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The book publishing industry has gone through more change during the past few decades than in any comparable period in its 500-year history. Professor John Thompson examines this change and asks what impact it will have on the future of books.

Despite widespread speculation about the ‘end of the book’, we are still a long way from a world in which trade books are routinely read on screens rather than on the printed page.

For centuries, books have played a central role in education, the spread of knowledge and the cultivation of literary and scholarly debate. With its origins dating back to the 15th century, the publishing of books is the oldest of the media industries and one which has continued to flourish despite the profusion of other media forms. However, over the last 30–40 years, the industry has gone through a process of turbulent change stemming from forces that are partly commercial, partly technological. Thanks to these developments, it bears little resemblance today to the industry that existed in the 1960s and before.

Despite these changes and despite the continuing importance of books in contemporary culture, there has been very little systematic research on the modern book publishing industry. Historians have studied the book trade and the impact of books in earlier centuries, but the modern publishing business has been largely neglected by researchers.

It was partly to fill this gap in our knowledge that I began in 1999 to study the changing structure of the industry in Britain and the United States. The research, spanning a decade, was funded by two grants from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). While the first phase of the research focused on academic publishing, the second phase, begun in 2005, was concerned with mainstream trade publishing – the world of general interest books, aimed at the wider public and sold through high-street bookstores, supermarkets and the internet. This is the sector of publishing that produces bestsellers like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code – books that are widely reviewed in the press, prominently displayed in bookstores and, in some cases, turned into films.

What makes a bestseller? Why do some books take off and become runaway successes while thousands of others vanish without a trace? What are the changes that have swept through the industry and how have they affected the nature of what gets published and what succeeds? What impact have these changes had on the character of our literary culture, and what impact are they likely to have in the years to come?

Three key developments

To address these and other questions I immersed myself in the world of trade publishing in Britain and the USA. I interviewed senior managers, editors and other staff at all of the large trade publishing groups in London and New York, as well as many staff working in small and medium-sized publishing houses; I also interviewed agents, authors, scouts and booksellers – altogether, I did more than 250 interviews with key players in the industry. This enabled me to build up a detailed picture of how the industry works, how it has changed over the past few decades and how it is changing today.

I was able to show that three key developments have shaped the evolution of trade publishing in the English-speaking world since the 1960s. The first was the growth of the retail chains, like Waterstones in the UK and Barnes & Noble in the USA. These nationwide chains of book superstores transformed the landscape of bookselling in the 1980s and 1990s; they made books much more widely available, but at the same time they drove many smaller independent booksellers out of business.

The second development was the rise of the literary agent. Although not new – the first agents appeared in London at the end of the 19th century – literary agents have, since the 1970s, become much more powerful brokers in the field of trade publishing. They control access to new content and, through auctions, are able to raise the stakes for books that are perceived to have high sales potential.

The final development was the consolidation of publishing houses under the umbrella of large multimedia corporations. Many of the great publishing houses whose names are well known to us all – Penguin, Jonathan Cape, Macmillan, Knopf – are today owned by large corporations and survive as imprints rather than as independent publishing houses.

Making bestsellers

Together, these developments have created a field of cultural activity that has a distinctive structure and dynamic – a ‘logic of the field’. They have led, for instance, to the polarisation of the industry, with four or five large corporate groups dominating the field and a plurality of small independent publishers on the margins. Very few medium-sized independent publishers remain active: in this new world of trade publishing, it is very difficult to be medium-sized.

These developments have also led to a preoccupation with what in the industry are commonly known as ‘big books’. These are not yet bestsellers but rather ‘hoped-for bestsellers’. Given the unavoidable role played by serendipity in trade publishing, it is simply unclear how well many new books will do in the marketplace – no-one really knows.

The focus on big books is exacerbated by the financial pressures on the publishing houses owned by large corporations and by the practices of the retail chains, which order large quantities of some new books, charge publishers a premium for front-of-store displays and expect them to turn over quickly. Many new books fail to take off and are sent back to publishers in large numbers, resulting in historically high levels of returns. But in those cases where they do take off, publishers and booksellers mobilise quickly behind them, with additional resources and promotion, pouring more fuel on the flames – this in part is how bestsellers are made.

The end of the book?

Today trade publishers are faced with unprecedented challenges. The economic climate is tough, overall sales (especially in North America) are down and the arrival of a new generation of ebook readers has raised fresh questions about the future of printed books. Do these developments mean that the world of the book as we’ve known it is about to undergo a further transformation, even more radical than that which has characterised the industry in recent decades, perhaps even leading to the eclipse of the printed book as such?

Despite widespread speculation about the ‘end of the book’, we are still a long way from a world in which trade books are routinely read on screens rather than on the printed page. Although ebook sales have increased significantly in recent years, especially in the USA, they still account for only around 1% of the revenues of trade publishers – a tiny fraction. This is bound to increase as reading devices become more widely available but no-one knows exactly how significant it will eventually become.

Whatever happens, it seems likely that books will continue to play an important role in our cultural and public life for the foreseeable future. Books have been, and remain for many, a privileged form of communication, one in which the genius of the written word can be inscribed in an object that is at once a medium of expression, a means of communication and a form of art. For the telling of extended stories or the sustained interrogation of our ways of thinking and acting, the book has proven to be a most satisfying and resilient cultural form, and it is not likely to disappear soon. But how books will be produced and delivered, and where they will fit in the new symbolic and information environments that are emerging today, are questions to which there are, at present, no clear answers.

For more information, please contact the author Professor John Thompson ( [email protected] ) at the Department of Sociology .

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence . If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

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What's the Future of Books?

Amid historic disruption in the publishing industry, big questions are—rightfully—being asked. Here, experts weigh in on how books (and the ways we discover them) are going to change.

The publishing industry is in flux. One major publisher has been acquired by a private equity firm, editors are departing (and getting laid off) from others, there are fewer book media outlets than ever, and most literary discourse is happening online. But what does it all mean for the books themselves, and the ways that readers are discovering them? Here, we make some predictions about the future of books.

It’ll be even harder to launch debut fiction.

“Celebrities and tastemakers are becoming the new medium for discovery,” says Ariele Fredman, a literary agent at United Talent Agency who previously launched eight #1 New York Times bestsellers as a publicist. As a result, it will be more important than ever for debut novels to land on book club rosters.

A Reese Witherspoon, Oprah, or Jenna Bush endorsement can be enough to not only secure a spot on the bestseller list, but anoint an author with a fanbase that lasts. “If you don't get one of those coveted spots, it becomes even harder to break a new voice,” Fredman adds.

Outside of those chosen debuts, “we're going to see a continued investment in bigger-name authors” from publishers, says former editor Molly McGhee, the author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, “because they have guaranteed returns on investment.”

Literary genre fiction and autofiction will still be the most popular modes of storytelling.

According to Dan Sinykin , the author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, the biggest trend on the page—also thanks to celebrity book clubs—will continue to be “literary genre fiction,” where “writers who are more artistic than they are entertaining” riff on genre tropes like dystopias, apocalypse tales, detective novels, and space operas. Think Colson Whitehead , Marlon James , Emily St. John Mandel , and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyeh .

The other major literary trend, Sinykin says, is autofiction: the hybrid genre between fiction and creative nonfiction about an author’s life. Autofiction automatically has built-in marketing appeal, because it drives reader interest in the author as a personality.

Citing the critical and commercial success of Annie Ernaux, Karl Ove Knausgård , Patricia Lockwood , and Ayad Akhtar , the influential publicist Michael Taeckens says autofiction will likely become even more popular than it is now.

Book clubs and indie publishers will continue investing in multiplatform storytelling—especially audio.

“Stories are commodities now,” says Julie Grau, editor and publisher of Spiegel & Grau. “They're not tied to a specific format.” These days, a story can take shape across print, audio, ebooks, film, and live events, which means readers who may not connect with a book might love it as an audio project. For this reason, “it's actually never been a better time to be a creator,” says Michelle Weiner, co-head of the books department at Creative Artists Agency. Plus, she adds, there has been a surge in live book events since the pandemic. She foresees a new wave of “bespoke” book programming, with more interactive events like Channing Tatum’s live art launch party at Brooklyn’s Books Are Magic.

There won’t be a new Book Twitter.

The online literary community has splintered into factions on new platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. “Instagram and TikTok are still massively influential,” says Taeckens, “but there's no longer one central place where most everyone shares and receives info and opinions about books.”

Authors are hesitant to invest time building an audience on Twitter’s successors. “How many times a day are you going to click into four platforms?” Fredman wonders.

“Book communities will continue to congregate,” Taeckens says, but “instead of one platform taking precedence, as Twitter did, I suspect that many different platforms will continue as the dominant trend.”

People will pick up books not because of the plot, but because they want to *feel* a certain way (i.e. hopeful).

BookTok “prioritizes emotional release, storytelling, and romance,” McGhee says. As a result, TikTok has created a new way of talking about books. If you watch Today Show book segments, you might see Isaac Fitzgerald or Qian Julie Wang say that a book made them laugh! or cry! or feel alllllll the feelings . Influencer Zibby Owens has organized her Santa Monica bookstore around the feelings that books are intended to elicit, rather than topic or genre.

Publishers are thinking this way, too. In marketing language and jacket copy, One World senior editor Nicole Counts says, “what we have to communicate to the reader is how they're going to feel.”

And word-of-mouth recommendations will be more powerful than ever.

Perhaps because they’re overwhelmed by the plethora of online platforms, “people are moving towards only word-of-mouth discovery where the peer-to-peer suggestion has become more important than ever,” Fredman says (though according to Taeckens, peer-to-peer suggestion has always been the bedrock of spreading buzz). Cindy Spiegel (co-publisher of Spiegel & Grau) argues that influencers are a form of word-of-mouth, too, because there is trust built into the parasocial relationship .

Meanwhile, imprints are starting to function more like brands—and they’re hoping to cultivate brand loyalty. The next step at One World, Counts says, is “building trust” between readers and the imprint, so folks who might not read poetry feel confident trying a poetry book simply because One World published it.

But at the end of the day, the trust will come back to the book itself. “The book has to be a book that people actually want to read,” Spiegel says. “And no one can make someone like a book.”

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Friday essay: a real life experiment illuminates the future of books and reading

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Andy Simionato is founder and editor of Atomic Activity Books, and is a lecturer at the School of Design, RMIT University.

Karen ann Donnachie is founder and editor of Atomic Activity Books, an independent, experimental publishing concern.

RMIT University provides funding as a strategic partner of The Conversation AU.

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Books are always transforming. The book we hold today has arrived through a number of materials (clay, papyrus, parchment, paper, pixels) and forms (tablet, scroll, codex, kindle).

The book can be a tool for communication, reading, entertainment, or learning; an object and a status symbol.

The most recent shift, from print media to digital technology, began around the middle of the 20th century. It culminated in two of the most ambitious projects in the history of the book (at least if we believe the corporate hype): the mass-digitisation of books by Google and the mass-distribution of electronic books by Amazon .

The survival of bookshops and flourishing of libraries (in real life) defies predictions that the “ end of the book ” is near. But even the most militant bibliophile will acknowledge how digital technology has called the “idea” of the book into question, once again.

To explore the potential for human-machine collaboration in reading and writing, we built a machine that makes poetry from the pages of any printed book. Ultimately, this project attempts to imagine the future of the book itself.

A machine to read books

Our custom-coded reading-machine reads and interprets real book pages, to create a new “ illuminated ” book of poetry.

The reading-machine uses Computer Vision and Optical Character Recognition to identify the text on any open book placed under its dual cameras. It then uses Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing technology to “read” the text for meaning, in order to select a short poetic combination of words on the page which it saves by digitally erasing all other words on the page.

Armed with this generated verse, the reading-machine searches the internet for an image – often a doodle or meme, which someone has shared and which has been stored in Google Images – to illustrate the poem.

Once every page in the book has been read, interpreted, and illustrated, the system publishes the results using an online printing service. The resulting volume is then added to a growing archive we call The Library of Nonhuman Books .

From the moment our machine completes its reading until the delivery of the book, our automated-art-system proceeds algorithmically – from interpreting and illuminating the poems, to pagination, cover design and finally adding the endmatter. This is all done without human intervention. The algorithm can generate a seemingly infinite number of readings of any book.

The following poems were produced by the reading-machine from popular texts:

deep down men try there he’s large naked she’s even while facing anything.

from E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey

how parties popcorn jukebox bathrooms depressed shrug, yeah? all.

from Bret Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction

Oh and her bedroom bathroom brushing sending it garter too face hell.

from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s

My algorithm, my muse

So what does all this have to do with the mass-digitisation of books?

Faced with growing resistance from authors and publishers concerned with Google’s management of copyright, the infoglomerate pivoted away from its primary goal of providing a free corpus of books (a kind of modern day Library of Alexandria ) and towards a more modest index system used for searching inside the books Google had scanned. Google would now serve only short “snippets” of words highlighted on the original page.

Behind the scenes, Google had identified a different use for the texts. Millions of scanned books could be used in a field called Natural Language Processing . NLP allows computers to communicate with people using everyday language rather than code. The books originally scanned for humans were made available to machines for learning, and later imitating, human language.

Algorithmic processes like NLP and Machine Learning hold the promise (or threat) of deferring much of our everyday reading to machines. History has shown that once machines know how to do something, we generally leave them to it . The extent to which we do this will depend on how much we value reading.

If we continue to defer our reading (and writing) to machines, we might make literature with our artificially intelligent counterparts. What will poetry become, with an algorithm as our muse?

We already have clues to this: from the almost obligatory use of emojis or Japanese Kaomoji (顔文字) as visual shorthand for the emotional intent of our digital communication, to the layered meanings of internet memes, to the auto-generation of “ fake news ” stories. These are the image-word hybrids we find in post-literate social media.

To hide a leaf

Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Spiritual Laws

Emerson’s challenge highlights the subjectivity we bring to reading. When we started working on the reading-machine we focused on discovering patterns of words within larger bodies of texts that have always been there, but have remained “hidden in plain sight”. Every attempt by the reading-machine generated new poems, all of them made from words that remained in their original positions on the pages of books.

The notion of a single book consisting of infinite readings is not new. We originally conceived our reading-machine as a way of making a mythical Book of Sand , described by Jorge Luis Borges in his 1975 parable.

Borges’ story is about the narrator’s encounter with an endless book which continuously recombines its words and images. Many have compared this impossible book to the internet of today. Our reading-machine, with the turn of each page of any physical book, calculates combinations of words on that page which, until that moment, have been seen, but not consciously perceived by the reader.

The title of our early version of the work was To Hide a Leaf. It was generated by chance when a prototype of the reading-machine was presented with a page from a book of Borges’ stories. The complete sentence from which the words were taken is:

Somewhere I recalled reading that the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest.

The latent verse our machine attempts to reveal in books also hides in plain sight, like a leaf in a forest; and the idea is also a play on a page being generally referred to as a “leaf of a book”.

Like the Book of Sand, perhaps all books can be seen as combinatorial machines . We believed we could write an algorithm that could unlock new meanings in existing books, using only the text within that book as the key.

Philosopher Boris Groys described the result of the mass-digitisation of the book as Words Without Grammar , suggesting clouds of disconnected words.

Our reading-machine, and the Library of Nonhuman Books it is generating, is an attempt to imagine the book to come after these clouds of “words without grammar”. We have found the results are sometimes comical, often nonsensical, occasionally infuriating and, every now and then, even poetic.

The reading-machine will be on display at the Melbourne Art Book Fair in March and will collect a Tokyo Type Directors Club Award in April. Nonhuman Books are available via Atomic Activity Books .

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Surviving or Thriving? Books in a digital world

Image description: Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Mexico

My dream has always been to own a library. Nothing too fancy – I’m not asking for an Austen-esque regency manor with a cavernous expanse of dust jackets and cloth bindings – just an otherwise ordinary room whose decoration represents a shrine to books.

Living in an increasingly digital society, where technology continues to threaten to supplant physical literature, it’s easy to assume that the concept of books is on its way out; in theory, too, the book should be consigned to the past. Once read, its purpose declines to that of a relic, a monument to the transient enjoyment, or indeed tedium, experienced within its pages. Unless, as rarely, it is re-read several times over, it becomes nothing more than clutter. The decline of the CD in favour of streaming music has already exposed this foible through the surge in popularity of instantaneously-accessible cultural content with no physical encumberment left behind.

Living in an increasingly digital society, where technology continues to threaten to supplant physical literature, it’s easy to assume that the concept of books is on its way out

Logically, then, the humble book should be heading towards the same demise, and yet market research trends show little sign of this supposed ‘decline and fall’ actually taking place. According to CNBC, of the $26bn total sales of books across the US related in the Association of American Publishers’ 2019 annual report, a staggering $22.6bn was made from printed books alone. Additionally, contrary to expectations, it’s not the older generation who are powering the survival of physical literature: CNBC’s article also highlights that 63% of print books sold in the UK are to those under the age of 44, with the older generation conversely more likely to choose an e-book instead.

We shouldn’t be surprised at the tenacity of the book, or indeed the likely reasons for its survival in the modern age since history inevitably repeats itself. Among the earliest manuscripts and printed books housed in Arts End, part of Duke Humfrey’s library in the Bodleian, the most popular and elegant are editions of Aristotle’s works. Books were, in the days before mass printing, lavish unnecessary expenditures designed as a symbol of wealth and social status. Even as a Classicist, Aristotle does not tend to be an easy or particularly enjoyable read, which leads me to assume that the majority of their owners didn’t deign to actually read their weighty tomes in any detail, instead of showcasing their implied cultural capital merely in the ownership and display of such knowledge.

