
In a library, you can stand beside the shelf and run your finger along the spines. You can feel the book-ness of what has been written. It is a very unsophisticated reader indeed who conceptualizes the library principally as a place to obtain information. A library is a shrine to the book. When we eliminate the name “library,” as some universities and communities have done, creating such vulgarities as “information resource centers,” we are, implicitly, denigrating the very object that the library is intended to preserve. The book, we are saying, is not important; only its information content matters.
This is an error. With its weight and solidity, a book signals to the world that there are ideas worth preserving in a form that carries heft, and takes up space; by its touchability, a book signals the importance of our engagement in an arena external to and larger than ourselves; and by sitting on a shelf, along which we can run both hands and eyes, a book signals the possibility of still being surprised by what we discover. When I stand in an antiquarian bookshop, touching a first edition of Thackeray or Eliot, I am not simply absorbing information; I am connecting myself to generations past, touching the object that will persevere, in nearly the same form, for generations to come.
I am no enemy of the online world—I spend plenty of time there, and am writing for it at this moment—but the notion that we will experience texts the same way once they migrate to cyberspace is a fantasy. As the literary critic J. Hillis Miller has noted, an online text has a “fragile, fleeing, and insubstantial existence” compared to a book. A book is forever. A screen of text is not.
The notion that ideas are ephemeral and ever-changing presents a problem. Democracy is at its best when citizens debate among themselves, working out their differences through a process of reasoned argument and compromise. Democracy, in this sense, requires a mutual respect, across political differences. It requires us to grant, if only for the sake of our shared national life, that those who disagree have spent as much time in reflecting on their positions as we have.
A book matches perfectly the ideal of reflection.The tougher the text, the more reflective we must be in absorbing it. This suggests the importance of reading books that are difficult. Long books. Hard books. Books with which we have to struggle. The hard work of serious reading mirrors the hard work of serious governing—and, in a democracy, governing is a responsibility all citizens share. And if we are willing to work our way through difficult texts, we are far more likely to be willing to work our way through our opponents’ difficult ideas. An important lesson of serious reading is that ideas need not be correct to be important.
The online text, by contrast, proposes to the reader that ideas are little more than the stuff that dreams are made on. As Miller notes, if you dislike any aspect of the text—the font style or size, say, or the columnar arrangement—you are free to alter it to your liking. The text loses its fixed-ness. It ceases to represent anything permanent or unchanging.
Democracy is not alone in its need for the book. It is no accident that the great Western religions rely heavily on sacred texts—texts, moreover, that believers are able to touch and feel and carry about. The weight and heft of a Bible, its solidity, itself implies eternity. Matthew Brown of the University of Iowa, in his pathbreaking study of early American devotional texts, has pointed out how their form— “short and tubby, as thick as a brick” —formed a part of the aesthetic experience of the reader. One did not only read God’s word; one touched it. Many of us are old enough to remember when families routinely kissed the Bible. It is difficult to imagine lavishing the same loving attention on the computer screen.
And what has science to say about all this? We do not know as much as perhaps we one day will about the differences in how the brain perceives texts, depending on whether the text is presented as page or as screen. Most of the perception research so far has focused on retention rates, and is aimed at improving the presentation of the material on the screen. In other words, the research presupposes the migration of text to the screen, and asks how to improve it. But note the narrow focus of the improvement: Text is conceptualized as a tool for the transmission of data, nothing more. Reading is not an activity or an experience but simply a tool. Reading is indeed a tool; but it is also more. When we consider only retention, the “more” is lost.
Still, we do have some ideas. Several very preliminary studies, largely with fiction, suggest that readers who look at texts online have trouble retaining as much as those who view the text on a page. Some critics insist that these results are artifactual, that when we have two or three generations raised on the screen rather than the page, we will find the opposite result.
If this is so, we should look at experiments with the young. A small study published a few years ago in the Journal of Educational Psychology suggested that children may gain information equally fast with either method, but are less able to interact with text presented on a screen. This research, if it holds up, might just signal a general decline in interaction, unrelated to the nature of text. It might also signal, however, a greater distance from the text viewed on the screen – in other words, a smaller likelihood that the reader will lose himself or herself in the act of reading. (Bad news for those of us who write novels.)
Such results might bear out Miller’s concern that, in cyberspace, the text “jostles side by side” with a thousand other possible destinations for the attention. And the reader, of course, freely flees. I have had the experience of reading an op-ed in a newspaper, then mentioning it later to a friend, who will say, “Yes, I read it” —but will have turned out to have skimmed the first page of text or so, before jumping away to something else. Perhaps, when we read online, the perceptive part of the brain is, in a sense, confused by the intention of the reader who sits in front of a screen. Is the reader there to gather and reflect upon information, or perhaps to check email or play a game?
