the future of print books essay

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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Are paper books really disappearing?

If the printed word becomes a thing of the past, it may affect how we think.

When Peter James published his novel Host on two floppy disks in 1993, he was ill-prepared for the “venomous backlash” that would follow. Journalists and fellow writers berated and condemned him; one reporter even dragged a PC and a generator out to the beach to demonstrate the ridiculousness of this new form of reading. “I was front-page news of many newspapers around the world, accused of killing the novel,” James told pop.edit.lit . “[But] I pointed out that the novel was already dying at an alarming rate without my assistance.”

Shortly after Host’s debut, James also issued a prediction: that e-books would spike in popularity once they became as easy and enjoyable to read as printed books. What was a novelty in the 90s, in other words, would eventually mature to the point that it threatened traditional books with extinction. Two decades later, James’ vision is well on its way to being realised.

That e-books have surged in popularity in recent years is not news, but where they are headed – and what effect this will ultimately have on the printed word – is unknown. Are printed books destined to eventually join the ranks of clay tablets, scrolls and typewritten pages, to be displayed in collectors’ glass cases with other curious items of the distant past?

And if all of this is so, should we be concerned?

Answers to these questions do not come easily, thanks to the variability in both e-reading trends and in research findings on the effects (or lack thereof) that digital reading has on us. What we do know, according to a survey conducted last year by Pew Research, is that half of American adults now own a tablet or e-reader, and that three in 10 read an e-book in 2013. Although printed books remain the most popular means of reading, over the past decade e-books have made a valiant effort at catching up.

Pinpointing the emergence of the first digital book is challenging, however, mostly because people’s definition of what constitutes an e-book varies. In the 1970s, Project Gutenberg began publishing electronic text files, and books written in HyperCard followed in the 80s and 90s, pioneered by companies such as Voyager and Eastgate Systems. Later programs and devices for accessing early e-books included the Palm Pilot, Microsoft Reader and Sony Reader. “Microsoft and the Palm experiments around the turn of the century began to really sort of make e-books happen, although not in a substantial, commercial way,” says Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of the Idea Logical Company , a consultancy group in New York City specialising in publishing’s digital transformation.

Indeed, despite the hand wringing that Jones’ Host – said by some to be the first digital novel – caused in 1993, publishers weren’t too concerned. “In 1992, I spoke to CEOs at probably five of the seven major publishing companies, and they all said ‘This has nothing to do with us. People will never read on screens’,” says Robert Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book and co-founder of Voyager and the Criterion Collection.

In 2007, with Amazon’s release of the Kindle, that attitude abruptly changed. Almost immediately, the device began causing palpitations in the publishing industry. “Amazon had the clout to go to publishers and say, ‘This is serious. We want your books,’” Shatzkin says. “And because Amazon is Amazon, they also didn’t really care as much about profit on every unit sale as they did for lifetime customer value, so they were happy to sell their e-books for cheap.”

From 2008 to 2010 e-book sales skyrocketed, jumping up to 1,260%, the New York Times reports . Adding fuel to the e-book fire, Nook debuted, as did the iPad, which was released alongside the iBooks Store. “By that time, the publishing industry had lost all possible ability to regain any initiative and momentum,” Stein says. In 2011, as Borders Books declared bankruptcy, e-books’ popularity continued to steadily rise – though not exponentially, as it turns out. 

For the past two years, there has been a shift. According to the Association of American Publishers, e-book sales, which constitute about 20% of the book-buying market, have plateaued, and Pew’s newest data , collected in March and April this year, also corroborates the fact that e-book readership has steadied over the past year. What’s more, the Times indicates that the first few months of 2015 actually saw a decline in the number of e-books sold. (Pew’s data, however, also show that the number of Americans who read at least one print book fell from 69 to 63% from 2014 to 2015.) “[The publishing] guys are all sort of breathing a sigh of relief, saying ‘Whew, half our market doesn’t like reading on screens,’” Stein says. “The problem is that they’re reading the tea leaves incorrectly.”

While no one can say with certainty what the future holds for paper books, Stein believes that what is a plateau now will, at some point, return to a steep incline. “We’re in a transitional period,” he says. “The affordances of screen reading will continuously improve and expand, offering people a reason to switch to screens.”

Stein imagines, for example, that future forms of books might be developed not by conventional publishers but by the gaming industry. He also envisions that the distinction between writer and reader will be blurred by a social reading experience in which authors and consumers can digitally interact with each other to discuss any passage, sentence or line. Indeed, his latest project, Social Book , allows members to insert comments directly into digital book texts and is already used by teachers at several high schools and universities to stimulate discussions. “For my grandchildren, the idea that reading is something you do by yourself will seem arcane,” he says. “Why would you want to read by yourself if you can have access to the ideas of others you know and trust, or to the insights of people from all over the world?”    