Books were, in the days before mass printing, lavish unnecessary expenditures designed as a symbol of wealth and social status

A similar trait is visible today and seems likely to continue into the future of our society since even after cheap paper, ink and production lines have diminished the monetary value of today’s books, their social and cultural capital remains high. The predominant change from the past is in our consumption as well as a display of this learning: to have a well-thumbed copy of War and Peace on your shelf is tantamount to casually opening a conversation with ‘I fought Tolstoy and won’, while to have kept up with the biggest trends and innovations in modern literature creates a sense of belonging in society’s ever-evolving cultural climate.

Equally, the physical trace of knowledge consumed and horizons broadened is akin to a trophy for achievement. Anyone who has had to read for work rather than pleasure in support of an essay, report or thesis will recognise that contrary to the appearance of someone nose-deep in a book, reading is, in fact, a highly active rather than passive pastime. It requires a significant level of concentration, retention and processing to engage with and understand the nuances of literature, fiction and non-fiction.

In an age of bite-size tweets, image-orientated communication and shortened attention spans generated as a result, it comes as no surprise that younger people – those most likely to be immersed in all things digital in their daily lives – are especially keen to get away from a screen and stretch their minds through reading; and then, of course, to cherish the fruit of their labours through the memento of the book itself.

63% of print books sold in the UK are to those under the age of 44, with the older generation conversely more likely to choose an e-book instead

There is one section of society not mentioned in many commercial stats, for whom the consumption of literature is of paramount importance: younger readers. This category covers both children and adolescents, as literacy is an important skill for early learners in its own right, which can then be developed to support later learning in all aspects of the school curriculum.

Sadly, the reading trends in this age-group are alarming. The National Literacy Trust’s 2017/8 report into the reading habits of children shows that levels of daily reading and reading engagement are in decline, as ‘stories’ move from the page to app-based games and parents find it, on the whole, easier and more practical to put iPads rather than books in front of their children when travelling or at rest. Children’s minds move fast, books move slowly; the result is that children’s shorter attention spans benefit from a multi-sensory experience which books in their current format are unable to provide.

To address this issue, radical steps are finally being taken to bring books to children, rather than vice versa, though – ironically – through the introduction of technology into reading. Research is underway for the use of augmented reality in digital versions of children’s books, making shapes and characters come ‘alive’ on the page to keep attention focused on the story at hand.

The National Literacy Trust’s 2017/8 report into the reading habits of children shows that levels of daily reading and reading engagement are in decline, as ‘stories’ move from the page to app-based games.

Most interestingly, storylines in children’s literature are beginning to be adapted to better suit their interests. BBC Radio 2’s ‘500 words’ challenge, asking primary-age learners from around the UK to send in 500 words of writing, revealed through big data analysis that ‘plastic’ was the children’s ‘word of the year’ for 2018, not only because of the increase in the frequency of its use from previous years but also because of the emergence of negative connotations surrounding the word. Many children, it seems, used their 500 words to devise creative solutions for the climate crisis, and children’s literature should rightly evolve to embrace this social consciousness.

At the end of all this, then, are books today thriving or merely surviving? The future prospects for the physical book, and for reading more generally, are by turns heartening and worrying depending on which trends you study. And yet, as history has shown us, there is a tenacity to the book which has persisted over the centuries, allowing tomes to retain their social and cultural value even amidst technological revolutions such as mass printing machines and, most recently, the resistible rise of the digital world. Because of this, while dreaming of my future library, I am cautiously optimistic that future generations, too, will continue to dream of their own.

Image credit: Diego Delso

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Michigan Journal of Economics

The Future of Print Books and Bookstores

Written by Jennie Wang

Nowadays, how often do people deliberately walk into a bookstore with the intention of purchasing a specific book? Do they walk past shelf after shelf, navigating through aisles to reach the right section, then sweep their eyes over the spines of each book until they spot the desired title? In a society boasting increasing technological advancements, bookstores are becoming less and less of a necessity. Instead, a plethora of other, more convenient alternatives exist. These include options such as downloading e-books, purchasing books online and having them delivered directly to one’s house, or ordering books to pick up at a certain location. So what does the future look like for bookstores? Are they still going to exist 20, 30 years from now? 

To answer these questions, one must first consider some general information concerning bookstores, such as how many and what kinds of bookstores exist today. Next, one should look at the economics of owning a bookstore, such as the costs and benefits of keeping a bookstore open. Finally, using this information, one can make conclusions about how bookstores have survived for this long and whether or not they will continue to survive in our current society.

First, what is the market for bookstores like and how does the bookstore industry work in the United States? Companies in the bookstore industry are responsible for retailing books, newspapers, and magazines purchased from large manufacturers, either domestic or international, and selling them directly to the public through brick-and-mortar stores. Currently, the US has 17,729 bookstores employing a total of 74,132 workers, with the largest US companies being Barnes and Noble Inc., Follet Higher Education Group Inc., and Books-A-Million Inc. In 2021, the market size of the bookstore industry is $9.5 billion, an amount that had been decreasing at a 5.7% rate every year, on average, starting from 2016. This decline in revenue is due to many factors, namely, rising competition from online retailers and an increasing popularity of e-books. Additionally, in an attempt to prevent the spread of Covid-19, many bookstores temporarily closed their shops, causing total industry revenue to decline by 10.8% in 2020 alone, although a small rebound in the near future may occur (“Book Stores Industry in the US”).

Being aware of these challenges, one might wonder how it is that bookstores make a profit. Overall, a bookstore’s decision to stay open depends on its benefits and costs. The costs consist of variable costs such as inventory, employee salaries and benefits, advertising, bank payments, and taxes; and second, fixed costs, which include rent and utilities. The benefits consist mainly of book sales, which means that finding an accurate retail price is very important. Bookstores generally purchase their books from the publisher or manufacturer at a 40% discount from the retail price. This means that if the store buys a book for $6 from a publisher, it will sell the book for $10 to their customers. The $4 profit is then used to cover their costs. In the end after subtracting all expenses, the store is left with $.20 net profit, so a 2% profit margin. From this example, it is clear that a bookstore has very low profit margins. This explains why some bookstores choose to open up cafes in the building or sell other merchandise in addition to books such as shirts, bags, and bookmarks (Laube, 2021). 

To understand the cost-benefit situation more clearly, it is helpful to look at a specific example. Politics and Prose is an independent bookstore located in Washington D.C. that employs 50 workers with hourly pay and health benefits. The store has about 8,000 customers that pay a $20 annual membership fee. Based on their sales data from 2008, the store made $6.8 million in sales, with $3m coming from hardback sales, $2.2m from paperback, $250,000 from used books, and the rest from miscellaneous sales. The costs they had to pay were $3.9m for books, $1.6m towards payroll, and an unspecified amount towards general expenses. The store earned a total of $73,000. Though the total net profit of a bookstore can be very low, as long as the revenue from book sales covers the variable costs, the store stays open (Heath, 2009).

Knowing that revenues of bookstores are decreasing every year and understanding that bookstores make a low profit, it’s necessary now to ask whether or not bookstores will last far into the future. An interesting fact to note is that though stores have declined in number by 12% from 2012-2017, the American Booksellers Association (ABA) reports that membership in bookstores has actually increased by 13% in the same amount of time. Based on various pieces of evidence, one can conclude that bookstores and printed books are not going to be disappearing anytime soon. First, internet superstores have made information on books more widely available, causing consumers to turn towards bookstores and the people they encounter there for recommendations, be that employees or fellow book shoppers. According to Oren Teicher, chief executive of the ABA in 2017, “As the volume of books published increases, the importance of a bookseller that can recommend titles has never been greater.” In contrast to the low priced, algorithm-based suggestions of the internet, brick-and-mortar stores offer people a chance to interact with a community of expert readers (Ang, 2017). Second, a younger generation of business owners is in the process of replacing more traditional bookstore owners, with ideas and new methods to attract consumers. For example, brick and mortar stores offer services that online stores don’t. In 2017, a bookstore located in the Bronx called the Lit Bar included a literary-themed bar in their store. So while book sales brought in 40% of the revenue, sales from drinks provided a return of 200% (Ang, 2017). Third, though e-books were first assumed to be the catalyst that would bring an end to the demand and production of physical books, evidence says this is not so. From 2008 to 2010, though sales for e-books increased by 1,260%, they stagnated in 2015. Sales from print books still make up 80% of the book market, with physical books bringing in $4 billion revenue in sales against the $770.9 million from e-books in 2018. This is because e-books represent a large decline in utility and a marginally small gain in efficiency. Although e-books are more convenient and less expensive, they do not contain some of the unique and valuable qualities found in physical books. (Anagnos, 2018).

There is still further proof that bookstores remain a vital piece of society. Publishers are aware that the market for books is a sustainable industry and are not hesitant to show it. Penguin Random House recently invested $100 million towards doubling warehouse sizes and increasing the distribution of books, with HarperCollins and other major publishing companies following suit (Alter, 2015).

Bookstores are challenging to run, but it is clear that they are necessary and important. Though internet stores provide consumers with the option to purchase e-books or deliver books straight to their houses, bookstores offer an opportunity to be in a cozy, comfortable, and welcoming space surrounded by books, which a bibliophile can then display on a bookshelf or store in a bookbag. He can rest one on his lap and flip through its pages and breathe in its scent. Physical books are special, and the distributors of these hidden gems, the common bookstores that we so often drive past, are here to stay.

Alter, A. (2015, September 23). The plot twist: E-book sales slip, and print is far from dead. Retrieved February 25, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/business/media/the-plot-twist-e-book-sales-slip-and-print-is-far-from-dead.html?_r=2

Anagnos, C. (2018, December 22). Why e-book sales are Suddenly falling: Chloe Anagnos. Retrieved February 25, 2021, from https://fee.org/articles/as-independent-bookstores-make-a-comeback-e-book-sales-take-a-dive/

Ang, K. (2017, July 10). Thanks, Amazon Prime! Now independent bookstores are booming. Retrieved February 25, 2021, from https://www.marketwatch.com/story/thanks-amazon-now-indie-bookstores-are-booming-2017-01-25

Book Stores Industry in the US – Market Research Report. (2021, February 4). Retrieved February 25, 2021, from https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/market-research-reports/book-stores-industry/

Heath, T. (2009, June 28). Bookish Doyennes Nurture D.C. Landmark. Retrieved February 25, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/26/AR2009062605010_3.html?sid=ST2009062702615

Laube, S. (2021, February 10). Bookstore economics 101 -. Retrieved February 25, 2021, from https://stevelaube.com/bookstore-economics-101/

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The 'Future Book' Is Here, but It's Not What We Expected

The Future Book was meant to be interactive, moving, alive. Its pages were supposed to be lush with whirling doodads, responsive, hands-on. The old paperback Zork choose-your-own-adventures were just the start. The Future Book would change depending on where you were, how you were feeling. It would incorporate your very environment into its story—the name of the coffee shop you were sitting at, your best friend’s birthday. It would be sly, maybe a little creepy. Definitely programmable. Ulysses would extend indefinitely in any direction you wanted to explore; just tap and some unique, mega-mind-blowing sui generis path of Joycean machine-learned words would wend itself out before your very eyes.

Prognostications about how technology would affect the form of paper books have been with us for centuries. Each new medium was poised to deform or murder the book: newspapers, photography, radio, movies, television, videogames, the internet.

Some viewed the intersection of books and technology more positively: In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote in The Atlantic : “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”

Researcher Alan Kay created a cardboard prototype of a tablet-like device in 1968. He called it the "Dynabook," saying, “We created a new kind of medium for boosting human thought, for amplifying human intellectual endeavor. We thought it could be as significant as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press 500 years ago.”

In the 1990s, Future Bookism hit a kind of beautiful fever pitch. We were so close. Brown University professor Robert Coover, in a 1992 New York Times op-ed titled “ The End of Books ,” wrote of the future of writing: “Fluidity, contingency, indeterminacy, plurality, discontinuity are the hypertext buzzwords of the day, and they seem to be fast becoming principles, in the same way that relativity not so long ago displaced the falling apple.” And then, more broadly: “The print medium is a doomed and outdated technology, a mere curiosity of bygone days destined soon to be consigned forever to those dusty unattended museums we now call libraries.”

Normal books? Bo-ring. Future Books? Awesome—indeterminate—and we were almost there! The Voyager Company built its "expanded books" platform on Hypercard, launching with three titles at MacWorld 1992. Microsoft launched Encarta on CD-ROM.

But … by the mid-2000s, there still were no real digital books. The Rocket eBook was too little, too early. Sony launched the eink-based Librie platform in 2004 to little uptake. Interactive CD-ROMs had dropped off the map. We had Wikipedia, blogs, and the internet, but the mythological Future Book—some electric slab that would somehow both be like and not like the quartos of yore—had yet to materialize. Peter Meirs, head of technology at Time , hedged his bets perfectly, proclaiming: “Ultimately, there will be some sort of device!”

And then there was. Several devices, actually. The iPhone launched in June 2007, the Kindle that November. Then, in 2010, the iPad arrived. High-resolution screens were suddenly in everyone’s hands and bags. And for a brief moment during the early 2010s, it seemed like it might finally be here: the glorious Future Book.

Fast forward to 2018. At the end of Denis Johnson’s short story “Triumph Over the Grave,” he writes: “It doesn’t matter. The world keeps turning. It’s plain to you that at the time I write this, I’m not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.”

It’s a kick in the gut, not just because of his tone, rhythm, grammar but because he is dead. Passed away in 2017. I was reading this story—part of his collection The Largesse of the Maiden —on my Kindle, during a many-day hike. Hiking with a Kindle definitely feels futuristic—an entire library in a device that weighs less than a small book, and rarely needs charging. And my first impulse on reading Johnson’s final line, sitting on a dirt path in the mountains of Japan flanked by Cryptomeria japonica , was to eulogize him right there, smack dab in the text while a nightingale whistled overhead. The Kindle indicated with a subtle dotted underline and small inline text that those final sentences had been highlighted by “56 highlighters.” Other humans! Reading this same text, feeling the same impulse. Some need to mark those lines.

I wanted to write, “Fuck. Sad to think this is the last new work we’re going to get from this guy. Most definitely dead as I’m reading it.” You know, something in the vulgarity of Johnson himself. I wanted to stick my 10-cent eulogy between those lines for others to read, and to read what those others had thought. Purchasing a book is one of the strongest self-selections of community, and damn it, I wanted to engage.

But I couldn’t. For my Kindle Oasis—one of the most svelte, elegant, and expensive digital book containers you can buy in 2018—is about as interactive as a potato. Instead, I left a note for myself: “Write something about how this isn’t the digital book we thought we’d have.”

Physical books today look like physical books of last century. And digital books of today look, feel, and function almost identically to digital books of 10 years ago, when the Kindle launched. The biggest change is that many of Amazon’s competitors have gone belly up or shrunken to irrelevancy. The digital reading and digital book startup ecosystem that briefly emerged in the early 2010s has shriveled to a nubbin.

Amazon won. Trounced, really. As of the end of 2017, about 45 percent (up from 37 percent in 2015) of all print sales and 83 percent of all ebook sales happen through Amazon channels. There are few alternatives with meaningful mind- or market share, especially among digital books.

Kindle Oasis displaying the last page of Denis Johnson's Triumph Over the Grave .

Yet here’s the surprise: We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.

Twenty years ago, what did you need to make a book on your own? You needed a pile of words, sure. But you also needed a mountain of cash. And even if you had the cash—say, $20,000 to get the thing edited, designed, proofed, and printed—you still needed a printer. Assuming you could get your books printed, you needed a place to store them. You needed someone to ship them. You needed a relationship with a distributor to get them into Barnes and Noble. And you needed a marketing budget to get them on that front table.

To publish a digital book today, you still need the words, but you can skip many of the other steps. From a Pages or Microsoft Word document you can export an .epub file—the open standard for digital books. Open an Amazon and iBooks account, upload the file, and suddenly you’re accessing 92 percent of the digital book market.

For printed books, a slew of new funding, production, and distribution tools make creating and selling a physical artifact much easier. Blurb , Amazon , Lulu , Lightning Source , and Ingram Spark are just a few of the print-on-demand companies we all have access to. Many will handle sales—providing you with a web page to send potential readers to, managing the burdensome tasks of payments and shipping. The improvement in print-on-demand quality in recent decades is astounding. The books look fabulous—with decent paper options, cover types, finishes. Professional photographers are even offering up monographs in collaboration with companies like Blurb. And Amazon will have the finished books on your doorstep the next day.

It’s easy to take these offerings for granted. Today, anyone with a bit of technological know-how and an internet connection can publish—offering digital or physical editions, on the same online retail shelves—alongside Alexander Chee, Rebecca Makkai, or Tom Clancy.

This proliferation of new technology and services has altered author economics. Almost half of author earnings now come from independently published books. Independent books don’t outsell big-five books, but they offer higher royalty rates—roughly 70 percent versus 25 percent. For the first time—perhaps since the invention of the printing press—authors and small presses have viable independent options beyond the “traditional” publishing path with its gatekeepers.

For six years in the 2000s I was an art director and producer of printed books with a small indie press and, let me tell you, there were no great models for pre-sales or raising capital. Then crowdfunding arrived.

Kickstarter launched in 2009. Although it wasn’t the first crowdfunding platform, it quickly became the largest and most influential. Since launch, Kickstarter has helped fund more than 14,000 “publishing” -related projects, collecting some $134 million. The 10 best-funded publishing projects on Kickstarter alone generated more than $6 million in funding---and then reaped much more in post-publication sales.

Best-selling authors like Jack Cheng ( See You in the Cosmos ) and Robin Sloan ( Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore ) got their start funding novellas or first novels on Kickstarter. Sloan launched his project “Robin Writes a Book” in August 2009, when few had heard the phrase “crowdfunding” and the idea of giving money for a thing not yet made seemed slightly bonkers.