Or perhaps, as others have suggested, the fact that one touches a book, physically turning the pages, and, generally, turning the head as well, means that the memory echoes in different parts of the brain, thus making recall easier. Plenty of science supports the proposition that, in infants, the act of touching helps develop cognitive skills. In one famous experiment, the ability of babies to tell where a sound was coming from was heightened when they were allowed to feel the device or toy making the sound. Many of us remember cramming for exams back in college, and, when sitting for the test, recalling that the answer we needed was at the bottom of a particular page of the book; and summoning that image, in turn, helped us to form a complete memory.
Whatever we finally learn from the science, we can be certain of one thing: A screen is not the same as a page, and, as the migration continues, the experience of reading will itself be altered. We can anticipate a decline in reflection, in the willingness to work hard to understand a point of view, and, perhaps, the loss of the ability to appreciate the value of ideas.
Of course, we have been here before—somebody has, anyway. Two thousand years ago, the written word was transmitted almost entirely on scrolls, and the nature of the scroll helped dictate the nature of what was written. Thus, texts tended to be long and linear, designed to be read as the scroll was unrolled. Jumping back and forth within a text was an enormous challenge, and there is reason to think few rose to it. Only with the development of the codex, the ancestor of what we think of as the book, did the reader begin to gain control over the material read. For the first time, the reader could hunt around within the text, moving forward or back, even skipping chunks of text by merely flipping pages. The codex worked a revolution in human communication, and the human understanding of the text was never the same.
Indeed, we might say that democracy in its modern form emerged from the idea of written-ness. Absent the codex, ideas would still be the province of a privileged priesthood. The Internet, by hypothesis, will spread ideas to everyone. But if the form of presentation no longer signals permanence and eternity, if we are no longer encouraged to work our way through difficult texts, then we will likely see the decline of democracy and the rise of something else.
Will the something else be better or worse? Sounds like a good idea for a book.
Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, where he has taught since 1982. His seven nonfiction books include God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics and Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy. His first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), spent eleven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His fourth novel, Jericho’s Fall, will be published in July.
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Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, where he has taught since 1982. His seven non-fiction books include God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics and Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy. His first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), spent eleven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His fourth novel, Jericho’s Fall, will be published in July.
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Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, where he has taught since 1982. His seven non-fiction books include God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics and Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy. His first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), spent eleven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His fourth novel, Jericho’s Fall, will be published in July.
Sonia's Batting Average
Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, where he has taught since 1982. His seven non-fiction books include God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics and Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy. His first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), spent eleven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His fourth novel, Jericho’s Fall, will be published in July.
Mr Carter,
The self published Urban Romance novelists - and the Senegalese book vendors who sell their works - seem to be doing great!
Maybe the elite literati from downtown need to take the 2 train to 125th St to get some business advice from them!
Which might start with a simple Publish-Books-The-Public-Actually-Wants-To-Read as a good start point!
But no, publishing does NOT deserve a bailout!
In this age of iUniverse and Amazon.com you guys need to rethink your business model - or you'll be an upscale version of Chrysler, and it won't be anybody's fault but your own!
Oh, full disclosure - I'm an iUniverse self published writer, with two non fiction books in print at the moment.
Oh, and why this fetish with ink stained lumps of paper?
The future of writing is online, Mr Carter - ever heard of the Kindle?
Our grandchildren won't bother with big lumps of paper covered in refined petroleum products, Mr Carter, in the future all books will be online.
As far as "books are forever" - ever seen a flooded library? Or a bookstore that had a fire?
Between water, fire, mold, rats, dryrot and the slow chemical reactions that cause all paper to eventually rot, paper is far from forever, my friend!
But 1s and 0s will be with us as long as we still have electricity to power the server farms!
Professor Carter beautifully evokes the book as central to culture. GreogryAButler sounds as if he would reduce a great painting to an analysis of the chemical composition of the pigments.
I agree with the first commenter. The new trend is self-publishing or print on demand. Writing is the new fad, everyone wants to be a writer these days and they are publishing their own work because it's impossible to get one published any other way. This, to me, represents democracy.
Well, Mr. Butler, maybe it's because there is a whole bunch of people out there trying to hold onto their careers?
I have a friend who's worked in magazines her whole life, and now has to re-think herself.
"But 1s and 0s will be with us as long as we still have electricity to power the server farms!"