Books themselves, however, likely won’t disappear entirely, at least not anytime soon. Like woodblock printing, hand-processed film and folk weaving, printed pages may assume an artisanal or aesthetic value. Books meant not to be read but to be looked at – art catalogues or coffee table collections – will likely remain in print form for longer as well. “Print will exist, but it will be in a different realm and will appeal to a very limited audience, like poetry does today,” Stein says. “However, the locus of intellectual discourse is going to move away from print.”

“I think printed books just for plain old reading will, in 10 years from now, be unusual,” Shatzkin adds. “Not so unusual that a kid will say, ‘Mommy, what’s that?’ but unusual enough that on the train you’ll see one or two people reading something printed, while everyone else is reading off of a device.”

Shatzkin does believe, however, that the eventual and total demise of print “is inevitable,” though such a day won’t arrive for perhaps 50 to 100 or more years. “It will get harder and harder to understand why anyone would print something that’s heavy, hard to ship and not customisable,” he says. “I think there will come a point where print just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Frankly, I reached that point years ago for books that you just read.”

While some might mourn the aesthetic loss of the printed book, is there anything else we risk forfeiting should print disappear entirely? Some research indicates that there is cause for concern.

“The reality is that there is great anxiety that the book might disappear,” says Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in Massachusetts, and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain . “But people like myself have good reason to hope that that will not be true, for readers’ sakes.”

According to Wolf and others’ research findings, electronic reading can negatively impact the way the brain responds to text, including reading comprehension , focus and the ability to maintain attention to details like plot and sequence of events. Research roughly indicates that print falls on one end of the reading spectrum (the most immersive) and that online text occurs at the other end (the most distracting). Kindle reading seems to fall somewhere in the middle. “A lot of people are worried that our ability to enter into the story is changing,” Wolf says. “My worry is that we’ll have a short-circuited reading brain, excellent for gathering information but not necessarily for forming critical, analytical deep reading skills.”

The field, however, is in its infancy, and findings about the negative impacts of e-reading are far from chiseled in stone. Indeed, some studies have produced opposite results, including that e-reading does not impact comprehension or that it can even enhance it, especially for readers with dyslexia .

Findings are also mixed for how digital reading affects children . Illustrated children’s e-books often include enhancements, including movement, music and sound. But the effect these additions have on reading varies depending on how they are executed. If done well, “they can be a kind of guide for children,” says Adriana Bus, a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands who conducts research into reading, and reading problems.

In several experiments involving more than 400 kindergarteners, Bus and her colleagues found that kids who read animated e-books understood the story better and learned more vocabulary than those who read static ones. “For young children, written language is often difficult, but animated pictures can help them understand more difficult parts of the text,” she says.   

But for all the worries about e-books changing the way we comprehend the written word and interact with one another, Wolf points out that “never before have we had such a democratisation of knowledge made possible.” While too much time on devices might mean problems for children and adults in places like Europe and the US, for those in developing countries, they may be a godsend, Wolf says – “the most important mechanism for giving literacy .”  

In light of this, she hopes that we continue to maintain a “bi-literate” society – one that values both the digital and printed word. The recent uptick in the number of independent bookstores, at least in the US, gives her encouragement that others, too, are recognising the value of print.

“A full reading brain circuit is one of the most important contributions to the intellectual development of our species,” she says. “Anything that threatens that should be a matter of great vigilance and scrutiny.”

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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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The Future of Print

July 6th, 2010 · 45 comments by kassia krozser.

I’ve spent the past month listening and reading. I reminded myself of all the positive, cool, exciting projects happening in publishing today — and there are many (I’ve been asking those involved to post here to share what they are doing). I’ve considered what happens next and focused a lot on what readers are saying, about books, digital and print.

Though everybody is writing about ebooks and the digital experience these days, I find I don’t have much new to add to the conversation; I’ve said it all before. Sometimes I was right, sometimes I was wrong, sometimes I evolved. I still absolutely believe that user experience is — after the content of the book — the most important place for publishing types to focus their attention. I’ve given up on reading banal analysis and wild conjecture. I ignore anything with the word “killer” in the headline or lead. If there’s a question mark in the headline — Will the iPhone Destroy How We Cook Dinner? — I don’t even bother to click through. I presume it’s a question the writer is asking himself, not actually bothering to consider with any depth. It’s just vague punditry designed to fill the web equivalent of column inches.