Kickstarter is not explicit patronage in the classical sense. At its worst, the platform produces products that feel chintzy and a bit scammy, an unholy union between QVC and SkyMall. But at its best there’s a sense of, as Tim Carmody puts it, “ unlocking the commons ”—of helping something get into the world that otherwise wouldn’t exist, and you are part of that.

I’ve published two books (with both physical and digital components) that wouldn’t have been made without crowdfunding. In 2010 I republished a guide I coauthored to the Tokyo art world , and in 2016 I published a photo collection and comprehensive online guide to Japan’s Kumano Kodo UNESCO World Heritage pilgrimage path.

I compiled everything I learned in that first campaign into a breakdown called " Kickstartup ." That essay described cash raised through Kickstarter as “… micro seed capital. This—capital without relinquishment of ownership—is where the latent potential of Kickstarter funding lies.”

I wrote that essay in 2010 just as crowdfunding was entering the mainstream. Soon after, it seemed everyone was launching books.

The emblematic story of a Kickstarted book is Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls . Launched in 2016, it quickly shattered all book-funding records, raising $1.2 million combined during its initial Kickstarter and IndieGogo campaigns. The book went on to sell over 1 million copies around the world. Rebel Girls has become a brand unto itself. Publisher Timbuktu Labs launched Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls 2 in 2018, raising another $866,000 in pre-sales. Earlier this year, I asked Elena Favilli , co-founder of Timbuktu Labs, how she would describe the company: “When I think about Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls , and the whole movement, and the whole community that has formed around it … I would say that today we are a digital native brand, and that we have done this starting from a physical object, and a very traditional one such as a children’s book.”

The Timbuktu success story often omits one important detail: The company began in 2011 as a breathlessly future-of-publishing app developer, making a digital children’s magazine for the newly launched iPad. Timbuktu was part of a wide-eyed first wave of tablet-focused digital-publishing upstarts that tumbled forth, frothy with venture capital. This was when WIRED was publishing gigabyte-sized app updates for the digital version of the magazine, and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins was pushing for publishing innovation via its $100 million-plus iFund. When Flipboard (where I worked from 2010 to 2011)—which reimagined the beauty of print magazines in digital-first form—went live on the App Store, it proved so popular it had to turn off signups and create a waiting list, one of the first iPad apps to constrain access.

Amid this rush, Timbuktu Labs began winning awards for its magazine app, which was updated daily with new content. Despite the positive press, it never gained the necessary traction to become a sustainable business or justify taking on more capital. I invested a small amount in their angel round in 2012. And as an investor, I had a front-row seat: They tried. They really tried. The market simply wasn’t there. And so as a last-ditch effort, cofounders Favilli and Francesca Cavallo retreated to LA to rethink their business and life plans. It was there the idea for Rebel Girls was born, and a sustainable business was built around the opposite of an app: a physical book. Goodnight Stories didn’t emerge spontaneously, though; they began to test it, six months before launching their now famed Kickstarter campaign, using the simplest of internet technologies: email.

In 2014, The New York Times had 6.5 million subscribers to its email newsletters. By 2017, that number had doubled. Companies like Mailchimp have been offering newsletter services for nearly two decades, but they were never as popular as they are now. In 2018, users sent about 1 billion emails per day through Mailchimp, a 5,000-fold increase from 2013, when the service handled only 200,000 emails a day.

In response to this email explosion, the startup Substack launched in 2017 as a newsletter publishing and monetization platform. Most newsletter platforms and payment systems aren’t integrated in any smooth or meaningful way. Charging for access can be an onerous task. Through the Substack system, though, a publisher can easily set up metered access to a newsletter for a subscription fee. As of October, Substack boasts over 25,000 subscribers across various newsletters, paying on average $80 a year. Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi recently launched his novel, The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing , in serial on Substack. Judd Legum’s Popular Information is also published via Substack.

Almost every writer or artist I know has a newsletter. One way to understand this boom is that as social media has siloed off chunks of the open web, sucking up attention, the energy that was once put into blogging has now shifted to email. Robin Sloan, in a recent—of course— email newsletter , lays it out thusly:

In addition to sending several email newsletters, I subscribe to many, and I talk about them a lot; you might have heard me say this at some point (or seen me type it) but I think any artist or scholar or person-in-the-world today, if they don't have one already, needs to start an email list immediately.

Why? Because we simply cannot trust the social networks, or any centralized commercial platform, with these cliques and crews most vital to our lives, these bands of fellow-travelers who are---who must be---the first to hear about all good things. Email is definitely not ideal, but it is: decentralized, reliable, and not going anywhere---and more and more, those feel like quasi-magical properties.

Ownership. We recognize we (largely) own the mailing lists; they are portable, can be printed out, stored in a safe; they are not governed by unknowable algorithmic tomfoolery. I maintain an email newsletter with more than 10,000 recipients, and I treat it as the most direct, most intimate, most valuable connection to my audience. In hard economic terms, when I was promoting my Kickstarter campaign for Koya Bound , each time I sent out a newsletter, I had roughly 10,000 more backer-dollars within an hour. That’s a pretty damn strong, tangible community signal. Far more immediate and predictable than I’ve found Twitter or Facebook or Instagram to be.

That first Rebel Girls test email went to 25 recipients; the list snowballed in size and excitement over the six months leading up to the Kickstarter campaign. Timbuktu’s goal was—what seemed ambitious and implausible in the moment—$40,000. This exemplifies the amplification voodoo of a platform like Kickstarter: When someone backs a project, it broadcasts the news to their friends, creating a network effect. The bigger the network, the more powerful the effect. Kickstarter, with more than 15 million patrons, has the biggest network effect game in town. That also makes it a powerful online marketing force for independent authors and publishers.

The trouble with rigid definitions of what is or isn’t a “book” is that sometimes something that’s not shaped like a book, is actually very book-like.

Taiwan-based Ben Thompson publishes a newsletter called Stratechery . For $100 a year you get Thompson’s thoughts on technology and startups four times a week. Yes, he’s sharp and diligent, but most importantly he has a voice . And if you’re paying attention, his analysis will probably make you money. So it’s an easy sell. According to public statements , in 2014 he had over 1,000 subscribers paying $100 a year. He later said his subscriptions generate 100 times what he made in 2014. Could it be? Could Ben Thompson be making $10 million a year on a newsletter? I asked him to confirm and he wrote back, “I am very successful but not near $10m unfortunately!” Still, it’s hard to imagine him with fewer than 10,000 subscribers.

In 2008, WIRED co-founder and technologist Kevin Kelly predicted how the internet and email would allow creators to be independent. He called it the 1,000 True Fans theory of market building. Now the payments and funding and production pieces are in place to allow someone—given 1,000 fervent and supportive fans—to reliably publish for fun and profit. Stratechery is just an archetypical example of Kelly’s 1000 True Fans theory in practice.

Folks like Ben Thompson are effectively writing books. Take a year of his essays, edit them for brevity and clarity, and you’d have a brilliant edition of This Year in Tech . And so in a strange way, Stratechery in paid newsletter form is as much a Future Book as a bounded Kindle edition.

It’s also worth noting that Thompson’s position is protected: No outsider can take away his subscribers or prevent him from communicating with them. Email is a boring, simple, old technology. The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson. Unlike followers or social media subscribers, email has yet to be usurped by algorithms (for the most part; Gmail does a little bit of sorting now). It’s a predictable marketing channel.

Social media, however, is not predictable. Algorithms and product functionality have all the stability of rolling magma as companies refine how they engage, and extract value from, users. This means an investment in social media can go belly up in a few years. Take author Teju Cole, for example. His use of Twitter was both delicate and brilliant . He amassed a quarter of a million followers before unceremoniously dropping the service in 2014, perhaps feeling the growing invective so characteristic of the platform today. He then consolidated his promotional social media activity around Facebook. Today, he says, “My main experience of Facebook is that I have no idea who sees what. I allegedly have 29,000 people following the page. I doubt that more than a few hundred of them are ever shown what I post.” Of course, Facebook gently suggests that page owners can reach their full audience by paying for promotion. Considering the shift in demographics of Facebook usage, who knows if his audience is even checking their timelines, and would see the posts if he paid.

By contrast, there’s something almost ahistorical about email, existing outside the normal flow of technological progress. It works and has worked, reliably, for decades. There’s no central email authority. Most bookish people use it. Today I’m convinced you could skip a website, Facebook page, or Twitter account, and launch a publishing company on email alone. Coffee House Press is a good example: I don’t ever peek at the website, or see any of the social media updates, but I love its semiregular, well-considered emails, and almost always buy something when they arrive. Similarly, publisher MCD Books’ newsletter, Electric Eel , is my main vector for keeping up with their work. MCD Books has also discovered what covers in the digital age were missing: a little bit of animation. Just enough movement to catch the eye of someone scrolling through their feed.

If a publisher is going to augment emails with social media, Instagram feels like the best fit. Books are inherently visual, and cover design is in something of a golden age at the moment with designers like Alison Forner , Gray318 , Rodrigo Corral , Suzanne Dean , and many others producing consistently outstanding work.

The Library of Congress began distributing books on cassette tape in 1969, but audiobooks only gained significant publishing market share in recent years. Once physical, now almost entirely digital and ephemeral, audiobooks have gone from a rounding error to generating $2.5 billion in revenue in 2017, up 22 percent from the prior year.

It turns out smartphones aren’t the best digital book reading devices (too many seductions, real-time travesties, notifications just behind the words), but they make excellent audiobook players, stowed away in pockets while commuting. Top-tier podcasts like Serial, S-Town, and Homecoming have normalized listening to audio or (nonfiction) booklike productions on smartphones.

The technical improvements that made audiobooks a great experience arrived suddenly in the past few years: Higher quality, better battery life, and less expensive Bluetooth headphones have flooded the market. Connectivity and multi-device cloud syncing are ubiquitous. By August, 25 million smart home speakers had shipped, with sales rising 187 percent in the second quarter. That’s useful because over half of all audio book listening takes places at home.

From the production side of things: A serviceable home voice-over studio can be cobbled together for less than $1,000 (even less if you’re willing to cut corners and work in a closet) thanks in part to the boom in podcasting. And the distribution channels for audiobooks are accessible to anyone who has an ACX (Audiobook Creation eXchange) file to upload.

This escalation of audiobook mindshare has been quietly simmering on the fringes for decades. In 2005, The New York Times argued that listening to books was roughly the same as reading them. Back then, an audiobook required intention—buying physical media ( Lord of the Rings required juggling 12 cassettes), a trip to the library, charging the batteries on your Discman. Now our always-connected, always-charged, always-networked devices make listening to an audiobook as effortless as “Alexa, read me Moby Dick.” And so it is. So much so that The New York Times launched an audiobooks best seller list in March.

Last August, a box arrived on my doorstep that seemed to embody the apotheosis of contemporary publishing. The Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition was published via a crowdfunding campaign. The edition includes a book of images, three records, and a small poster packaged in an exquisite box set with supplementary online material. When I held it, I didn’t think about how futuristic it felt, nor did I lament the lack of digital paper or interactivity. I thought: What a strange miracle to be able to publish an object like this today. Something independently produced, complex and beautiful, with foil stamping and thick pages, full-color, in multiple volumes, made into a box set, with an accompanying record and other shimmering artifacts, for a weirdly niche audience, funded by geeks like me who are turned on by the romance of space.

We have arrived to the once imagined Future Book in piecemeal truths.

Moving images were often espoused to be a core part of our Future Book. While rarely found inside of an iBooks or Kindle book, they are here. If you want to learn the ukulele, you don’t search Amazon for a Kindle how-to book, you go to YouTube and binge on hours of lessons, stopping when you need to, rewinding as necessary, learning at your own pace.

Vannevar Bush's “Memex” essentially described Wikipedia built into a desk.

The "Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an iPhone.

In The Book of Sand , Borges wrote of an infinite book: "It was then that the stranger told me: 'Study the page well. You will never see it again.'" Describing in many ways what it feels like to browse the internet or peek at Twitter.

Our Future Book is composed of email, tweets, YouTube videos, mailing lists, crowdfunding campaigns, PDF to .mobi converters, Amazon warehouses, and a surge of hyper-affordable offset printers in places like Hong Kong.

For a “book” is just the endpoint of a latticework of complex infrastructure, made increasingly accessible. Even if the endpoint stays stubbornly the same—either as an unchanging Kindle edition or simple paperback—the universe that produces, breathes life into, and supports books is changing in positive, inclusive ways, year by year. The Future Book is here and continues to evolve. You’re holding it. It’s exciting. It’s boring. It’s more important than it has ever been.

But temper some of those flight-of-fancy expectations. In many ways, it’s still a potato.

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Essay · The future of the book

In which something old and powerful is encountered in a vault

FINGERS stroke vellum; the calfskin pages are smooth, like paper, but richer, almost oily. The black print is crisp, and every Latin sentence starts with a lush red letter. One of the book’s early owners has drawn a hand and index finger which points, like an arrow, to passages worth remembering.

In 44BC Cicero, the Roman Republic’s great orator, wrote a book for his son Marcus called de Officiis (“On Duties”). It told him how to live a moral life, how to balance virtue with self-interest, how to have an impact. Not all his words were new. De Officiis draws on the views of various Greek philosophers whose works Cicero could consult in his library, most of which have since been lost. Cicero’s, though, remain. De Officiis was read and studied throughout the rise of the Roman Empire and survived the subsequent fall. It shaped the thought of Renaissance thinkers like Erasmus; centuries later still it inspired Voltaire. “No one will ever write anything more wise,” he said.

The book’s words have not changed; their vessel, though, has gone through relentless reincarnation and metamorphosis. Cicero probably dictated de Officiis to his freed slave, Tiro, who copied it down on a papyrus scroll from which other copies were made in turn. Within a few centuries some versions were transferred from scrolls into bound books, or codices. A thousand years later monks meticulously made copies by hand, averaging only a few pages a day. Then, in the 15th century, de Officiis was copied by a machine. The lush edition in your correspondent’s hands—delightfully, and surprisingly, no gloves are needed to handle it—is one of the very first such copies. It was printed in Mainz, Germany, on a printing press owned by Johann Fust, an early partner of Johannes Gutenberg, the pioneer of European printing. It is dated 1466.

Some 500 years after it was printed, this beautiful volume sits in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, its home since 1916. Few physical volumes survive five centuries. This one should last several more. The vault that holds it and tens of thousands of other volumes, built in 1951, was originally meant to double as a nuclear-bomb shelter.

Although this copy of de Officiis may be sequestered, the book itself is freer than ever. In its printed forms it has been a hardback and, more recently, a paperback, published in all sorts of editions—as a one off, a component of uniform library editions, a classic pitched at an affordable price, a scholarly, annotated text that only universities buy. And now it is available in all sorts of non-printed forms, too. You can read it free online or download it as an e-book in English, Latin and any number of other tongues.

Many are worried about what such technology means for books, with big bookshops closing, new devices spreading, novice authors flooding the market and an online behemoth known as Amazon growing ever more powerful. Their anxieties cannot simply be written off as predictable technophobia. The digital transition may well change the way books are written, sold and read more than any development in their history, and that will not be to everyone’s advantage. Veterans and revolutionaries alike may go bust; Gutenberg died almost penniless, having lost control of his press to Fust and other creditors.

But to see technology purely as a threat to books risks missing a key point. Books are not just “tree flakes encased in dead cow”, as a scholar once wryly put it. They are a technology in their own right, one developed and used for the refinement and advancement of thought. And this technology is a powerful, long-lived and adaptable one.

Books like de Officiis have not merely weathered history; they have helped shape it. The ability they offer to preserve, transmit and develop ideas was taken to another level by Gutenberg and his colleagues. Being able to study printed material at the same time as others studied it and to exchange ideas about it sparked the Reformation; it was central to the Enlightenment and the rise of science. No army has accomplished more than printed textbooks have; no prince or priest has mattered as much as “On the Origin of Species”; no coercion has changed the hearts and minds of men and women as much as the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays.

Books read in electronic form will boast the same power and some new ones to boot. The printed book is an excellent means of channelling information from writer to reader; the e-book can send information back as well. Teachers will be able to learn of a pupil’s progress and questions; publishers will be able to see which books are gulped down, which sipped slowly. Already readers can see what other readers have thought worthy of note, and seek out like-minded people for further discussion of what they have read. The private joys of the book will remain; new public pleasures are there to be added.

What is the future of the book? It is much brighter than people think.

Today self publishing has made a comeback. The internet enables people to sell their e-books and print books without the hassle of directing people to their homes or trying to get bookstores to display them. It also offers them success on a scale never before possible.

At last spring’s London Book Fair there was a booth rented by eight authors who said that, between them, they had sold a staggering 16m books and spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list—all without the help of a traditional publisher. They are used to having their claims dismissed; Bella Andre, a self-published romance writer with an economics degree from Stanford, got so irked when a publisher challenged her heady sales figures that she took a picture of a bank statement and sent it to him. “No one is counting our books in any survey that comes out in the media,” sighed Barbara Freethy, another romance writer. She says that, as of September, she has sold over 4.8m books.

Last year Amazon’s sales of self-published books were around $450m, according to one estimate; a former Amazon executive thinks the number is higher. In America about a quarter of the books that got an ISBN in 2012 were self-published, according to Bowker—almost 400,000 titles. In 2013 self-published books accounted for one out of every five e-books purchased in Britain, according to Nielsen.