And as long as nobody decides to "edit" the 1s and 0s. Also, a fire may burn one, or 10, or 100 copies of a book, but as long as there are other copies, that book still exists.
I have to say that I both agree and disagree with Dr. Carter. The current situation reminds me most of Ray Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451. Viewed properly as metaphor, there is no need to physically burn all of the books when you can just make them seem irrelevant. Democracy requires the permanence of information, and a free medium in which to discuss and debate it, so both online and physical texts are important. Electronic texts, as Dr. Carter points out, are easily changed.
However, I don't want the government getting involved in the publishing business, because it always comes with strings. Freedom of the press would vanish in a world where the financial stability of publishing companies was dependent on pleasing politicians to get their financial commitments. This would immediately silence "offensive" voices, and they are often the most important to hear for democracy to flourish.
Publishing will be hurt, and will probably contract, and many of the books will shift to print-on-demand or self-published. Many people will have to find work in other fields, as the business model shifts, but important works will continue to appear in physical form, from publishing houses, because despite this reflexive online community thinking that it's the whole world, there's a massive other world out there that still desires and requires it.
I'm stunned to see such a visceral,angry reaction to Mr. Carter's thoughtful essay. How bizarre.
I like Carter's novels, incidentally, "New England White," and "The Palace Council." I hope that if this massive movement away from books toward books on kindle and by demand occurs at a complete level that the marketing arm of publishing houses vetting work still says something about authors through promotion. A free-for-all indy rock world does not appeal to me.
I hope reviewers keep pace with changes. I don't want to see American literary culture, already hobbled by notions of "high"and "low" become even more diffuse and reactionary.
The academe's christened "literary" authors are already so separated from any public outside grad school seminars.
We no longer live in an age in which Bolano is read as Nabokov once was, during the "Lolita" phase -- if he were read that is, and not simply bought -- or when Updike experienced decent sales numbers.
Others have written much more articulately about that transition.
I sometimes imagine someone in the fifties looking down at a reader of say Raymond Chandler, not knowing such basic unrequired snobbery would result in a future culture in which tell-alls of pro-wrestlers, porn-stars and American Idols outpace anything a Gay Talese could drum up.
Books suffer this unwanted strain. Tina Brown balances it nicely, I think; there is a decent showcasing of a fairly wide range of work here.
This reminds me of the transition from analog audio (records) to digital audio (CDs). The simple and indisputable fact is that analog audio produces a better sound: The instruments are all analog and the human ear is analog and at every transition of media, something gets lost. However, CDs (and by later extension, MP3s) are more convenient, versatile, and navigable, so they quickly took over. However, records continue to be printed so that true music lovers can enjoy the physicality of the music that cannot be found in digital music, and in fact a rebirth of the record is currently underway.
I predict a similar trend with the written word. Mr. Carter is right--books make for a better reading experience--but unfortunately this simple fact will not stem the tide of convenience. However, those of us who understand the joy of holding a book between our fingers will not abandon the media and the day will come when people will look back with fondness on the book and there will be a revival of the printed word.
This article is great!
Well thought out and very valid points.
It's refreshing to here from someone who has actually though about life in an intelligent way.
Those who disagree with the importance and necessity of creating symbols that stand for liberty and free thinking, quite frankly have not found their soul yet. When knowledge can be obliterated with a key stroke, all things are at stake.
Quite a provocative piece. Well done, Professor Carter. There are two seemingly incongruous forces at work in this digital medium. The art of writing is being democratized, which is an exciting and empowering development. Unfortunately, substance and quality are suffering in the short term as a result.
The art of reading is likewise suffering in the short term, but as novice writers intuitively discover that they need to be good readers in order to become great writers, they will engage in the act of reflection and strive for lucidity. At some point, the competing forces will arrive at equilibrium.
I will never personally relinquish my attachment to books. I have no desire to take anything other than a book to the beach, or the forest, or the mountains, and read it under natural sunlight. I do not suspect that coming generations will be inclined any differently. Just open a good children's book and watch a child's reaction when you start reading it if you have any doubt,.
I believe many of Prof. Carter's points about digital texts: they are harder to retain, the words are impermanent, the medium does not have sensory appeal (bookstores smell good!).
The conclusion I draw from this and the future I envision is that only those texts that are worthy of permanence will be committed to paper. This will be a kind of enshrinement -- book stores will be more like churches. The average trashy romance/SciFi/mystery novel will remain only in digital form. At first the publishers will decide which get printed and which don't. Perhaps they will keep that mantle, or perhaps they will die off and only those willing to pay a high price will get printed books-on-demand. Maybe the holy bookstores will provide this service. A new kind of clergy will emerge: people we trust to recommend the books that get printed. (Oprah is a high priestess already.)
