I recently interrupted Nature Boy while he was reading. Remarkably, he wasn’t reading from his laptop or phone. He was reading a printed book. The item in question was typical of many such devices used during the past five centuries to share ideas and information across time and distances.
You might recognize the technology from yesteryear or the annual Times Colonist book sale. It comprised many sheets of paper printed with text and bound and glued into a light-cardstock cover decorated with pictures and more text.
In recent years, tech-pundits have pronounced (and others have lamented) print books obsolete — alongside cassette tapes, vinyl LPs, photographic film and office doorknobs. Digital books and e-book readers broke publishers’ grip on commercial and trade-book publishing. They allowed anybody with a computer, technical know-how and a story to reach the masses.
The advancing e-tide seemed inevitable.
Yet data from the Association of American Publishers indicate print books’ obituary was published prematurely. In 2016, sales of print books in the U.S. increased by 3.3 per cent, while e-book sales declined even further than the 14 per cent drop noted in 2015.
According to Pew Research, even in the e-book-devoted U.S., 65 per cent of readers perused a paper book the year before, while only 28 per cent read an e-book. Print’s popularity has remained steady since 2014. It is attributed to older consumers who refuse to let print go and younger consumers who seek the tactile pleasures of owning and sharing analog tomes.
This ties into other trends for retro, pre-digital technologies among younger generations. Last Christmas, U.S. recording artists and labels saw a 140 per cent increase in cassette-tape sales over the previous year, while ICM Unlimited reports almost half of the buyers of vinyl records in 2016 were 35 or younger.
Both Fujifilm and Kodak have re-released old products — disposable and Instax instant-film cameras, and the Kodak Super 8 motion-picture film camera are new again. Moleskin, with its paper notebooks, and Fossil, with its smart analog watches, are seeing sales of low-tech, go-anywhere products to tech-savvy digital natives increase. Even Atari has announced plans to launch a retro-looking, PC-based game console, the company’s first in 20 years.
The curvaceous and generously proportioned lady hasn’t yet sung when it comes to old-style products.
Another item to note about Nature Boy’s reading material was that it was A Novel. It said so on the cover. It was not A Remarkable True Story, A Biography, Poems, 100 Best whatevers, or some such similar category. It certainly wasn’t another of the many books labelled “A Field Guide to …” that weigh down Nature Boy’s end of our combined bookshelves.
When he reads fiction, Nature Boy tends to A Mystery or A Thriller, not the less finely defined generality that, in its broadness, suggests a certain la-di-dah literariness.
Nature Boy reading A Novel is novel. However, like printed books and re-emerging film photography, tape and vinyl technologies, the concept of the novel is no longer new.
Eleventh-century readers likely understood that The Tale of Genji was gossipy romantic fiction based on Japanese court life. Late 15th- or early 17th-century readers — few as they were — surely realized that La Morte d’Arthur or Don Quixote differed from definitive biographies. Early 19th-century readers of works by Jane Austen and Fanny Burney knew they were reading about characters drawn from the authors’ imaginations.
But it is a truth near universally acknowledged that the way in which many novels and works of literary nonfiction are being written these days is new. These works are being serialized on websites and blogs. They are being crowdsourced and Wiki’ed.
By side-stepping publishing gatekeepers, these social media allow more people than ever before to become writers, even if not all succeed at it. For every book such as Andy Weir’s The Martian, many more are read only by their authors’ mothers.
The duality of the print and e-book publishing worlds resembles the shifting sands and changing water courses of a river delta. The movement of one creates opportunities for the other. As a sand bar erodes in one place, a new one forms somewhere else, entirely unexpected.
Nobody knows what the future of books will bring. What we do know is that reports of the death of printed books are greatly exaggerated.
