David Louis Edelman has written a great article about the life, and death, of the novel (in its current form).
Very soon we’re going to have a medium for distributing the written word that’s not only easier but better suited to the task than books. So let’s dispense with the silly, sentimental arguments you often hear about why storytelling is never going to go electronic. “You can’t replace the feeling of a holding a book,” “I don’t like reading on a screen,” and “I can’t read an e-book in the bathtub” are some of the sillier excuses you hear all the time for why printed books are going to survive until the end of time. I’m sorry, but “I can hold my entire library in my hand,” “I can download new books at will,” “I can search my entire library in a nanosecond,” “I can instantly send books to my friends,” “I can translate and define words on the fly,” and “I don’t have to devote an entire room of my house to holding my books” are going to trump reading in the bathtub any day of the week.
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To sum up: the written word is going electronic. Permanently. Soon. Once that happens, storytellers will have no need to shoehorn their stories into these 8″ x 12″ hunks of pulped wood and ink. And once we’re not restricted to the medium of the novel, we’ll be leaving the form behind.
And to tell you how strongly I agree with David, I’ll say that the only part of his article I didn’t agree with was his admittedly conservative estimation of the timeframe involved (he suggests 50 years). In my opinion, if the medium lasts another 25 years, it will only be due to a brilliant marketing effort by the publishing industry at large (”Doubles as a door stop!” “Good for whacking unruly children, take that laptop!”). One thing the e-publishing industry is going to have to work on though, is pricing. There’s just no way to justify pricing an ebook in the same range as a print book. Once they lower the prices a little bit, and once the stories become a little more available (in standard formats, readable on any reader), watch the scales begin to shift.
This can actually be good news for writers, who will no longer be constrained to word counts for stories. Sure, a lot of stories want to be 80 - 120k words, but many want to be 25k, or 50k, and if you’ve ever written one of these stories, you’ll know (as I’ve found out) that there is virtually no market for works in these lengths.
Anyway, this is a topic that is getting a lot of play around the blogosphere, and likely will from here on out, until the point when ebook sales actually, finally, overtake the standard paper and ink novel.
If you liked that post, then try these...
Modern-Day Mythica, Chapter Four: Martin on March 27th, 2008
VidLit on March 21st, 2007
Ten Thousand Years of Spotted Trolls on May 22nd, 2008
Modern-Day Mythica, Chapter One: Gregg on March 24th, 2008
Patrick O'Brian, Bloody Olde England on January 28th, 2008
March 19th, 2008 at 10:09 am
I better hurry up and get published, because - I _like_ books. ;)
March 19th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE books. I have tons of them, I have bookshelves in my den so I can display them. I would love to have a library, too. BUT…I think the printed book will evolve into an artisan-type of medium. You’ll still be able to buy your favorite books in printed format, I believe, but most of our reading will likely be moving to some ebook medium. The same kind of thing has happened in the music industry, which started out using vinyl LPs as the medium. Sure, 8-tracks have died out, but there are a lot of people still putting music to vinyl LPs. The book, beloved format that it is, won’t die entirely, it’ll just be overtaken by a new medium.
March 19th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I don’t know, people have been declaring the book dead for years now and it has not happened. Fifty years may actually be too soon, maybe a hundred or more years. Books still satisfy our need to own objects. The move to digital publishing will take away jobs in the industry and could lead to something like the recording industry where you roll your own and sell your own. But will that lower quality?
I don’t doubt that the future means digital books, I just somehow think of it as being much later like in Star Trek times. It could be that the POD way of doing things turns out to be like giving a gift. You might buy the paper version of your favorite book to keep on your end table like a decoration.
I liked what Edelman said about the form changing. I think if anything, novels will get shorter, not longer. Unless society changes away from the hectic pace we now suffer.
March 19th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Ah, but I haven’t declared it dead yet! In fact, I still haven’t. But you make some good points. As for quality, I did say that books will still be published by artisans, and the word artisan generally implies excellent craftsmanship, so I think we’re safe on that front. Besides, who’s to say Star Trek times aren’t a lot closer than you think? Kurzweil states that our technological culture is advancing at a rate of increase of 10% per decade. Put that into context, and Star Trek times might be fifty years away. Things are going to change quickly from here on out; our culture demands it.
March 19th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Shh, don’t tell people who actually tell stories orally. I mean, their form has been dead since the 1490s. I think pixel delivery can do a lot, but killing books, don’t think so. It has to do with the form. TV was supposed to kill movies. Movies changed. The VCR was going to kill TV programming, and they still do it. Even with DVRs, there’s still programing. It’s the form.
By now the US was supposed to be paperless. Still hasn’t happened. I’ll agree that paper is dead. When I started in the design business, the paper industry was completely different. Now it’s so incredibly bland it’s like eating mush every single meal. If you want “different” paper, it’s almost always a mill order item, and most of those mills are in Europe or Asia. Which ups the cost, so everybody goes with bland “house” stocks.
Anyway, books won’t be replaced by electronic book readers… until book readers become like CDs to books being vinyl records. They might take some of the market before that time, but they won’t completely replace them.
March 20th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Well, I’m not really saying that books will be dead, I just think the e-format will overtake them in sales. That’s all.