I predict that in a decade eBook readers will be given away, analagous to razors: give away the handle, sell the blades. For a long while there will be competing eBook formats (as there are razors and their blades), but perhaps there will emerge a de facto standard (such as the PDF) that all readers can use.
I hope I'm wrong about a lot of this because I really like books. But I think, by and large, they are going the way of the brontosaurus.
Mr. Carter, As someone who has read all your books and reviewed the most recent one very favorably (I would have reviewed them all favorably had I been doing so at the time) I agree with you about publishing, books and reading and I fear for all of them. It has nothing to do with the kind of books: it has to do with the idea of books themselves. I have written about the subject myself here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-solod-warren/a-mind-is-a-terrible-thin_b _171454.html for the Huffington Post most recently. Although I have had my own problems with the publishing industry and what and who they choose to publish I would never wish their demise and I am saddened each time I see a house loose staff or go under. I cherish the actual act of holding a book and nothing electronic will ever replace the feeling of holding or reading the actual text
Thanks for being an author who cares about words, whose words I love to read,and and who took the time to speak out.
Hello Professor Carter,
I mainly agree with jdmarino's comment and would like to add that no one needs a device to read a printed book. All forms of digital information require devices to read them. These devices are constantly upgraded and changing. A large percentage of e-information will be lost as new and better readers or computers are invented, and decisions are made whether old content is worthy of transformation to facilitate reading on these new devices. (How much data did we save from our old 3" disks?) Whereas we can pick up a book that was made 300 years ago and instantly read it, 300 years from now I don't think information made exclusively for Kindle or any other e-readers will be accessible unless you also have a collection of these antique e-readers. In the meantime, e-information will find its very important place in the dissemination of information, but printed books will always be with us.
Government bailing out publishers is a bad idea. Publishers working with the old model (huge advances to celebrity writers with one big marketing push and little follow up) don't deserve a bailout. $7 million for Bush's planned book is a perfect example. How many copies will be unsold, returned, and pulped in the end? The future of publishing information from diverse sources, thus protecting our democracy, is with small and independent publishers. Indie publishers may not be able to give big advances, but they put much more energy into nurturing new authors and marketing over a longer period of time. (Since I'm in the process of becoming a small publisher, I am prejudiced on this point.) Help for Indie publishers can come in the form of SBA guaranteed loans. That forces one to create a viable business & marketing plan so no bailout will be required. Another transformative event for publishers has to be the demise of the policy of 'returns'. That would help keep indie publishers in business and keep diversity of opinion alive.
Publishing deserves to bite the dust. This nostalgia for books is patently absurd. There is no more ARROGANT a group than publishers, editors, agents, and publicists unless it would be a group of vultures and parasites somewhere. OH, NOOOO WE HAVE NO MONEY WE ARE IMPOVERISHED LITTLE MICE who have seven million to throw at George Bush. Give me a break. I never thought I would live long enough to see these disgusting people standing in the unemployment lines but there they are. My heart breaks for them and their thousand dollar lunches. They don't KNOW from poverty. This is a business that can fail nicely on its own. It is a failure they so richly deserve. -- Tim Barrus, Amsterdam http://le-too.blogspot.com
Able and willing to pay $7 million for a George W. Bush book?!?
I suppose good fiction is worth a lot.
I only hope they hire him a ghost writer.
The value of books or writing or literature has NOTHING to do with the current economic entities that publish them. Let them die and be replaced by other entities, let them live, whatever, it has very little to do with whether we have worthwhile things to read.
What was Dante's advance, or his contract terms? Shakespeare's for his sonnets? Kant's? St. Augustine's? Austen's? Herodotus? Plato? Virgil? Homer? If the economic model changes, so what? People will still create and their creations will be disseminated.
Archival storge is worth thinking about, but plenty of people in the library science and data management fields are already worrying on that, and if you're concerned there's a whole literature and evolving practice.
Books will never die. The publishing business as it is now constituted will. We will shortly see the demise of overproduction of soon-to-be-remaindered books, free returns for booksellers (the cause of remainders), the focus on blockbusters, the huge advances, the enormous promotional budgets, and vast publisher overheads. Replacing all this will be:
-specialized publishers operating efficiently and effectively in publishing lesser-known authors of merit to smaller, focused markets;
-new distribution techniques (electronic books sold through Kindle, paper books-on-demand et al);
-inexpensive paper or electronic self-publishing;
-an economic model that pays most authors through royalties on sales instead of advances;
-marketing focused on web-based and social networking markets.