“Wool” started off as a short story online about a subterranean city called the Silo. Reader enthusiasm and feedback encouraged its author, Hugh Howey, to extend it into a novel. More enthusiasm followed. Simon & Schuster, a big publisher, did an unusual deal to license rights to the print book, while Mr Howey continued to sell the e-book off his own bat. It became a bestseller and may become a film. The film of “Fifty Shades of Grey”, the poster-child for online fiction, hits cinemas next year. Like “Wool”, E.L. James’s “Fifty Shades...” started off online, and some of its e-book success has been attributed to the fact that reading erotica is more discreetly done on a tablet. But since being acquired by Random House it has done remarkably well in its printed form, too. All told, it and its two sequels have chalked up sales of over 100m worldwide.

Like Ms James, most writers still sign with publishers when they have the chance, because print books remain such a sizeable chunk of the market. But the self-publishing boom is changing how those publishers work. Self-published authors attract readers by selling their books for just a few dollars and are aggressive about offering promotions to boost sales. This puts pressure on publishers’ prices—especially in genre fiction, where self publishing is most powerful. In the past five years the revenues of Harlequin, a publisher of romantic fiction, have dropped by around $100m; in May it was purchased by HarperCollins.

As well as changing what publishers can charge for some types of book, self publishing also changes how they go about finding them. Publishers hoping to spot the next hot thing have started to scour online writing sites, such as Wattpad, where people receive feedback on their work from other users. Any interest they show is normally warmly appreciated. In the past 12 months the average earnings for self-published authors have probably been around $1,180, reckons Mark Coker, the boss of Smashwords, a self-publishing platform, with most of them getting less than that. Such authors find themselves highly dependent on Amazon’s recommendation system and websites that offer promotions to boost their sales; most readers still gravitate to books that have been professionally written, edited and reviewed.

But the advantages of being “properly published”—editors, promotion, and the like—should not be oversold. “We have to be careful not to compare the reality of self publishing with the ideal of legacy publishing,” says Barry Eisler, a thriller writer. In 2011 he walked away from a publisher’s advance of $500,000 in favour of the self-publishing route; he says the decision paid off well. Susan Orlean, an author and a staff writer at the New Yorker, considered something similar for a recent book. “In a million years I would have never thought of that before,” she says. She thinks the day will come when publishers may have to start unbundling their services. “The mere fact that publishers make hardcover books won’t be a powerful enough argument. They will have to reimagine their role.” Publishers could start offering “light” versions of their services, such as print-only distribution, or editing, and not taking a cut of the whole pie.

Publishers realise that they have to change. “Publishers will only be relevant if they can give authors evidence that they can connect their works to more readers than anybody else,” admits Markus Dohle, who runs Penguin Random House, the world’s largest consumer-book publisher.

Such connection is crucial, because the same technology that is making it easier for people to publish their own books is also making it easier for them to explore new ways of finding, sharing, discussing and indeed emulating the books of others. (Ms James’s “Fifty Shades of Grey” started off as fan-fiction based on the characters of Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling “Twilight” books.) From online reviews to the world’s numerous literary festivals to all sorts of social media, writers are ever more aware of and available to their audiences. Ms Orlean says she was used to “writing into the void”, but now posts regularly about what she is working on. For her and others the contact seems like an opportunity. Others find it irksome. Most, probably, see it as a bit of both. But it is not going away. And it is not entirely new.

In Cicero’s day authors ready to launch their newest work would gather their friends at home or in a public hall for a spirited recitatio, or reading. Audiences would cry out when they liked a particular passage. Nervous authors enlisted their friends to lend support, and sometimes even filled seats with hired “clappers”. They were keenly aware of the importance of networking to get influential acquaintances to recommend their works to others. The creation of books started off as something both personal and social; the connection embodied in that dual nature is at the heart of what makes books so good at refining and advancing thought. It was just that the practicalities of publishing in the printing-press age made the personal connections a bit harder to see.

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Mimmo Capone

The newly restored reference room of the library at the American Academy in Rome

How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be?

No one knows, because the settlement is so complex that it is difficult to perceive the legal and economic contours in the new lay of the land. But those of us who are responsible for research libraries have a clear view of a common goal: we want to open up our collections and make them available to readers everywhere. How to get there? The only workable tactic may be vigilance: see as far ahead as you can; and while you keep your eye on the road, remember to look in the rearview mirror.

When I look backward, I fix my gaze on the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, its faith in the power of knowledge, and the world of ideas in which it operated—what the enlightened referred to as the Republic of Letters.

The eighteenth century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent. Anyone could join it by exercising the two main attributes of citizenship, writing and reading. Writers formulated ideas, and readers judged them. Thanks to the power of the printed word, the judgments spread in widening circles, and the strongest arguments won.

The word also spread by written letters, for the eighteenth century was a great era of epistolary exchange. Read through the correspondence of Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, and Jefferson—each filling about fifty volumes—and you can watch the Republic of Letters in operation. All four writers debated all the issues of their day in a steady stream of letters, which crisscrossed Europe and America in a transatlantic information network.

I especially enjoy the exchange of letters between Jefferson and Madison. They discussed everything, notably the American Constitution, which Madison was helping to write in Philadelphia while Jefferson was representing the new republic in Paris. They often wrote about books, for Jefferson loved to haunt the bookshops in the capital of the Republic of Letters, and he frequently bought books for his friend. The purchases included Diderot’s Encyclopédie , which Jefferson thought that he had got at a bargain price, although he had mistaken a reprint for a first edition.

Two future presidents discussing books through the information network of the Enlightenment—it’s a stirring sight. But before this picture of the past fogs over with sentiment, I should add that the Republic of Letters was democratic only in principle. In practice, it was dominated by the wellborn and the rich. Far from being able to live from their pens, most writers had to court patrons, solicit sinecures, lobby for appointments to state-controlled journals, dodge censors, and wangle their way into salons and academies, where reputations were made. While suffering indignities at the hands of their social superiors, they turned on one another. The quarrel between Voltaire and Rousseau illustrates their temper. After reading Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in 1755, Voltaire wrote to him, “I have received, Monsieur, your new book against the human race…. It makes one desire to go down on all fours.” Five years later, Rousseau wrote to Voltaire. “Monsieur,…I hate you.”

The personal conflicts were compounded by social distinctions. Far from functioning like an egalitarian agora, the Republic of Letters suffered from the same disease that ate through all societies in the eighteenth century: privilege. Privileges were not limited to aristocrats. In France, they applied to everything in the world of letters, including printing and the book trade, which were dominated by exclusive guilds, and the books themselves, which could not appear legally without a royal privilege and a censor’s approbation, printed in full in their text.

One way to understand this system is to draw on the sociology of knowledge, notably Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of literature as a power field composed of contending positions within the rules of a game that itself is subordinate to the dominating forces of society at large. But one needn’t subscribe to Bourdieu’s school of sociology in order to acknowledge the connections between literature and power. Seen from the perspective of the players, the realities of literary life contradicted the lofty ideals of the Enlightenment. Despite its principles, the Republic of Letters, as it actually operated, was a closed world, inaccessible to the underprivileged. Yet I want to invoke the Enlightenment in an argument for openness in general and for open access in particular.

If we turn from the eighteenth century to the present, do we see a similar contradiction between principle and practice—right here in the world of research libraries? One of my colleagues is a quiet, diminutive lady, who might call up the notion of Marion the Librarian. When she meets people at parties and identifies herself, they sometimes say condescendingly, “A librarian, how nice. Tell me, what is it like to be a librarian?” She replies, “Essentially, it is all about money and power.”

We are back with Pierre Bourdieu. Yet most of us would subscribe to the principles inscribed in prominent places in our public libraries. “Free To All,” it says above the main entrance to the Boston Public Library; and in the words of Thomas Jefferson, carved in gold letters on the wall of the Trustees’ Room of the New York Public Library: “I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.” We are back with the Enlightenment.

Our republic was founded on faith in the central principle of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters: the diffusion of light. For Jefferson, enlightenment took place by means of writers and readers, books and libraries—especially libraries, at Monticello, the University of Virginia, and the Library of Congress. This faith is embodied in the United States Constitution. Article 1, Section 8, establishes copyright and patents “for limited times” only and subject to the higher purpose of promoting “the progress of science and useful arts.” The Founding Fathers acknowledged authors’ rights to a fair return on their intellectual labor, but they put public welfare before private profit.

How to calculate the relative importance of those two values? As the authors of the Constitution knew, copyright was created in Great Britain by the Statute of Anne in 1710 for the purpose of curbing the monopolistic practices of the London Stationers’ Company and also, as its title proclaimed, “for the encouragement of learning.” At that time, Parliament set the length of copyright at fourteen years, renewable only once. The Stationers attempted to defend their monopoly of publishing and the book trade by arguing for perpetual copyright in a long series of court cases. But they lost in the definitive ruling of Donaldson v. Becket in 1774.

When the Americans gathered to draft a constitution thirteen years later, they generally favored the view that had predominated in Britain. Twenty-eight years seemed long enough to protect the interests of authors and publishers. Beyond that limit, the interest of the public should prevail. In 1790, the first copyright act—also dedicated to “the encouragement of learning”—followed British practice by adopting a limit of fourteen years renewable for another fourteen.

How long does copyright extend today? According to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (also known as “the Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” because Mickey was about to fall into the public domain), it lasts as long as the life of the author plus seventy years. In practice, that normally would mean more than a century. Most books published in the twentieth century have not yet entered the public domain. When it comes to digitization, access to our cultural heritage generally ends on January 1, 1923, the date from which great numbers of books are subject to copyright laws. It will remain there—unless private interests take over the digitizing, package it for consumers, tie the packages up by means of legal deals, and sell them for the profit of the shareholders. As things stand now, for example, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt , published in 1922, is in the public domain, whereas Lewis’s Elmer Gantry , published in 1927, will not enter the public domain until 2022. 1

To descend from the high principles of the Founding Fathers to the practices of the cultural industries today is to leave the realm of Enlightenment for the hurly-burly of corporate capitalism. If we turned the sociology of knowledge onto the present—as Bourdieu himself did—we would see that we live in a world designed by Mickey Mouse, red in tooth and claw.

Does this kind of reality check make the principles of Enlightenment look like a historical fantasy? Let’s reconsider the history. As the Enlightenment faded in the early nineteenth century, professionalization set in. You can follow the process by comparing the Encyclopédie of Diderot, which organized knowledge into an organic whole dominated by the faculty of reason, with its successor from the end of the eighteenth century, the Encyclopédie méthodique , which divided knowledge into fields that we can recognize today: chemistry, physics, history, mathematics, and the rest. In the nineteenth century, those fields turned into professions, certified by Ph.D.s and guarded by professional associations. They metamorphosed into departments of universities, and by the twentieth century they had left their mark on campuses—chemistry housed in this building, physics in that one, history here, mathematics there, and at the center of it all, a library, usually designed to look like a temple of learning.

Along the way, professional journals sprouted throughout the fields, subfields, and sub-subfields. The learned societies produced them, and the libraries bought them. This system worked well for about a hundred years. Then commercial publishers discovered that they could make a fortune by selling subscriptions to the journals. Once a university library subscribed, the students and professors came to expect an uninterrupted flow of issues. The price could be ratcheted up without causing cancellations, because the libraries paid for the subscriptions and the professors did not. Best of all, the professors provided free or nearly free labor. They wrote the articles, refereed submissions, and served on editorial boards, partly to spread knowledge in the Enlightenment fashion, but mainly to advance their own careers.

The result stands out on the acquisitions budget of every research library: the Journal of Comparative Neurology now costs $25,910 for a year’s subscription; Tetrahedron costs $17,969 (or $39,739, if bundled with related publications as a Tetrahedron package); the average price of a chemistry journal is $3,490; and the ripple effects have damaged intellectual life throughout the world of learning. Owing to the skyrocketing cost of serials, libraries that used to spend 50 percent of their acquisitions budget on monographs now spend 25 percent or less. University presses, which depend on sales to libraries, cannot cover their costs by publishing monographs. And young scholars who depend on publishing to advance their careers are now in danger of perishing.

The book-scanning project at the British Library, London, which received funding from Microsoft until that company discontinued its book digitization program last May

Fortunately, this picture of the hard facts of life in the world of learning is already going out of date. Biologists, chemists, and physicists no longer live in separate worlds; nor do historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars. The old map of the campus no longer corresponds to the activities of the professors and students. It is being redrawn everywhere, and in many places the interdisciplinary designs are turning into structures. The library remains at the heart of things, but it pumps nutrition throughout the university, and often to the farthest reaches of cyberspace, by means of electronic networks.

The eighteenth-century Republic of Letters had been transformed into a professional Republic of Learning, and it is now open to amateurs—amateurs in the best sense of the word, lovers of learning among the general citizenry. Openness is operating everywhere, thanks to “open access” repositories of digitized articles available free of charge, the Open Content Alliance, the Open Knowledge Commons, OpenCourseWare, the Internet Archive, and openly amateur enterprises like Wikipedia. The democratization of knowledge now seems to be at our fingertips. We can make the Enlightenment ideal come to life in reality.

At this point, you may suspect that I have swung from one American genre, the jeremiad, to another, utopian enthusiasm. It might be possible, I suppose, for the two to work together as a dialectic, were it not for the danger of commercialization. When businesses like Google look at libraries, they do not merely see temples of learning. They see potential assets or what they call “content,” ready to be mined. Built up over centuries at an enormous expenditure of money and labor, library collections can be digitized en masse at relatively little cost—millions of dollars, certainly, but little compared to the investment that went into them.

Libraries exist to promote a public good: “the encouragement of learning,” learning “Free To All.” Businesses exist in order to make money for their shareholders—and a good thing, too, for the public good depends on a profitable economy. Yet if we permit the commercialization of the content of our libraries, there is no getting around a fundamental contradiction. To digitize collections and sell the product in ways that fail to guarantee wide access would be to repeat the mistake that was made when publishers exploited the market for scholarly journals, but on a much greater scale, for it would turn the Internet into an instrument for privatizing knowledge that belongs in the public sphere. No invisible hand would intervene to correct the imbalance between the private and the public welfare. Only the public can do that, but who speaks for the public? Not the legislators of the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

You cannot legislate Enlightenment, but you can set rules of the game to protect the public interest. Libraries represent the public good. They are not businesses, but they must cover their costs. They need a business plan. Think of the old motto of Con Edison when it had to tear up New York’s streets in order to get at the infrastructure beneath them: “Dig we must.” Libraries say, “Digitize we must.” But not on any terms. We must do it in the interest of the public, and that means holding the digitizers responsible to the citizenry.

It would be naive to identify the Internet with the Enlightenment. It has the potential to diffuse knowledge beyond anything imagined by Jefferson; but while it was being constructed, link by hyperlink, commercial interests did not sit idly on the sidelines. They want to control the game, to take it over, to own it. They compete among themselves, of course, but so ferociously that they kill each other off. Their struggle for survival is leading toward an oligopoly; and whoever may win, the victory could mean a defeat for the public good.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that businesses must be responsible to shareholders. I believe that authors are entitled to payment for their creative labor and that publishers deserve to make money from the value they add to the texts supplied by authors. I admire the wizardry of hardware, software, search engines, digitization, and algorithmic relevance ranking. I acknowledge the importance of copyright, although I think that Congress got it better in 1790 than in 1998.

But we, too, cannot sit on the sidelines, as if the market forces can be trusted to operate for the public good. We need to get engaged, to mix it up, and to win back the public’s rightful domain. When I say “we,” I mean we the people, we who created the Constitution and who should make the Enlightenment principles behind it inform the everyday realities of the information society. Yes, we must digitize. But more important, we must democratize. We must open access to our cultural heritage. How? By rewriting the rules of the game, by subordinating private interests to the public good, and by taking inspiration from the early republic in order to create a Digital Republic of Learning.

What provoked these jeremianic- utopian reflections? Google. Four years ago, Google began digitizing books from research libraries, providing full-text searching and making books in the public domain available on the Internet at no cost to the viewer. For example, it is now possible for anyone, anywhere to view and download a digital copy of the 1871 first edition of Middlemarch that is in the collection of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Everyone profited, including Google, which collected revenue from some discreet advertising attached to the service, Google Book Search. Google also digitized an ever-increasing number of library books that were protected by copyright in order to provide search services that displayed small snippets of the text. In September and October 2005, a group of authors and publishers brought a class action suit against Google, alleging violation of copyright. Last October 28, after lengthy negotiations, the opposing parties announced agreement on a settlement, which is subject to approval by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. 2

The settlement creates an enterprise known as the Book Rights Registry to represent the interests of the copyright holders. Google will sell access to a gigantic data bank composed primarily of copyrighted, out-of-print books digitized from the research libraries. Colleges, universities, and other organizations will be able to subscribe by paying for an “institutional license” providing access to the data bank. A “public access license” will make this material available to public libraries, where Google will provide free viewing of the digitized books on one computer terminal. And individuals also will be able to access and print out digitized versions of the books by purchasing a “consumer license” from Google, which will cooperate with the registry for the distribution of all the revenue to copyright holders. Google will retain 37 percent, and the registry will distribute 63 percent among the rightsholders.

Meanwhile, Google will continue to make books in the public domain available for users to read, download, and print, free of charge. Of the seven million books that Google reportedly had digitized by November 2008, one million are works in the public domain; one million are in copyright and in print; and five million are in copyright but out of print. It is this last category that will furnish the bulk of the books to be made available through the institutional license.

Many of the in-copyright and in-print books will not be available in the data bank unless the copyright owners opt to include them. They will continue to be sold in the normal fashion as printed books and also could be marketed to individual customers as digitized copies, accessible through the consumer license for downloading and reading, perhaps eventually on e-book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle.