That is not to say there isn’t smart analysis out there, but tea leaves from a moment in time do not predict the entire future. We spend far too much time worrying about who will “win” (what this means, nobody can say) and who will “lose” (again, what does this mean?) and what people really want. This final one annoys me the most because the pronouncements often come from those who have no idea how the technology they are praising — or dismissing — is used by real people.

Which leads me to an email I sent to my friend Melissa Klug, a book and paper aficionado . She thought she was asking for a few quick thoughts on the future of print. She got a medium-length essay (mostly reproduced below…mostly, because I cannot resist editing and revising and rethinking and updating). For those who prefer an abstract to reading long pieces, I’ll make it easy: print will remain important, but our relationship with print will change.

Print is not dead. It is not even dying, at least not yet. Think of print like an overweight beast, shedding excess weight. The result is a leaner, more defined, more beautiful experience. What we buy in print will be increasingly valuable as readers shift to the digital realm — and they are shifting so amazingly fast, it’s almost terrifying.

Print, for many types of information, will become far less important. It’s too slow for our world, too clunky for an increasing number of people. I read that a publisher is “crashing” a book on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It’s due out in September. Given the volume of information already published and the way public interest flags, is this too long a delay? What will the book offer than other sources don’t? It’s the same relevance conundrum facing newsweeklies.

Major newspapers will continue to see diminishing print runs, but this mostly because the kind of information they provide is more easily consumed in the digital environment — it’s the old joke about reading yesterday’s news. Clay Shirky is giving newspapers fifty years . I think he is being generous.

With the Internet and television combining forces, “news” becomes more immediate. Newspapers/news publications did a horrible job of anticipating the future. They did a horrible job of understanding their own strengths. This doesn’t mean news is no longer important. It’s that these organizations seemed to miss what made them critical in the first place. We don’t pay for the weather, we don’t pay for box scores (anymore), we don’t pay for day old breaking news. We don’t pay for print versions of stories that are changing by the hour.

Of course, that leaves the world of analysis as the currency of journalism. The news is the easy part. Putting the information into context is valuable. It’s what is necessary to encourage people to pull out their credit cards (see above about vague punditry — it’s not what people want). In fact, analysis, context, synthesis are the future of information, and I worry that journalists have lost this talent. I will spare you more thoughts on this except to say: your children should all be library science majors!

So print — cheap, disposable, ephemeral print — will become marginalized, probably faster than we realize. But also slower than the doom-and-gloom types believe. “Print” is not a small idea. We print all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, and that isn’t going to come to a full stop. Until our robot overlords decree otherwise, we will be creating all sorts of printed materials.

Most will not survive the day they’re created. This goes for books as much as newspapers and other time-limited information.

Setting aside the cheap, throwaway print products, the future of print is valuable, beautiful, useful…quality. As I sit here, surrounded by print publications of all types, I see what I value. I read. A lot. I haven’t been precious about format in well over a decade. Or decades. I was the kid who read cereal boxes — sometimes the same box of Life over and over — if there were not other words available. I want to read. What I find now is that I gravitate toward the format that best suits the type of reading I want or need to do at that moment.

For fiction and narrative non-fiction, I am 100% digital. It kills me that I get so many ARCs in print — if it’s something I want to read, I’ll buy the digital version of a book a publisher sends me for free, just because I want to read in my preferred manner. I do a lot of reading at the gym, on planes, during the interstitial moments. Digital works for me on so many levels, particularly because I am aligned with the Evil Empire. They created a seamless purchasing and reading experience for me. That’s another post.

(Aside: on my last trip to Europe, I impulsively tossed a hardcover in my suitcase because I loved the author and — funny — the last print book I’d bought was hers. Never let me loose in Waterstones! I was flying business, and my suitcase, packed for three weeks, two divergent climates, was just a smidge overweight. Yep, the book. So I pulled out the book and shoved it into my already heavy backpack — two laptops, a Kindle, my phone, various chargers, and a hardcover book. Yeah, that was me, bent over double. Sadly, the book was one of the author’s weaker efforts, a shame as her previous book was really compelling.)

So, print. I buy magazines in print. I haven’t warmed to the digital versions. I think magazine publishers are going out of their way to make the experience as unlikeable as possible. It’s not a feat to replicate the print edition in digital format, full page fidelity and all. What I — and it seems so many others — want is a magazine that takes advantage of the technology. Magazine publishers don’t seem to get that, or maybe they think we are happy with okay, good enough, sloppy.