These changes are all to the good and will in fact improve the ability of authors of all kinds to identify and connect with their readers. I for one look forward with great optimism to a new book-based literary age. Our real challenge is maintaining a literate and curious populace.
I read this with a loud and growing 'Grrrrrrr"... None are more willing to be more willfully thick than the intelligentsia. Of course our predecessors kissed their books, they were so expensive ownership signified far more than the printed text inside.
I dream of the day when no pile of text is so expensive that we feel the need to kiss it. I grew up in a house with few bucks, as a man nothing makes me happier than the re-editioning revolution that copyright laws, digital manipulation and the entrepreneurship of publishing house like Penguin has made possible. We ought to become medium agnostic and embrace whatever best disseminates ideas, talk, debate, pass on. The process is never perfect, and our experience of the early years of the internet suggests as much dross as jewels is generated, but we ought never to assume less.
I recently began to blog myself, http://artkritique.blogspot.com/ on the assumption that a net positive contribution to the world of ideas was a good thing. The history of art generated and promoted by states is fairly woeful, we regard most of it as kitsch today. Just as I find financial institutions positioning themselves as tools of democracy obscene I feel a pang of doubt about the literary establishment's claims to altruism.
There is a simple economy of ideas at work here, the internet has the lowest barrier to entry for anyone who wants to spread their ideas than any medium of production or distribution yet invented. If we feel that the quality of those ideas has an imbalance then we ought to redress it ourselves, if we can then monetize that output then we will, we always do.
Noble sentiments, but such a bailout is politically impossible. I can imagine the response if anyone tried to implement it given that approximately 2 in 5 Americans below the age of 45 read nothing for pleasure! (Not a number I plucked from the air - see "To Read or Not To Read" by the National Endowment for the Arts).
Thank you for a well-written and well-considered article. The current economic situation is so dire that publishing will not likely get consideration, but it's encouraging to have someone support it so strongly and for the right reasons. In the long run, in Faulker's terms I believe that we will not only endure but will prevail.
Mr. Carter's bibliophilia is not all that different from the lust-for-vinyl that keeps purists shopping for LP records rather than making the switch to digital music. Digital music hasn't killed music, and digital content will not kill literature. In fact, digital music has ushered in a new era of choice and freedom for both artists and their audiences, and the same is now happening with books.
Indie authors are following the lead of their musician brethren, bypassing publishing conglomerates and other gatekeepers to reach out directly to a readership. None of this would be possible without the digital revolution in print and Web 2.0.
And just as record industry executives before them, the titans of mainstream publishing are doing all in their power to stop---or at least slow---the technological and cultural progress that spells their doom. The Authors Guild demand that Amazon disable Text-To-Speech technology on the Kindle 2 (which enables the blind and print-disabled to hear their Kindle books read to them by the device) is just the latest in a long string of Big Publishing's attempts to derail progress and retain control and profit.
I'm afraid that they, and Mr. Carter, are part of a dying breed. Ask anyone under 30 if they mourn the loss of chain record stores like Tower, The Wherehouse and Licorice Pizza. With the exception of those few vinyl purists, the answer will be either, "No," or, "What's a chain record store?" Give it maybe 20 years, then ask someone under 30 if they mourn the loss of chain bookstores and paper-pulp books.
A long time ago we learned that The Medium Is The Message, but when the medium is entirely controlled by profit-driven corporations, the message is forced to the back of the bus: behind profit, corporate vision, marketing concerns, political concerns, and even packaging concerns. Set the message free and it will proliferate seemingly of its own accord.
Fear not, Mr. Carter. The message will out.
Thanks for blogging about a bailout for the book industry. I wholeheartedly agree that the book publishing industry is in a terrible situation -- a sort of 'perfect storm' of pressures. It will be very sad -- and totally unnecessary -- to watch publishers and retailers suffer and decline further.
I do disagree with you (I'm assuming you are advocating some form of government loans or grants) about how to quickly improve the situation. Please read the recommendations at this webpage: www.bookindustrybailout.ca. No government intervention is needed, except perhaps a veiled threat to cut off existing grants unless the industry fixes a tragic and potentially fatal flaw in its business model. Although this website focuses on the Canadian industry, the US situation -- and solution -- is the same.
I look forward to your thoughts, and to any publicity you can give to the recommendations found at the website. We expect that the environmental impacts as shown at http://www.bookindustrybailout.ca/calculatingtheshame.html will soon begin to draw attention to this proposal for reform, as will a YouTube video now being edited for release by month's end.
Thank you.
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