After reading the settlement and letting its terms sink in—no easy task, as it runs to 134 pages and 15 appendices of legalese—one is likely to be dumbfounded: here is a proposal that could result in the world’s largest library. It would, to be sure, be a digital library, but it could dwarf the Library of Congress and all the national libraries of Europe. Moreover, in pursuing the terms of the settlement with the authors and publishers, Google could also become the world’s largest book business—not a chain of stores but an electronic supply service that could out-Amazon Amazon.

An enterprise on such a scale is bound to elicit reactions of the two kinds that I have been discussing: on the one hand, utopian enthusiasm; on the other, jeremiads about the danger of concentrating power to control access to information.

Who could not be moved by the prospect of bringing virtually all the books from America’s greatest research libraries within the reach of all Americans, and perhaps eventually to everyone in the world with access to the Internet? Not only will Google’s technological wizardry bring books to readers, it will also open up extraordinary opportunities for research, a whole gamut of possibilities from straightforward word searches to complex text mining. Under certain conditions, the participating libraries will be able to use the digitized copies of their books to create replacements for books that have been damaged or lost. Google will engineer the texts in ways to help readers with disabilities.

Unfortunately, Google’s commitment to provide free access to its database on one terminal in every public library is hedged with restrictions: readers will not be able to print out any copyrighted text without paying a fee to the copyright holders (though Google has offered to pay them at the outset); and a single terminal will hardly satisfy the demand in large libraries. But Google’s generosity will be a boon to the small-town, Carnegie-library readers, who will have access to more books than are currently available in the New York Public Library. Google can make the Enlightenment dream come true.

But will it? The eighteenth-century philosophers saw monopoly as a main obstacle to the diffusion of knowledge —not merely monopolies in general, which stifled trade according to Adam Smith and the Physiocrats, but specific monopolies such as the Stationers’ Company in London and the booksellers’ guild in Paris, which choked off free trade in books.

Google is not a guild, and it did not set out to create a monopoly. On the contrary, it has pursued a laudable goal: promoting access to information. But the class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition. Most book authors and publishers who own US copyrights are automatically covered by the settlement. They can opt out of it; but whatever they do, no new digitizing enterprise can get off the ground without winning their assent one by one, a practical impossibility, or without becoming mired down in another class action suit. If approved by the court—a process that could take as much as two years—the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States.

This outcome was not anticipated at the outset. Looking back over the course of digitization from the 1990s, we now can see that we missed a great opportunity. Action by Congress and the Library of Congress or a grand alliance of research libraries supported by a coalition of foundations could have done the job at a feasible cost and designed it in a manner that would have put the public interest first. By spreading the cost in various ways—a rental based on the amount of use of a database or a budget line in the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Library of Congress—we could have provided authors and publishers with a legitimate income, while maintaining an open access repository or one in which access was based on reasonable fees. We could have created a National Digital Library—the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. It is too late now. Not only have we failed to realize that possibility, but, even worse, we are allowing a question of public policy—the control of access to information—to be determined by private lawsuit.

While the public authorities slept, Google took the initiative. It did not seek to settle its affairs in court. It went about its business, scanning books in libraries; and it scanned them so effectively as to arouse the appetite of others for a share in the potential profits. No one should dispute the claim of authors and publishers to income from rights that properly belong to them; nor should anyone presume to pass quick judgment on the contending parties of the lawsuit. The district court judge will pronounce on the validity of the settlement, but that is primarily a matter of dividing profits, not of promoting the public interest.

As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information. Google has no serious competitors. Microsoft dropped its major program to digitize books several months ago, and other enterprises like the Open Knowledge Commons (formerly the Open Content Alliance) and the Internet Archive are minute and ineffective in comparison with Google. Google alone has the wealth to digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire class of authors and publishers. No new entrepreneurs will be able to digitize books within that fenced-off territory, even if they could afford it, because they would have to fight the copyright battles all over again. If the settlement is upheld by the court, only Google will be protected from copyright liability.

Google’s record suggests that it will not abuse its double-barreled fiscal-legal power. But what will happen if its current leaders sell the company or retire? The public will discover the answer from the prices that the future Google charges, especially the price of the institutional subscription licenses. The settlement leaves Google free to negotiate deals with each of its clients, although it announces two guiding principles: “(1) the realization of revenue at market rates for each Book and license on behalf of the Rightsholders and (2) the realization of broad access to the Books by the public, including institutions of higher education.”

What will happen if Google favors profitability over access? Nothing, if I read the terms of the settlement correctly. Only the registry, acting for the copyright holders, has the power to force a change in the subscription prices charged by Google, and there is no reason to expect the registry to object if the prices are too high. Google may choose to be generous in it pricing, and I have reason to hope it may do so; but it could also employ a strategy comparable to the one that proved to be so effective in pushing up the price of scholarly journals: first, entice subscribers with low initial rates, and then, once they are hooked, ratchet up the rates as high as the traffic will bear.

Free-market advocates may argue that the market will correct itself. If Google charges too much, customers will cancel their subscriptions, and the price will drop. But there is no direct connection between supply and demand in the mechanism for the institutional licenses envisioned by the settlement. Students, faculty, and patrons of public libraries will not pay for the subscriptions. The payment will come from the libraries; and if the libraries fail to find enough money for the subscription renewals, they may arouse ferocious protests from readers who have become accustomed to Google’s service. In the face of the protests, the libraries probably will cut back on other services, including the acquisition of books, just as they did when publishers ratcheted up the price of periodicals.

No one can predict what will happen. We can only read the terms of the settlement and guess about the future. If Google makes available, at a reasonable price, the combined holdings of all the major US libraries, who would not applaud? Would we not prefer a world in which this immense corpus of digitized books is accessible, even at a high price, to one in which it did not exist?

Perhaps, but the settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company. Apart from Wikipedia, Google already controls the means of access to information online for most Americans, whether they want to find out about people, goods, places, or almost anything. In addition to the original “Big Google,” we have Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Images, Google Labs, Google Finance, Google Arts, Google Food, Google Sports, Google Health, Google Checkout, Google Alerts, and many more Google enterprises on the way. Now Google Book Search promises to create the largest library and the largest book business that have ever existed.

Whether or not I have understood the settlement correctly, its terms are locked together so tightly that they cannot be pried apart. At this point, neither Google, nor the authors, nor the publishers, nor the district court is likely to modify the settlement substantially. Yet this is also a tipping point in the development of what we call the information society. If we get the balance wrong at this moment, private interests may outweigh the public good for the foreseeable future, and the Enlightenment dream may be as elusive as ever.

February 12, 2009

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Digitization promised to democratize learning, and despite countervailing forces the trend is toward more open access. But is an ‘Alexandria in the cloud’ really an open sesame?

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Robert Darnton’s latest book is The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789. He is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian Emeritus at Harvard. (December 2023)

The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 retroactively lengthened copyright by twenty years for books copyrighted after January 1, 1923. Unfortunately, the copyright status of books published in the twentieth century is complicated by legislation that has extended copyright eleven times during the last fifty years. Until a congressional act of 1992, rightsholders had to renew their copyrights. The 1992 act removed that requirement for books published between 1964 and 1977, when, according to the Copyright Act of 1976, their copyrights would last for the author’s life plus fifty years. The act of 1998 extended that protection to the author’s life plus seventy years. Therefore, all books published after 1963 remain in copyright, and an unknown number—unknown owing to inadequate information about the deaths of authors and the owners of copyright—published between 1923 and 1964 are also protected by copyright. See Paul A. David and Jared Rubin, “Restricting Access to Books on the Internet: Some Unanticipated Effects of U.S. Copyright Legislation,” Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues , Vol. 5, No. 1 (2008).  ↩

The full text of the settlement can be found at www.googlebooksettlement.com/agreement.html . For Google’s legal notice concerning the settlement, see page 35 of this issue of The New York Review .  ↩

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AI and the Future of Literary Studies

Compare the following two paragraphs. One is a mission statement for a university in regional Australia. The other is generated by AI from the prompt ‘write a mission statement for university based in Australia, with a regional focus’.

• Our innovation and excellence in both education and research generate ideas that transform lives and communities. We will be the region’s most progressive and responsive university, leading in blending digital capability with our distinctive campus precincts. We will leverage strong partnerships to maximise the social, cultural and economic impact we deliver regionally, nationally, and globally.
• Our university is dedicated to providing quality education with a regional focus. We strive to prepare our students to become responsible citizens who positively impact their communities, while also fostering a sense of global awareness. Our goal is to produce graduates who are well-rounded, critical thinkers with the skills necessary to succeed in an ever-changing world.

Which was written by AI, and which by humans?

At least to my ears, the first statement sounds less human. While the terms ‘innovation’ and ‘excellence’ are thrown around a lot in universities – and normally in ways that obfuscate meaningful goals or projects – their use here feels to me at best only life- like . It seems improbable that university managers would be so tin-eared as to take these words straight out of senior team meetings and put them into a mission statement that is meant to speak to students, faculty, staff, politicians, and the wider public.

I pause too over the phrase ‘distinctive campus precincts’. Even though this phrase makes a claim for difference (‘distinctive’), it in fact has no place or history. It is what you might say if, like a machine, you did not have a felt sense of where your university is and what distinguishes it. The two tricolons (‘social, cultural and economic impact’; ‘deliver regionally, nationally, and globally’) similarly feel drawn from the dream-like archive of management rhetoric. The university is to be all things to everyone all at once – and, conversely, it is to commit to nothing at all.

By contrast, the second statement is more direct. The first sentence indicates what the university actually does: it gives students from the region access to education. The second sentence, while certainly more in the idiom of the mission statement than the previous, is bolder than any of the sentences contained in that first statement. Regional universities are responsible both to their communities and the wider world, and we can imagine that a mission statement might reflect these humble yet bold aims. The final sentence is more rote again, with its focus on well-rounded and critical thinkers for an ‘ever-changing world’. But it is still a clear and even laudable aim for a regional university to seek to translate from the local to the global.

Reading this second statement over, I realise that this is the university that I would rather work for. It is focused on the student as a person (‘well-rounded, critical thinkers’). This is what I want out of my classroom, as I help my students from all variety of backgrounds to be wider readers, clearer thinkers, and more engaged citizens of the world they are entering. After having encountered real students in the second statement, I am led to realise just how absent they are from the first. The human element of education has disappeared behind robotic claims about the institution’s ‘social, cultural, and economic impact’. There are no people teaching, learning, or researching here.

As you may have guessed by now, it is in fact the second statement that is generated entirely by AI. My only intervention was to remove the phrase ‘in Australia’, from its opening sentence. The first statement, on the other hand, is how a large regional university in Australia  phrases its ‘ambition’ in its ‘strategic plan’. The robotic here has come about naturally, as it were, without machine input.

We have long presumed that writing is one of the most human of activities, that it is one of the least available to machine replication. For many of us, it feels as close to the heart as love is – and machines cannot love. Certainly, some of the greatest accounts of human creativity encourage us to think this way. In The Prelude , William Wordsworth feels a ‘mild creative breeze’ passing over him, which soon becomes ‘a tempest, a redundant energy / Vexing its own creation’. This ‘storm’, as he describes it, breaks up the ‘long-continued frost’ of his existence and expression, bringing with it the promise of a new spring. ‘The hope of active days, of dignity and thought’ are opened up to him, a dream of ‘Pure passions, virtue, knowledge, and delight, / The holy life of music and of verse’. In this moment of profound breakthrough, he pours his ‘Song’ out into the open fields and finds his soul tumbling out with it. ‘Great hopes were mine,’ he writes, ‘My own voice cheared me, and, far more, the mind’s / Internal echo of the imperfect sound’.

Yet generative AI calls into question much that we think we know about the relationship between writing and the self. Or, to put it more precisely, generative AI surfaces the extent to which language is a set of patterns, ones that though they may be invisible to us, can in fact be recognised by a machine when trained on an unimaginably large corpus. In our own learning, we have internalised from childhood the rules of a human language – a ‘mother tongue’ – until we have now forgotten that we are operating by any rules at all. It often feels uncanny how generative AI recognizes which words are most likely to follow others, as it identifies patterns and then predicts them.

The result is a synthesis that fools us into feeling that it is drawn from life. In the two vision statements I quoted, GPT3 calls on the corpus of the internet to find the language likely to be used here. There will be phrases about students, communities, impact, critical thought, and the constancy of change. The fact that the first statement – that is, the genuine one –  is so out of step with wider patterns might be enough to give us pause. Innovation, excellence, digital capability, and partnerships turn out to be the unusual fixation of this ‘distinctive campus precinct’.

The synthetic qualities of AI-produced language recall an approach to creativity in literary thought that is dramatically different from Wordsworth’s (and indeed from most of my students’). This view, which can now only gain greater currency, radicalises skepticism about human rationality and assumes that authors are not, in effect, in control of what they write. Wordsworth’s image of attempting to listen to the ‘internal echo’ of his imperfect expression gestures in this direction: even when the muse is upon him, finding his true poetic voice remains an immense struggle. The arguments against intention span very different intellectual projects and histories, from Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay on what they call ‘the intentional fallacy’ to Roland Barthes, for whom texts have ‘no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.’

Most famous of all – and, as it happens, most congenial to generative AI – is Jacques Derrida’s dictum, ‘ il n’y a pas de hors-texte ’, translated by Gayatri Spivak as ‘there is nothing outside the text’. This phrase has been treated as emblematic of the anti-humanism of poststructural thinkers, as they leave us as little more than automatons swimming around in a sea of language. Michel Foucault concluded that Derrida was granting ‘the voice of the masters […] unlimited sovereignty’ to ‘indefinitely […] resay the text’. Much of this dispute has now been resolved via synthesis: there may be nothing outside ‘the text’, it seems, but ‘the text’ has been taken to mean all discourse, and all that shapes it – economics and power. In this version, ‘there is nothing outside the text’ is more akin to ‘nothing is non-textual’, as Leslie Hill has it. For generative AI, of course, there is indeed nothing outside the text and nothing is non-textual – it is just that ‘the text’ is everything that has been written and put on the internet.

By contrast, human learning draws on everything we have available to us –   our senses, experience, and language – and is shaped by and expressed through neurobiology. Nowhere are the consequences of the distinction between human and machine learning clearer than when AI begins to hallucinate. I asked GPT3 to ‘write a paragraph explaining the meaning of the armadillo in Elizabeth Bishop’s “ The Armadillo ”’:

In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘The Armadillo,’ the armadillo serves as a symbol of transience and the fleeting nature of life. The poem describes a funeral procession for an armadillo that has been hit by a car, drawing attention to the animal’s vulnerability and mortality. Through the use of imagery and metaphor, Bishop explores the idea that death is an inevitable part of life, and that everything, no matter how seemingly tough or impermeable, will eventually pass away. The armadillo’s armour-like exterior, which serves as a protective barrier in life, becomes a metaphor for the fragility of life itself. Ultimately, the armadillo in ‘The Armadillo’ represents the transience of all living things and serves as a reminder of the ephemeral nature of existence.

Those who know the poem are likely to laugh at this reading: Bishop’s marvellous account of watching fire balloons rising on a saint’s day in Brazil is in no way about a funeral procession for an animal hit by a car. There is no car and the armadillo is fine. Neither does Bishop use the armadillo to reflect on ephemerality and fragility – in fact, quite the opposite. Yet GPT3’s missteps are symptomatic, as they surface patterns of language that are hidden from us, ones that operate both locally and at a colossal level of abstraction.

GPT3 associates armadillos with a car accident because of the many articles on the internet, especially from the United States, in which the creatures are mentioned in relation to collisions and tyre punctures. ‘ Spend a few months careering around Texas roads, and odds are you’ll encounter an armadillo or two. These small, armored creatures look like something out of a science fiction story, or a throwback from prehistoric times’, says one website. The armadillo only comes up once in Bishop’s poem, and there are few close readings available online. . As a consequence, GPT3 draws on the patterns it knows – armadillos have armour and are hit by cars – to fill in the gaps.

More interesting again is GPT3’s mastery of high school poetry blather. It has recognised that a work of literature is under discussion, so it draws on the terms and phrases that are likely to be used in this context. The main sources for these materials are websites aimed at helping students with their high school literature examinations. This example features the basics of poetry analysis (‘imagery’; ‘metaphor’) fused with reflections on mortality and the passing away of all things. The pattern here is one that teachers of literary studies are unlikely to want to acknowledge: when poetry comes up, students are rewarded for switching to a language of high seriousness. It is this very pastiche element of GPT3’s account of the poem – it feels like poetry analysis, but it does not know anything about either the poem or the human experience it describes – that makes this writing simultaneously so right and wrong. All poems, it seems, must be about something profound and devastating, rather than about having a nice sandwich – or indeed bottle of Coke.

Much of what literary scholars do when we teach is behave in the manner of an academic discussing books intelligently, demonstrating to students the language that they should then use to discuss literature, the sensibility that they should internalize and then reproduce if they too want to be the right kind of attentive reader. Exemplaris : the modelling of how to do something, the giving of an example, is one of the oldest ideas of what it means to be an educator. Reading over GPT3’s account of the poem is in that sense oddly familiar. The feeling is akin to reading a student essay that is attempting too hard to be ‘academic’, right down to the heavy-handed pursuit of death and mortality. Terms proliferate but meaning is deferred; plausible sentences appear but understanding is not to be found. In GPT3’s poetry analysis, I feel as though I am drowning in a sea of discourse, unreal and endlessly productive.

Where generative AI is especially weak, though, is where it comes up against that which cannot be synthesized out of discourse itself. The armadillo has a meaning that is more specific than generalized poetry blather allows. In the absence of online resources, and short of actually understanding the poem, the AI identifies patterns that are not true and then confidently parrots them. It is a kind of accelerated ‘topic modelling’ familiar from digital research, but without the hand editing, safety checks, and indeed the knowledge, that together lend this approach legitimacy.

