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Curling Up

1) On my last trip to Manhattan, at the end of a few busy days, I entered one of those glass and aluminum mega-media stores — an admission that I have a CD-buying habit as severe as my book-owning compulsion. I walked through the store quickly, once, without stopping at a single bin, and found myself back on the street. Surprised, really that the place couldn’t hold me. Indeed, it drove me out, longing for the funkier environs of Twist & Shout back in Denver.

2) This past weekend, my wife told me that when she hired a new librarian to oversee the “Technical Information Center,” one of the first things the librarian did in that fairly high-tech if not quite digitized environment was to install an overstuffed chair and a coffee table. Yes.

3) We imagine an ideal e-book reader that simulates the turning of a page. But that’s something we would watch, not do (unless clicking is doing).

4) And I’ve recently taken note of futurist Thomas Frey’s thoughts about libraries.

I’ve been saying here that the answers to questions surrounding what comes next for publishing are not to be found in technology. Even though the Internet already allows whatever is written instantly to become public, I believe there will be a place for publishers to the extent that they attend to how authors and readers act. Which is to say that, even though Google (et al.) is scanning literature to bits, when they’re done, people will still go to . . . whatever Barnes & Noble is in the future. Although Frey believes it is “a safe bet” that the ultimate form of communication is not writing and reading books, it seems to me his thinking implies that for the foreseeable future consumers of story will find themselves in B&N because it smells like coffee.

So do all of my favorite independent bookstores smell of coffee — and of paper and of wood. I suppose it’s possible that bookstores are only a throwback to a fading age. But perhaps, instead, they are something more essential to modern experience, something that has to do with overstuffed chairs, circles of lamplight, and whole worlds actually in our hands.

Despite his tech-based, futurist’s perspective, Frey asserts that to remain workable and relevant collections of information (like, say, libraries) must now or soon enable information to be not ingested, but experienced. Perhaps this is the reason that, prior to the current war in Iraq, military and intelligence officials disseminated copies of a movie — The Battle of Algiers — throughout the Administration. And surely it’s the reason that at a time when we’re not completely sure what the country stands for and when arguments are increasingly blog-based, David McCullough’s book 1776 has sold 1.3 million copies in cloth (if Bookscan is to be trusted) and his book John Adams 1.6 million (repeat caveat).

It’s also the reason that, these days, I frequently hear the assertion that maybe more men should read more novels. Story, whether historically “true” or otherwise constructed, is finally the best way of knowing.

This is because narrative comes ready made as experience, regardless of the breadth or precision of the information it delivers. For this reason, whatever technical changes are coming, and assuming that what is now Novel (see that Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day has 1000+, 40-extra-long-textline pages) will never efficiently become Film-Play-Game, it seems to me that at least some categories of “book” will long remain something to curl up with.

— Fred Ramey
posted 2/12/07

 
 

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