All of which brings me back to university mission statements. Of course, they too are their own kind of pastiche, in this case drawn down from the global spectral unconscious of management rhetoric. Just like my students learning how to discuss literature, university leaders at some stage had to figure out how to speak as though they were competent managers, until they too could confidently reproduce the language of strategy, vision, partnerships, leverage, stakeholders, and so on. Yet, unlike my students interpreting poetry, they  are not limited by the reality principle. In fact, it is more than that: management-speak cannot survive reality because it is designed to shield its speakers from it. This is normally its strength.

One of the most important early archives for research into natural language processing was the Enron email corpus (which is available for download and manipulation by data scientists). After the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission finished its investigation of how the company came to collapse so spectacularly in 2001, it decided that it was in the public interest to make the materials widely accessible online. The emails show that weeks before the company’s failure, executives were telling each other that the firm was not only in good shape but that it would break all profit expectations. These cheery despatches from the frictionless world of make-believe were structured in and by the language of corporate confidence. The communications are in that sense much more than lies: they are testaments to a language of pure fantasy. Truth departed the scene and executives limitlessly remixed each other’s stories. When reality eventually intruded on these witless leaders – much too late, and not as a consequence of anyone at Enron telling the truth – the discourse collapsed.

The Enron emails are still present as ghosts in the machine of AI text generation. In all applied computational research, one of the central issues is how to gain access to high quality and machine-readable data. After the emails were made publicly available, AI researchers had at their disposal an enormous archive of people writing in natural language in a workplace setting. It was an irresistible opportunity. The 1.6 million emails have long been the dataset of choice for natural language processing projects. In other words, the most significant material on which natural language processing was based was the trail left behind from the largest bankruptcy in American corporate history at the time. Crucially, the archive is from the period leading up to the collapse. This was a period of such remarkable wrongdoing that Enron’s CEO and COO, along with numerous other executives from the firm, were found guilty of multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy. One of the world’s largest corporate audit firms, Arthur Andersen, had its CPA licence revoked in the aftermath.

Where GPT3 is strongest is precisely in this realm of make-believe, where things cannot be tested or known. Think of it as a firm that is bankrupt and trading but that never collapses – Enron without the Wall Street Journal . Il n’y a pas de hors-texte , it turns out, is true not so much for literary writing and its interpretation, but for the forms of expression that were never more than synthetic in the first place. This is why large language models perform so much more believably when they attempt to pastiche university mission statements and other corporate dejecta than when they attempt to read poems. Such statements are already pastiches that cannot survive outside the entirely internal world of their own discourse. They can be mimicked effortlessly because they ultimately refer to no reality, to nothing concrete, nothing that is meaningfully there . It is language all the way down. In fact, that is their point.

If this is a surprising place to arrive – the suggestion that poetry is real and testable, while university mission statements are not – it is also one that gives a new relevance to the discipline in which I have spent my career working. Generative AI writes convincing bullshit at a speed never seen before. It is a firehose of discourse, university mission statements until the end of time. The patience to understand what words actually mean, where they come from, what value they might have, and whether something is true or simply feels true – these are skills that can only become more significant when anyone can make a machine say anything.

As we move into a new era of writing, the archive of training data and neural patterns available to generative AI will become nearly limitless. While AI system designers will attempt to ensure that large language models are trained solely on human-generated content, there will be limitations to such efforts – not least because humans will use AI to write text that they will then lightly edit. AI text will be internalized by AI models, tending toward what John Barth described in the 1960s as a funhouse of language. More and more and more and more, endless distortions and reflections of each other, turned around and put back online and back into the model, forever. The result will not be consciousness, but rather, and very literally, internet brain, operating at extreme speed.

By contrast, the domain of literary thought remains resolutely human. Language, at least as I explore it in my classroom, is a way of understanding the world and ourselves. It is drawn from what we think, feel, and know: the place where the human contacts reality and attempts to account for it in words. Standing at the front of my class, working through a poem by Sylvia Plath with my students, I will continue to introduce young people to a world of thought and feeling that they have only just begun to understand, to read . It is this space where we become something other than machines maximising our ‘social, cultural and economic impact’. As absurd and naïve as this might sound, it is in this space of teaching where my students find their ownvoices, as opposed to that which has already been prepared for them by a world only too keen to make them ‘resay the text’.

As academic literary studies faces the challenge of generative AI, we should focus on what this kind of teaching has done well in one form or another for over a century: help students to encounter the good, the beautiful, and the true, and learn how to understand texts, themselves, and the world. For far too long we have accepted the parameters defined by our managers, spun and remixed from the top offices of our ‘distinctive campus precincts’. However, it has only become clearer how inimical the forms of value explored in literary studies are to management discourse – a discourse that, like AI, cannot recognise literary values as in any way distinctive. In our universities, costs have been driven down, and academics have been made to offer less and less to our students, and the fundamental human engagement that is at the heart of literary pedagogy has been circumscribed.

Assessment, of course, will have to change. The academic essay will no longer be the sine qua non of examination in university literature departments. It is too easy for students to synthesise material through AI and there will be limited evidence that they have genuinely learnt anything. While there are some situations where it might be appropriate to go back to pen and paper, if the purpose is simply to police students then we are doing both them and our disciplines a disservice. The gains to academic ‘integrity’ would come at the cost of making the examination process ever more artificial and removed from what our students will do as graduates. The written exam does little to help with developing a long-term practice of writing as thinking, as it instead promotes regurgitation. Moreover, in years to come, our graduates will be writing and reading in an environment permeated with AI. Microsoft has invested US $10 billion in OpenAI: its major products, from Word to Outlook to Teams, will soon incorporate the technology as standard. Our students will have the option to reduce the level of AI assistance, but for much of what they do a high level of autopiloting will not only be acceptable but preferable. Unless it is truly integral to the assessment that students write without external inputs, returning to pen and paper can only be a temporary measure until faculties figure out a coherent response.

When I first presented some of the ideas in this essay, a colleague suggested that generative AI now makes it possible to complete university study without reading, writing, or thinking. I said, ‘yes, but how truly different is that to now?’ Essays have been preferred in the mass university because they are scalable and cheap to assess, not necessarily because they reflect good pedagogy. I have found that all too often, the outcomes of such assessments do not reflect classroom dynamics, nor reward genuine engagement and understanding. As I tally up marks at the end of term, this is often a source of frustration to me. We can now change that.

There are any number of better options available to us right now than rounds of submitted essays. We can actually test the skills that we think we are helping students to gain through their educations – ‘authentic assessment’, as contemporary edu-speak has it. In my courses, for example, I want my students to be able to read poems and passages drawn from the course theme and to discuss them coherently. Among other things, they should be able to situate course materials in wider contexts, both historical and theoretical. These activities are what they will do when they become professionals, literary or not, and it is what they will do with books for the rest of their lives. I want my courses to feature a range of assessment options, such as: short student presentations on passages or poems followed by questions and answer from me; video reports with voiceover and creatively chosen images; creative extensions of course materials with elements of reflection and exegesis integrated; and, yes, an end of course essay. These essays, though, will be based more on research that the students have done than has previously been the norm. I will expect my students to argue for something, to show me something new. I will help them to get there by working with them on abstracts and drafts. All of these options support extended and long-term development processes – which are in their own ways forms of writing.

What is holding us back from a better teaching and learning paradigm is the cost cutting that has been rife in universities over the last few decades. Teaching students and assessing them in genuine ways is expensive. Innovative assessment strategies will only be possible with meaningful support from the university – the same institution that is of course hoping to return the ‘efficiency gains’ of AI to itself rather than to its students. The structure of the Australian university system does not make me hopeful on these fronts: our institutions have systematically diverted their resources away from students and researchers and towards administration. The NTEU reports that in the last three years, Australian higher education workers have been underpaid by $83.4 million, and a series of wage theft claims are still dragging through court.  Meanwhile, administrators have hired ever more provosts and deans, while also giving themselves large pay rises. Unless we struggle against it, it is likely that efficiency gains from AI will simply end up in the pockets of university leaders.

The biggest challenge of generative AI is hence less a matter of whether students will still want to learn to read books, talk about them, understand themselves, and even write. They will, in whatever form, for the duration of my lifetime anyway. The challenge is that academics have next to no power over how the university uses its resources. In a moment when it is harder than ever to tell if an actual human has read something, much less understood it, we should demand again to connect meaningfully with our students. We can ask them: what do you know about this poem and how did you come to know it? How do you understand this passage in the context of the literary tradition we are helping you to encounter? How does this novel think? Explain it to us. Help us to see it. Think with us and think again – but this time for yourself.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel,  History of Madness , ed. by Jean Khalfa, trans. by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (New York: Routledge, 2006)

Hill, Leslie,  The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida , Cambridge Introductions to Literature (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Wordsworth, William,  The Major Works , ed. by Stephen Charles Gill, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford [England] ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Andrew Dean is Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Victoria. In 2021,...

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Jeanine Leane gets under the skin of the diversity and inclusion mythscape in creative writing programs.

Gender and Power  

Fire dragon feminist Quah Ee Ling dissects the banalization of gender equity and diversity initiatives in academic and corporate spaces – initiatives that often fail to break out of a pernicious binary logic.

• The Cult of Creativity by Samuel W. Franklin The University of Chicago Press 264pp Published April 2023 ISBN 9780226657851
• Passionate Work: Endurance after the Good Life by Renyi Hong Duke University Press 248pp Published May 2022 ISBN 9781478018223
• Confidence Culture by Shani Orgad, Rosalind Gill Duke University Press 256pp Published February 2022 ISBN 9781478017608

Neoliberal Keywords: Creative, Passionate, Confident

Iana Robitaille reviews three books which ‘provide historical context for some of neoliberalism’s most persistent idioms: grit, resilience, initiative, innovation, positive mindset, and self-improvement’.

ieltstution

Let"s Crack IELTS

Essay 10: Ebooks – Advantages and Disadvantages

With the rise of Ebooks comes the decline of paper books. Some people see this as a good step forward while others do not. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this trend?

Sample response 1.

Over the past decade, technology has revolutionized almost every walk of life. One such innovation has been Ebooks which are increasingly becoming popular and replacing paper-based books. Many considered it a positive development because of the convenience they offer and environment-friendliness; however, there are others who deem the trend negative because of harmful effects on health and difficulty in maintaining focus for the reader.

The foremost benefit of electronic books is that they are extremely easy to handle and carry. For instance, one can store hundreds of books on his tablet or smartphone, and travel while reading comfortably without facing the hassle of lifting heavy books. In addition to that, these books are contributing to efforts to tackle climate change. Papers that are used in conventional books are made from wood, and have over the years, led to massive deforestation. With digital books becoming popular, a significant drop of 23% in deforestation has been noted over the past decade, as indicated by a report published in Daily Times.

However, there are drawbacks to this trend of using digital copies over paper ones. One major demerit is that such books affect readers’ visual health adversely. That is to say, if a reader is exposed to a screen for an extended duration, he may develop eyesight issues because of excessive exposure to ultraviolet radiation. Additionally, it is also a fact that reading a book on a smart gadget, for instance, a smartphone comes with numerous distractions from social media and other applications. On the contrary, paper-based books are neither associated with eyesight issues, nor any distractions.

To conclude, there are a few disadvantages of e-books like distractions from social media applications and harmful effects on eyesight; but them being pro-environment and easy to carry, they are attracting more people every passing day.

Sample Response 2

In recent years, Ebooks have gained immense popularity, and this has led to a decline in the demand for paper books. While some individuals perceive this as a positive development, others view it as negative. This essay will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the trend toward e-books.

On the one hand, Ebooks offer several benefits over traditional paper books. Firstly, they are more convenient and portable. With e-books, one can carry an entire library with them on a single device, whereas with paper books, it is not possible to carry more than a few books at a time. Secondly, e-books are often cheaper than paper books, making them more accessible to a wider range of readers. Additionally, e-books are more environmentally friendly, as they do not require paper or ink and do not contribute to deforestation or pollution.

On the other hand, the decline of paper books has some disadvantages. Firstly, many people still prefer the tactile experience of reading a physical book, as they enjoy the smell and feel of the pages. Secondly, some people argue that e-books do not offer the same level of engagement as paper books, as the lack of physical presence can make it difficult for readers to connect with the story. Finally, the shift towards e-books could lead to the closure of traditional bookstores and libraries, which are important cultural institutions in many communities.

In conclusion, the rise of Ebooks has both advantages and disadvantages. While e-books offer greater convenience, affordability, and environmental benefits, they may lack the same level of engagement and cultural significance as paper books. It is up to individuals to decide which format they prefer and to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of each. Ultimately, the shift towards e-books is a reflection of the changing nature of reading habits and technological advancements in the digital age.

Sample Response 3

In recent years, the popularity of Ebooks has grown exponentially, leading to a decline in the use of paper books. While some individuals view this trend as a positive step forward, others are more skeptical. In this essay, I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this trend.

On the one hand, Ebooks offer several advantages over traditional paper books. First and foremost, e-books are more convenient to carry around. With a tablet or e-reader, individuals can have access to an entire library of books in one compact device. This portability allows individuals to read books on the go, without having to carry around heavy paper books. Additionally, e-books are often more affordable than paper books, which is a significant advantage for those on a tight budget. Finally, e-books are more environmentally friendly than paper books, as they require no physical paper or ink.

On the other hand, there are also several disadvantages to the rise of e-books. Perhaps the most significant disadvantage is the impact that e-books can have on physical bookstores. As more and more individuals switch to Ebooks, physical bookstores may struggle to stay afloat. Additionally, e-books require a significant initial investment, as individuals need to purchase an e-reader or tablet. While the cost of e-books may be lower in the long run, this initial investment can be a barrier for some individuals. Finally, some individuals argue that reading an e-book simply does not compare to the experience of reading a physical book. They argue that the tactile experience of holding a book and turning its pages is an integral part of the reading experience that cannot be replicated with an e-reader.

In conclusion, while Ebooks offer several advantages, such as convenience, affordability, and environmental sustainability, there are also several disadvantages to their rise in popularity. These include their potential impact on physical bookstores, the initial investment required to purchase an e-reader or tablet, and the loss of the tactile experience that comes with reading a physical book. Ultimately, whether one views this trend as positive or negative depends on their personal preferences and priorities.

Sample Response 4

The advent of e-books has brought about a marked decline in the usage of traditional paper books. While some individuals perceive this trend as a step in the right direction, others remain apprehensive. In this essay, I will explicate the pros and cons of this development.

On one hand, e-books are advantageous for a number of reasons. Firstly, e-books are far more convenient than paper books, as they allow for the storage of thousands of books in one small device. This not only reduces the physical burden of carrying a bulky book but also makes reading on the go more feasible. Moreover, e-books are generally more cost-effective than paper books, which can be especially beneficial for students who require a large number of books. Furthermore, e-books are environmentally friendly, as they reduce the need for paper, which in turn reduces deforestation and pollution.

On the other hand, the rise of e-books has a few significant drawbacks. One of the main concerns is the impact on traditional bookstores, which may be forced to shut down due to the increasing popularity of e-books. This would not only result in job losses but would also have a detrimental effect on communities, as bookstores often serve as cultural hubs. Additionally, e-books require an initial investment in an e-reader or tablet, which can be a barrier for individuals who are unable to afford such a device. Furthermore, some individuals argue that the experience of reading a paper book, with its tactile sensation, cannot be replicated by an e-reader or tablet.

In conclusion, while Ebooks provide numerous benefits, including convenience, affordability, and eco-friendliness, there are also a few significant drawbacks to this trend, such as the potential impact on traditional bookstores, the initial investment required to purchase an e-reader, and the loss of the tactile sensation of a physical book. Ultimately, the decision of whether to embrace e-books or continue with paper books rests with each individual, based on their priorities and preferences.

Did you like these sample responses? Read more here:

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• Some people believe that teenagers should concentrate on all school subjects. But others believe that teenagers should focus on the subject that they are good at or that they find the most interesting. Discuss both sides and give your opinion.

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✍️Essay On Books: Free Samples for Students 

• Updated on  
• Nov 2, 2023

Books are considered human’s best friend. It has been an integral part of human society for ages and will continue to be a crucial part of human life. There are several categories of books, that offer us knowledge about specific fields. Words written in books serve as a source of knowledge, information, and entertainment , which are necessary for skill enhancement and polishing the language. Books are written in every language to fulfill the needs of people living in every region from villages to abroad. In this blog, you will get to know how to write an essay on books and we have also provided some sample essays on books for you. Keep Reading!

Table of Contents

• 1 Short Essay on Books
• 2 Essay on Books in 150 Words
• 3.1 Different Genres of Books
• 3.2 Benefits of Reading Books

Also Read: 15 Best-Selling Books of All Times

Short Essay on Books

Books are pages filled with ideas, thoughts, stories, imagination, and knowledge. Even after extreme advancements in technology , books continue to be cherished by humans. The reason behind that is the convenience and their appeal. 

Given below are some short sample essays on books that will help school-going children and students: 

Also Read: Essay Writing

Also Read: Motivational Books

Essay on Books in 150 Words

Books are considered true friends of humans, as they can teach us life lessons. Books are the repositories that impart wisdom and knowledge. From ancient times to today’s digital world, books have served as a source of inspiration, expanding the thought process and imparting education.

In schools, they teach us how reading books can shape our future and when a person grows, the impact of his learning through books is reflected in his lifestyle. In an era of mobile phones, smartphones, television, and laptops, we all still trust books. Books provide deep knowledge about any specific subject without any modifications.

Books possess the ability to ignite your imagination and take you to a completely different world. Some readers value books as humans, some highlight the important parts, some readers make collections of limited editions of books, and some even cherish the smell of old books. The cover and physical appearance of the books on the bookshelf reflect comfort.

Thus, books play an important role in everyone’s life. Nowadays movies are also directed based on famous books. 

Also Read: Essay on Education System

Essay on Books in 300 words

Books help mankind to evolve mentally. The thoughts of a person reflect his/her personality and the thoughts are developed based on your learning in life. As mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, books are considered the powerhouse of knowledge and information. The vintage look of the book adds charm to its appearance and such books attract the reader. Holding a book in hand, flipping pages while reading, using beautiful bookmarks in the book, and sensing the texture of pages can deeply imply a sensory effect on the readers.

Different Genres of Books

A book reader can enjoy a variety of genres of books. In spite of technological advancements in human life, thousands of books are released in the market. The budding writers also publish their books as they know the fact that good readers still prefer to read from books. If you do not want to purchase the hard copy of the book then, you can go for the online version. 

Following are some of the genres of books:

• Travel books- Such books tell the story and experience of travellers.
• Motivational books- Like “Atomic Habits” are used to inspire and motivate people to adopt good habits in life.
• Fictional books- Like “As You Like It” that represent literary fiction and play.
• Novel- it comes under the most read books by the reader. Novels are the long work of narrative fiction framed in prose.

Benefits of Reading Books

There are many benefits of reading books. Books help to increase our vocabulary and enhance our knowledge of a variety of subjects. They also serve as a good source of entertainment during free time. It boosts the ability of the reader to think creatively. They help in improving the fluency and enhance the communication skills . Books are a great source of knowledge it would help us in public speaking , debates, quizzes, examinations, etc.

Also Read: Best Indian Authors

In short, books have a positive impact on our personality. We should read more books of different genres and avoid using mobile phones without any reason.

Relevant Blogs

Books play an effective part in the life of humans from childhood to adulthood. Reading books is a great habit as it will broaden the knowledge. For students, books are the main source of knowledge and education. The imagination and creative skills of students can be developed with the help of books. Even a 1-2 year child also learn about colours, number, fruits, vegetables, and animals with the help of a toddler’s book.

To write a good essay on books you must be familiar with what are books, how many types of books are there, the different genres of books, their role in human society, and the benefits of books. Then, you can include all this knowledge in your essay. Here are some guidelines that you can follow to write an essay on books: Draft the raw information. Arrange it in a systematic order. Frame the introduction paragraph of the essay stating what are books. Then, frame the body and conclude the essay on the advantages and benefits of books. Proofread and edit your essay to bring more clarity.

To write an essay on ‘my favourite book,’ including the title of the book, incorporate a brief review of the book, and conclude with the lesson one may gain from reading that particular book.

This was all about an essay on books. The skill of writing an essay comes in handy when appearing for standardized language tests, thinking of taking one soon? Leverage Live provides the best online test prep for the same. Register today and if you wish to study abroad then contact our experts at 1800572000 .

Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

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10 of the Best Books and Stories Set in the Future

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr probably never said, ‘predictions are hard, especially about the future.’ And although the job of authors of science fiction and speculative fiction isn’t to make accurate predictions about what our future lives might look like, but to entertain us by tapping into current concerns, fears, dreams, and ambitions for where humanity might be heading, it can still be fun to read stories set in the future which managed to get things right (or sometimes, not so right).

The following list comprises ten of the very best books and stories written about the future. They range from short stories that can be read in one sitting to full novels, including one rather long and challenging novel (see John Brunner below).

We’ve included a range of types of story, too, from utopias to dystopias, and from stories focused on technology to stories focused on society. But all of these stories about the future are, for our money, worth reading.

1. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 .

Published in 1888, Bellamy’s short novel, which imagines a perfect future society, spawned a nationwide movement in America. It also predicted electronic broadcasting and credit cards, among other things.

Bellamy’s plan for a ‘cloud palace for an ideal humanity’ also helped to inspire the garden city movement in the US and the UK. This is the only utopian novel on this list, and it suffers from that affliction which many utopian books fall prey to (namely, lack of action and some dull passages), but it’s one of the best classic stories to imagine a brighter future for our world.

2. Rudyard Kipling, ‘With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD’.

Kipling (1865-1936) is now best-known for his books for children such as The Jungle Book and The Just So Stories , as well as rousing poems like ‘If—’. But he was also a sophisticated and, at times, visionary writer of short stories.

And in two short stories, ‘With the Night Mail’ and ‘As Easy as A.B.C.: A Tale of 2150 AD’, published in 1905 and 1915 respectively, Rudyard Kipling pioneered the short story set in the future, in which action rather than simple exposition is the key focus.

Set in the year 2000, ‘With the Night Mail’ features transatlantic aircraft and radio communication, with the narrator on board a mail plane travelling from London to Canada. The journey is exhilaratingly good fun to read, with Kipling’s invention and eye for detail a masterclass in what we now call ‘speculative fiction’.

3. E. M. Forster, ‘The Machine Stops’.

Is this the most prophetic story of the twentieth century? Published in 1909 and showing Forster’s (pictured right) disdain for technological advancement and the way it would make our lives poorer in an imagined future, this story attracted plenty of new readers in 2020 when so many people’s lives ‘went virtual’.

It’s all here: Zoom, self-isolation, and even the fear of other human beings. Controlling everything is ‘the Machine’, a mysterious technological entity worshipped as a god by many of the inhabitants of this future Earth.

You can read our analysis of this prescient short story here .

4. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World .

This novel by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is, along with Orwell’s novel below, probably the most famous story about an imagined future written in the entire twentieth century. Brave New World (1932) is as much satire as dark dystopia – Huxley had made his name as a writer of social satires in the 1920s – and there’s a certain Swiftian quality to his vision of a technologically and scientifically advanced futuristic society of the year 632 AF (‘After [Henry] Ford’).

In Huxley’s joyless future, the population live in one giant World State, human relationships are discouraged, and everyone’s emotions are regulated through a drug, soma. In New London, three rules or tenets are touted above all others: ‘No privacy, no family, no monogamy’.

5. Murray Constantine, Swastika Night .

Before Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , there was Swastika Night , an ‘alternative history’ of the Second World War written before WWII had even broken out!

Murray Constantine was the pseudonym of the British novelist Katharine Burdekin (1896-1963); her true identity was only discovered in the 1980s, two decades after her death. She wrote this work of speculative fiction in 1937, when Nazism was on the rise in Europe, but the outbreak of the Second World War was still two years away.

Set centuries in the future after the Axis powers had conquered the world, the novel takes place in a world where Hitler is worshipped as a blond-haired god and the past has been rewritten or actively suppressed. Among other things, the novel is a searing feminist critique and, as well as being a forerunner to Orwell’s novel, it might also be regarded as a precursor to works like The Handmaid’s Tale .

6. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four .

Along with Huxley’s novel and Constantine’s far less well-known future vision, Nineteen Eighty-Four is another dystopia which is focused on totalitarianism and the destruction of the individual. Orwell famously completed the novel in 1948 (although it wasn’t published until the following year), and reversed the last two digits to give the year of the novel (though he also toyed with calling it 1982 ).

As we have explored in our more in-depth analysis of the novel , the book is not merely about Stalinist Russia: it also has its roots in wartime Britain of the early 1940s, when the idea for the book began to coalesce in Orwell’s mind. Winston Smith, the novel’s protagonist, works for the Ministry of Truth (modelled on the BBC, where Orwell used to work and attend meetings in a ‘Room 101’) where his job is to change history; a number of the novel’s terms, such as ‘doublethink’, ‘thoughtcrime’, ‘thought police’, and ‘Big Brother’, have entered the language.

7. Ray Bradbury, ‘A Sound of Thunder’.

This is one of the classic short stories about time travel. And although it involves characters taking a journey back into the distant past rather than the far-flung future, the story begins in a future time – the year 2055 – where time travel is possible and people can travel back to prehistoric times.

The story was first published in Collier’s magazine in 1952. A time-travel safari company in the United States, Time Safari Inc., allows animal-hunters to travel back in time in a Time Machine and kill a long-extinct animal, such as a dinosaur. A man named Eckels turns up ready to undertake his safari … with disastrous results. We have analysed this story in more detail in a separate post .

8. J. G. Ballard, ‘Billennium’.

This 1962 story from one of the most original authors of the twentieth century (and one of the best modern authors of the short story) is a dystopian tale set in a vastly overpopulated future, in which the world’s population is around 20 billion.

Ballard (1930-2009) is perhaps the best writer about future in all of English literature, not least because (as he always maintained) he wasn’t writing ‘about’ the future as such, but about the here-and-now. But this story explicitly sees Ballard imagining a future America in which people can barely move in the big cities.

In this overcrowded future world, people live in extraordinarily cramped rooms in vast metropolises. The story focuses on two friends, Ward and Rossiter, who find new living quarters and then discover a whole new room behind one of their cupboards.

9. John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar .

Published in 1968 but set in 2010,  Stand on Zanzibar has to be one of the most prescient science-fiction novels ever written. In the book, Brunner prophesied that the population of Earth would have exceeded 7 billion by 2010 (it actually happened in October 2011), that Europe would form a sort of collective union (i.e., the EU), and that China would rise to become a competitive world power.

The novel also features a character named President Obomi, and foresaw electronic music, that the Honda company would start making automobiles, Viagra, and same-sex marriage, among many other accurate predictions . Overpopulation, though, is its core theme, and the novel is a curious mixture of world-building (delivered in numerous experimental ways) and good old-fashioned pulp-fiction storytelling.

10. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale .

Let’s conclude this pick of the best stories about the future with another novel. Atwood’s dystopian tale, first published in 1985, has – like Orwell’s before her – become a kind of modern myth, with the iconography of the novel (those hooded red-and-white clothed women) and its depiction of institutionalised patriarchy becoming go-to references in the media and in everyday discussion.

Atwood’s novel is a reminder that the future can easily see us travel backwards, with progress giving way to horrible regression in terms of women’s rights and bodily autonomy. And since Atwood published the novel, in the West as well as elsewhere in the world, echoes of the society she imagines here can all too readily be found.

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Essay on Value of Books

Students are often asked to write an essay on Value of Books in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Value of Books

The importance of books.

Books are a treasure trove of knowledge, opening our minds to diverse worlds of experience, thought, and education. They offer a wealth of learning, often from great thinkers and writers of history.

Books as Guides

Books serve as our guides in life. They provide lessons on morality, love, courage, and many other aspects of human existence. They can shape our values and perspectives.

Books and Imagination

Books stimulate our imagination, transporting us to different times and places. They help us understand the world and develop empathy for others.

Concluding Thoughts

In conclusion, the value of books is immeasurable. They enrich our lives and minds in countless ways.

250 Words Essay on Value of Books

The quintessence of books.

Books, often regarded as man’s best friend, have been a cornerstone of human civilization. They act as mirrors reflecting the society’s evolution and the progression of human thought.

Books as a Source of Knowledge

Books are a reservoir of knowledge, offering a plethora of information on various subjects. They foster intellectual growth, enhance critical thinking, and stimulate creativity. The wisdom garnered from books transcends the boundaries of time and space, enabling readers to explore diverse cultures, historical eras, and scientific advancements.

Books and Personal Growth

Books are instrumental in personal development. They provide perspectives that broaden our worldview, fostering empathy and understanding. They also serve as a source of inspiration, motivating us to strive for excellence and overcome adversities. Reading books cultivates patience, concentration, and discipline, essential traits for personal and professional success.

Books and Emotional Well-being

Books play a significant role in emotional well-being. They offer solace in times of distress, providing an escape from reality. Reading allows us to experience a spectrum of emotions, enhancing emotional intelligence and resilience.

The Future of Books

In the digital age, the format of books may have evolved, but their value remains unaltered. E-books and audiobooks have made reading more accessible, but the essence of a book lies in the knowledge it imparts and the impact it leaves on the reader.

500 Words Essay on Value of Books

Introduction.

Books have been the cornerstone of human civilization, serving as a medium for the preservation and transmission of knowledge across generations. They are not merely collections of printed pages, but repositories of human understanding, wisdom, and imagination.

The Intellectual Value of Books

Books are instrumental in the intellectual development of individuals. They provide an in-depth understanding of various subjects, from the complexities of quantum physics to the intricacies of human psychology. By presenting different perspectives, they expand our horizons, challenge our preconceived notions, and stimulate critical thinking. Reading books also enhances our cognitive abilities, including memory, concentration, and analytical skills.

Books as a Source of Inspiration

The emotional value of books.

Books are a powerful tool for emotional growth and healing. They allow us to experience a wide range of emotions and situations, fostering empathy and compassion. Literature, in particular, exposes us to diverse characters and narratives, enabling us to understand and appreciate different human experiences. Furthermore, self-help books can provide strategies for managing stress, anxiety, and other emotional challenges.

Books and Cultural Understanding

Books play a crucial role in promoting cultural understanding and diversity. They introduce us to different cultures, traditions, and histories, fostering a sense of respect and appreciation for diversity. By breaking stereotypes and prejudices, they contribute to the promotion of mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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Guest Essay

I Paid My Child $100 to Read a Book

By Mireille Silcoff

Ms. Silcoff is a cultural critic and the author of the short story collection “Chez L’Arabe.”

This summer, I paid my 12-year-old daughter $100 to read a book. As far as mom maneuvers go, it was definitely last ditch and the size of the payout was certainly excessive. I can’t say I am proud — but I am extremely satisfied. Because the plan worked. It worked so well, I’d suggest other parents of reluctant readers open their wallets and bribe their kids to read, too.

My daughter is a whip-smart kid, definitely smarter than I was at 12. But until I resorted to bribery, she’d never read an entire chapter book for pleasure. She’d read books for school, but getting her to do that was like pulling teeth, and on her own she’d read a few graphic novels and listened to the audiobooks of the “Harry Potter” series. None of those activities became a gateway to any habit of what I might call classic deep reading — with two eyes in front of paper, and nothing else going on.

When I faced this truth a few months ago, it felt like a parenting failure. Even though we’d read many storybooks when she was younger and we live in a house stuffed with books, I’d not managed to instill one of life’s fundamental pleasures in my kid.

Just before the pandemic, a depressing federal survey revealed how much reading for pleasure had dropped among children. Almost 30 percent of 13-year-olds said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun, a substantial increase from the 8 percent who said the same roughly 35 years earlier. Given that screen time among children also increased significantly during the pandemic, it’s fair to conclude that leisure reading is an increasingly endangered pursuit among children.

For those of us who are lifelong readers — who value our night stands stacked with teetering towers of books; who hold in our minds like friends the ideas and characters we’ve collected over the years from the printed page — conveying the importance of reading shouldn’t be hard. We all understand how reading enhances the fabric of our experience. Yet I found it weirdly difficult to communicate any of this to my reading-reluctant daughter. She claimed to dislike reading. Furthermore, she didn’t care to like it. And she didn’t see any of this as a problem. Lots of her friends, she explained to me, just “weren’t into” reading. I realized that if I wanted to communicate the joy of reading to my child, I had to clarify what the joy was for myself.

Certainly, my daughter’s having landed a smartphone last year — a secondhand iPhone with a zillion parental controls and time limits baked in — is part of the problem. Before the phone, I had a child who was like a gregarious Tigger, squealing with delight at something as simple as a new dessert cooling in the fridge. Post-phone, I had a monosyllabic blanket slug who wanted only to stay in her room with the blinds down, door closed, under a duvet, palming that little rectangle as if unhanding it would make her social life disappear. If it wasn’t her friends or it wasn’t her phone, it was only one thing: “boring.”

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The Future of Credit Risk Decisioning

Editor’s Note — Today’s essay is a collaboration with my friend Francisco Javier Arceo . Francisco is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat and has previously worked as an engineer and data scientist at numerous fintech companies and banks, including Affirm, Fast, and Goldman Sachs. He is also the author of one of my all-time favorite newsletters — Chaos Engineering . Francisco is brilliant, hilarious, and one of the few people who thinks more about the guts of credit decisioning than I do. We wrote today’s essay together, but rest assured, all the smart parts came from his brain. I hope you enjoy it!

Credit risk decisioning, as we think of it today, got its start in the 1950s, when mathematicians and engineers started looking for commercial applications for the theories and technologies that had, for the prior two decades, been primarily employed by the military.

Early pioneers like William Fair and Earl Isaac (the co-founders of FICO) saw an opportunity to apply information theory and statistical analysis to the process of deciding who to give loans to, a process that had been entirely within the realm of human judgment and intuition up until that point.

It’s lucky that they did.

Lending is a fantastic field to apply statistical analysis techniques to because the process of determining whether someone should be approved for a loan or not is a process bound by constraints.

The primary output of any credit risk model is always binary — predicting if a borrower will default on their loan obligation or not.

And many of the inputs into credit risk models have become bound by constraints as well. While Bill Fair and Earl Isaac didn’t have to deal with regulations like the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) when they first founded FICO in 1956, by the time they (and the three national credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) were ready to commercialize the first general-purpose credit score (the FICO Score) in 1989, the restrictions imposed by the FCRA and ECOA were well-established.

These constraints have created a narrow search space for lenders to innovate within over the last 60 years. Over that time, clever statisticians and data scientists have discovered a lot of what does and doesn’t work in credit risk decisioning, which has left the lending industry with a very mature and well-tested set of tools and best practices for determining who should and shouldn’t get a loan.

This is generally a very good thing — we know what works! — but it also tends to lead to rigid thinking.

When you talk to experienced credit risk professionals, you often hear some version of “that’ll never work” or “that’s not how we do things.”

This rigidity is understandable, but it misses a key point — constraints change.

Laws and regulations (and how they’re interpreted and enforced) change. Technology continues to advance up and to the right, unlocking capabilities that would have astonished messieurs Fair and Isaac.

It’s not right to say that there’s no room in the field of credit risk decisioning for innovation.

The right way to think about it is that there’s always room for innovation, provided that it’s done with sufficient knowledge of and respect for the lessons we’ve learned over the last 60 years.

So, our goal in this essay is to describe the process of developing and operationalizing credit risk models, explain how that process has been shaped (and constrained) by different regulations and technologies over the last six decades, and discuss where new technologies and regulatory developments are unlocking opportunities to improve the quality of our decisions.    

Developing a Credit Risk Model

AI is all the rage these days, in financial services and outside of it. However, it’s important to remember that lenders have been applying specific techniques and technologies within the field of artificial intelligence (machine learning, most prominently) to the question of who to lend money to for decades. 

AI/ML can help lenders save themselves money (through increased efficiency) and save their customers money (through better pricing of risk). The big question is, “how?”

Lenders usually start with credit bureau data. The virtue of this data is that it is A.) highly predictive, B.) FCRA-compliant, and C.) old enough and deep enough that lenders can backtest their models against it. 

You start by purchasing a dataset from one of the bureaus and turning that into something that can be used for machine learning.

A critical step in the model development process is precisely defining your outcome (in the context of lending, this is usually delinquency or default) because it will ultimately dictate the performance of your portfolio.

You define it by making an explicit value statement about time. Concretely, this looks something like, “I want to predict the likelihood of default within the first 3 months.” 

Whether or not you want it to be, the choice has important consequences to your portfolio, so choose it carefully.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s say you wanted to launch a 12-month installment loan to an underserved consumer market segment. You would start by getting historical data of other lenders’ loans from a credit bureau to build your model.

You will need to make sure you pull the data at two different time periods: (1) when the original application was made so you can use data that is relevant for underwriting (and so you don’t have forward-looking data resulting in data leakage ) and (2) 12 months later (or whatever time period is appropriate for you) to check if the consumer defaulted on their loan.

Then, you’d clean the dataset into something that can be used for machine learning.

Once you have your dataset, you can start to run different Logistic Regressions or other classification-based machine learning algorithms to find hidden patterns and relationships (i.e., non-linear functions and interaction terms ).

There’s a lot more to it, and you can expand on things in much more elegant ways to handle different phenomena, but for the sake of simplicity, this is essentially how it’s done.

Evaluating your Model

Once you have a model for predicting default, you need to figure out if it is any good (or, more accurately, if it will be an improvement over the existing model).

This is important because we already have an extraordinarily good model for predicting default in consumer lending — the FICO Score. Building a better-performing general industry credit scoring model than FICO is essentially impossible (FICO has a 60+ year headstart on you, and they employ some very smart people), but you don’t need to build a model that outperforms FICO for the entire industry. You just need to build a model that outperforms FICO for your specific product and target customer segment. This is difficult but doable. Indeed, most large consumer lenders have built custom in-house default models superior to FICO for their specific use case and they continue to be a competitive advantage for them.

( Read Alex’s essay on the eventual end of the FICO Score for more details on this front. )      

So, how do you know if your model is an improvement (for your business) over the status quo?

It turns out that accuracy is an imperfect metric when you have a low default rate (or, more generally, when you have severe class imbalance ). As an example, suppose you have a 5% default rate. That means 95% of your data did not default, so if your model predicted that no one defaulted , you’d still have 95% accuracy. 

Without proper adjustment, this behavior is actually very likely to occur in your model, so we tend to ignore the accuracy metric, and instead, we focus on the rank order separation of the model.

To measure that rank order separation, there are four metrics industry professionals typically look at: Precision, Recall , the Kolomogorov-Smirnov (KS) Test , and Gini/AUC . 

Gini/AUC has increasingly become the most popular. A good credit risk model is usually around 70% AUC / 40% Gini. You don’t need to understand what that means; just trust Francisco — the higher, the better.

An important point here is that any single metric is very crude, and a dataset can be pathologically constructed to break it, so while these metrics are helpful, there are cases where things can still misbehave even though they seem normal. So, make sure to validate your model with sound business judgment.

But, for argument’s sake, let’s say you’ve done that. You’ve built a model that is better at rank ordering risk of default for your 12-month installment loan product than any of your prior models or the general industry models available from FICO or the bureaus.

Now, what do you do?  

Building a Compounding Analytic Advantage

Turns out, everything we’ve been discussing so far is the easy part.

The hard part is operationalizing our new model in a way that creates a compounding analytic advantage over time.

This is not a concept that William Fair and Earl Isaac would have grokked.

Back in their day, model development and model execution where two completely different processes, playing out in parallel.

Statisticians would pull data sets from the bureaus, look for hidden patterns and relationships within the data, develop features, and build a model. That model would then be deployed into production, where it would be called on to assist with a specific step (credit decisioning) within a much larger, human-powered workflow (relationship lending). That workflow would then produce outcome data (how did the loans perform?), which would be fed into the credit bureaus and aggregated into credit reports, which the statisticians would then draw on to start work on the next iteration of their model.

The process was slow — any use of computer systems for pulling applicant data or making credit decisions using statistical models happened in batch; there was no concept of real-time transactions — and reliant on industry-wide data aggregation (through the credit bureaus). There was little ability for individual firms to build what Francisco calls a “machine learning flywheel.”  

Fast forward to today, and the big difference that we see is that the lending products that customers acquire and the experiences that they have using and managing them are all entirely orchestrated by software . 

This allows for a much more tightly integrated and proprietary approach to model development, in which every interaction that the customer has with the product generates data, which can then be fed back in to improve the model, which can then be deployed to generate better, more personalized product experiences for the customer. And on and on and on.

( Read this article from Francisco for a deeper dive into the challenges and rewards of building a machine learning flywheel. ) 

Now, to be clear — building this flywheel is not easy.

The foundation is a great product. None of this works if you don’t build a great digital lending product, and building a great digital lending product requires meticulous and thoughtful engineering, complemented by a deep understanding of the business.

But again, for argument’s sake, let’s say that you’ve succeeded in doing this. You built a great 12-month installment loan product for an underserved customer segment in the market.

How do you architect the systems around that product to create this compounding analytic advantage we’ve been talking about?       

It starts with the data.

Machine learning relies on data. When making credit risk decisions, bad data will ruin your business, while good data (especially good data that only you have or understand) can help you outperform the market.

Historically, credit risk models relied on loan repayment data from the bureaus (which is just a customer’s repayment history on another lender’s portfolio). Some lenders would complement this data with proprietary internal data, which offered more valuable and granular insights, but in general, bureau data was the center of gravity for all credit risk models.

However, in today’s world, in which the lending products themselves can generate proprietary data continuously in real time, this isn’t necessarily true.

There are a few different examples of this in fintech, which are worth paying attention to.

The first is product design . By iterating on the parameters of the lending product (loan amount, repayment terms, pricing, etc.), lenders can create low-risk product structures that can quickly produce useful proprietary signals for determining the risk of default. This is exactly what BNPL providers like Affirm, Afterpay, and Klarna did with the Pay-in-Four BNPL product, which is why these providers have traditionally not relied on or contributed to the traditional credit bureaus.  

The second example is consumer-permissioned data . Fintech companies like Plaid, Finicity, and MX have helped to popularize and standardize the ability for consumers to share their financial data with authorized third parties. This ability (frequently referred to as open banking) is about to be codified by the CFPB’s Personal Financial Data Rights Rule, which is intended (among many other goals) to help improve consumer outcomes in lending via cash flow underwriting. It turns out that cash flow data (the patterns of in-flows and out-flows of money in consumers’ bank accounts) can result in a powerful set of features for predicting risk, which is why forward-thinking lenders are thinking very hard about ways to rearchitect their lending products in order to incentivize and easily facilitate consumer-permissioned data sharing.

( Read Alex’s essay on everything you ever wanted to know about cash flow underwriting for, well, everything you ever wanted to know. )  

The third and final example is embedded lending . By distributing lending products within the context and workflows of non-finance activities, lenders can significantly reduce adverse selection and can take advantage of proprietary data that the embedded channel provider has about its customers.

A word of warning — utilizing novel forms of data, even when used as a complement to traditional bureau data, can be hazardous if it’s not done with extreme caution. The reach of fair lending laws is longer than many in fintech might expect and can be applied in ways that might not seem logical or intuitive (e.g., disparate impact).

That said, many of these new types of data are being operationalized in ways that provide a compliant path forward (FCRA-compliant data and attributes are very common in the world of cash flow underwriting these days). And many others can still be utilized in non-FCRA contexts (fraud, marketing, etc.) that provide tremendous franchise value to lenders.    

Designing Credit Risk Machine Learning Systems

We’ve talked about how to develop a model and how to generate or acquire differentiated data that can strengthen that model, but we haven’t talked about how to integrate it into the systems used by the lender to make credit decisions.

So now we should talk about decision engines.

Just like you, risk models didn’t fall out of a coconut tree. They live in the context, terribly burdened by what has been. That context is public policy, regulatory requirements, and the business requirements of the line of business leaders that own the lending products that these risk models were built to support.

Lenders encode that context in a decision engine, which typically offers the ability to call third-party data sources and other internal services, run feature extraction, and execute model inference. 

From an engineering perspective, these decision engines play a central role in orchestrating the larger loan underwriting workflow, which is (as this graphic from Francisco aptly illustrates) often quite chaotic:

This chaos is, to a degree, to be expected (lending money is a complex business!), but it’s enormously beneficial to lenders if they can apply good systems engineering to rein in this chaos as much as possible and prevent their credit risk modeling and decisioning infrastructures from becoming brittle or difficult to change.

Here’s one view of what a well-organized architecture for a credit risk decisioning environment could look like (again, courtesy of Francisco):

( If you are wondering what Feast is, it’s an open-source feature store that Francisco has been working on that is designed to help address some of the challenges that arise when deploying machine learning models into production. )

It also may be enormously beneficial to lenders if they can figure out how to apply generative AI to Francisco’s graphic above.

The Generative Emergence

Generative artificial intelligence has emerged as one of the most extraordinary innovations of the 21st century. But not every problem is a nail and using LLMs as a blunt hammer for everything could lead to consequential mistakes.

For example, using Gen AI for synthetic data generation is great for many applications (e.g., question answering based on existing documentation). Credit is not one of them.

On the other hand, using Agents (i.e., autonomous software to execute some set of configured operations) to 10x your data scientists or machine learning engineers building your models can be extremely powerful. This is basically a copilot, and tools like Julius.ai are doing this today.

However, the highest impact use case for Gen AI-powered agents is document verification and parsing. 

Document verification is well positioned for automation as it is often a high-friction, manual task that results in a meaningful drop-off in the customer funnel. Small percentage changes could add up to meaningful conversion amounts for lenders and, while this space is still early, could be one of the biggest impact areas over the next five years.

Closing Thoughts

Nothing in the world of credit risk decisioning is easy. However, if we were to rank order the jobs to be done in credit risk decisioning from least challenging to most challenging, that list would be:

• Developing a proprietary credit risk model that outperforms off-the-shelf models for your specific product and target customer segment (difficult, but also relatively straightforward given the small search space that you are building within).
• Deploying that credit risk model into production in a way that doesn’t infuse more chaos into an already chaotic system (confoundingly difficult, especially at a large scale … but still achievable; check out this Feast demo from Francisco to see a glimpse of what a production ML system wielding chaos through great engineering and open source software can do).
• Architecting lending products and credit risk decisioning environments into a flywheel that produces a compounding analytic advantage (very few banks or fintech lenders have really figured out how to do this, and the ones that have are intentionally very quiet about it).     

The focus that many folks who are new to lending or financial services have on #1, relative to #2, reminds us of that Omar Bradley quote, “amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics.”

However, it’s only by mastering #1 and #2 that lenders can begin to reach for #3 and start down the path of building a great lending business.

Happy Risk Taking!

– Alex and Francisco

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Books | san diego’s tribal streetwear focus of new book that looks at its impact and legacy, ‘tribal and the cultural legacy of streetwear,’ edited by san diegan g. james daichendt, is a collection of essays and reflections that examines the san diego company’s far-reaching impact.

But the book really is much more than that.

Yes, the volume, which Daichendt edited and was published by Intellect Books, is centered around the San Diego-based company started by Bobby Ruiz that celebrates its 35th anniversary this year.

But throughout its 256 pages, “Tribal and the Cultural Legacy of Streetwear,” under Daichendt’s watchful eye, examines how Tribal Streetwear has, since 1989, straddled the intersection of community, art and culture. The pieces in the book take a deep dive into how it derived inspiration from and has left an indelible impact on a variety of subcultures, including graffiti, street art, tattoos, lowriders, music, skateboarding, surfing and breaking.

Tribal Streetwear “has strong Chicano roots in its aesthetic and since its inception in 1989, the impact of its designs continues to balance the precarious act of being relevant and responsible with its resources,” writes Daichdent, who, in his own words, “uses Tribal as a lens for examining the history of streetwear and the subcultural aspects that make it such an exciting development in cultural studies, art history and sociology.”

Daichendt, the Provost and Chief Academic Officer at Point Loma Nazarene University, talked about the book, its inception and the far-reaching impact of Tribal Streetwear.

Q: You recently came out with a new book, “Tribal and the Cultural Legacy of Streetwear.” How did this book come about?

A: Street art and graffiti have long been a subject of academic study for myself. As I have investigated writing projects, the larger concept of street culture has become a subject of interest which includes many subtypes, situations, locations and participants. This revelation has expanded the subject matter I could study and led to some exciting exhibitions, articles and experiences. While the subcultures of surfing, skateboarding, lowriding, breaking and tattoos within Southern California are not entirely new to me, I had never explored them as academic subjects. This expansion of my own work coincided with meeting the CEO and co-founder of Tribal Streetwear, Bobby Ruiz, who further enhanced my understanding and appreciation of the history of street culture in San Diego and beyond.

Q: You have had a long relationship with streetwear — specifically San Diego’s own Tribal Streetwear — as art and how it intersects with community and culture and art. How difficult was it to try and capture that in this book?

A: Streetwear is an international phenomenon that ranges from local skateboard shops to international fashion houses like Louis Vuitton. Tribal Streetwear is celebrating 35 years in San Diego, and it would be impossible to capture the depth of their involvement in the community and the range of products and experiences they have created over three decades. My goal was to further the academic conversation about streetwear and use Tribal as a lens for facilitating that conversation.

It’s difficult to comprehend how the articles of clothing produced by Tribal — including shirts, pants, jackets, hats, and a variety of fashion accessories — can be symbolic of so many different subcultures that are distinctly rooted in their communities. It’s a massive accomplishment, and it’s what distinguishes Tribal as an authentic organization that “keeps it real.”

Q: You were able to gather many voices in this book. How did you go about choosing whose voices to include?

A: The book would be limiting if it was just one voice. As an art historian and critic, I have a particular way of analyzing information so it was important to me to include researchers from a variety of fields, including criminal justice, sociology, literature, history, Chicano and Chicana studies, film, philosophy, and music studies. In addition, there are personal histories and reflections from practitioners that have a history with Tribal Streetwear. This diversity of experiences, thought and writing styles created a well-rounded portrait of streetwear in popular culture.

Q: Once you started working on the book, were there any surprises along the way?

A: Tribal Streetwear is so much more than a streetwear brand. They are embedded within the street culture. It’s one thing to say that and it’s another to see the T-Star logo tattooed on someone’s skin, affixed to their lowrider, or incorporated into their personal artwork. Tribal represents a community, personal identities and is a way of life. The fever and passion are inspiring and rewarding to witness. I knew it was important, but I was surprised at the depth of emotional commitment to Tribal and its place within so many different types of people.

Q: What was the most rewarding part of this project?

A: I feel like an honored guest in each of the subcultures represented in the text. As a professor, one could feel they are studying a movement from the outside, but in each case, I was quickly adopted because of my interest in the subject.

Q: The most challenging?

A: The term “streetwear” caught stride in the 1990s and was generally understood to be in alignment with the various subcultures that Tribal represents. The clothing style also evolved to include several variations that were reflective of the country or city it was from, but the base of T-shirts, hats and sneakers remained the same. Yet, not all street wear companies are the same and many lose their connection and inspiration to the street culture. Bobby shared early on with me that there is a version of streetwear that is born from a keyboard and another that is from the streets.

Q: The book clocks in at more than 250 pages. Did anything end up on the cutting-room floor? And if so, was it hard letting go?

A: There are thousands of photographs, personal accounts and individuals that contributed towards the story of Tribal Streetwear. However, the academic focus of the text helped us concentrate on what was essential.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from this monumental book?

A: Streetwear is a core aspect of street culture and is arguably the most widely seen characteristic and expression of this concept.

I hope readers realize that street culture is a massive concept that has had a huge impact on culture and that there is creativity and arts production happening in a big way on the streets of our communities. San Diego specifically has a strong museum and gallery culture but some of the best work is happening outside the walls of institutions and takes the shape of a lowrider, an article of clothing, or in a tattoo shop.

I hope each of these chapters collectively furthers our understanding of how and why Tribal is able to be more than a clothing company to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Tribal is uniquely San Diego from its Chicano roots to the range of artists they support to create progressive designs for their products.

The Tribal T-Star logo serves as an excellent representation of the many folks that make up the brand and the company’s philosophy and focus on culture. Made up of several “T” letters that lock together like a puzzle, the logo showcases a star in the negative space. A metaphor for the various aspects of street culture and family coming together to form something special.

“Tribal and the Cultural Legacy of Streetwear” (Intellect Books, 2024; 256 pages) 

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