We’re not.

Much of what I read in magazines is available for free on the web, but I find my relationship with the print content and the web content are different. I like to revisit them, to touch them, to buy the special issues (did you know there was a Dwell “100 Houses We Love” special issue? I am too messy to be modern, yet I drool over Dwell ). I like to cut out pages, to save pieces, to enjoy the rhythm of reading magazines. It’s different, you know.

I want my digital magazines to give me that sort of joy — it is obvious that magazine publishers/app developers haven’t really thought much about the user experience of digital magazines, or, heck, the user experience of print magazines. Reading the articles is just part of what happens.

I’ve stopped subscribing to print magazines. I buy individual copies when I remember because I’ve been burned by magazine publishers. They’ve shuttered the titles I love and, to fulfill their own terms, substitute stuff I have no interest in reading. I don’t trust the publishers to do right by me. I’d probably consider iPad subscriptions if the product and prices were better, but so far, no dice.

Then the books. I am a bit of a cookbook addict. While I love the How To Cook Everythin g app (shopping lists, timers!), I also love flipping through glossy pages and seeing the finished dishes — knowing mine will never look that good — and lists of ingredients. I will buy the print version of this book. I love the books published by Ammo . I still get giddy over my art of Samurai Shamploo book (what? you haven’t watched the series? We need to talk!). I went to two independent bookstores to find an art book the husband didn’t know he wanted. I saw it at last year’s Comic Book Day, knew it was perfect, noted the title, and, sigh, Vroman’s didn’t have it — I started at Vroman’s because they have awesome greeting cards, and that is really important to me, since it was a holiday gift and all.

So yeah, I was that slightly older woman in the comic book store buying their last copy of the book. The box was a little messed up, but that is fine. The pages are filled with the artwork he digs.

I also have this crazy weird book from the 1970s of houses from a home decor magazine (can’t recall title — think Architectural Digesty) that I adore even though not a single thing is something I would ever consider for my home. Also, we have a precious copy of Arlene Dahl’s Always Ask a Man . It is the basis of my household’s “always let him think it’s his idea” philosophy.

These are books I want in print, want to flip through, want to touch as I remember lines or images. There are many more of these in my collection. The print books we — that collective we — want to keep are a blip compared to the books produced every year. For me, they are a blip compared to the number of books I read in a year. Most of those have very little value to me. I read, I discard.

There’s no telling what book might find a place in a permanent collection, but five seconds in a used bookstore (physical or digital) is enough to prove that much of what is printed isn’t valuable enough to remain a permanent part of most libraries. These are the type of books I believe we’ll see dying in print first.

My theory is that readers will grow more and more intolerant of those books that have no real value, books that are worn out before they are unembargoed. And no point in pretending you can keep the best parts from leaking out. The future of print is not day-late print versions of last year’s news. Let’s be honest here: most of these print books are bought at deep discounts by consumers. The “value” assigned by purchasers is far less than the value assigned by the publisher.

This is why, when the bookcase fairy finally delivers my dream bookshelves, I will not be dragging out every book I have stored in the garage. In fact, the longer the books remain out of sight, the less important displaying them becomes. Just as friends are comfortable browsing the house’s iTunes library, they happily page through my Kindle, sampling and discussing. What I will keep when I finally open those boxes — ah, the love and care with which they were packed! — will be those books on the endangered species list. Books that cannot be bought in any other way.

Most, but not all, of these are candidates for digital repurchase. Yes, you read that right: I will rebuy books I love in the format I prefer. As long as publishers don’t engage in stupid pricing tricks (see: book originally published in 2006 ). I’ll be honest, these books are not must-haves for me. They are want-to-haves. It’s the job of the publisher to make it an attractive purchase for me.

I cannot predict when the shift from mostly print to mostly digital will happen. I suspect it will be like a patchwork quilt (not a T-shirt quilt ). Print becomes more valuable when it becomes less disposable. We will happily invest in quality because what we buy is something we want to preserve — and display — for a long time. I think we interact with different media in different ways. I’m not a smell of books person, but I am a tactile person. Different types of content (the wrong word here, but nicely umbrella) demand different types of interaction.

Print and digital are different experiences. It’s not good or bad or right or wrong. It’s what the book, the story within (be it fiction or non-fiction), requires. Some stories can be told in every format possible. Some must be purely digital. Some demand the pace of print.

To me, the future of print is irrevocably tied to the consumer’s ability to acquire those books they deem valuable to them. This might mean buying a gorgeous book from Ammo Books from the get-go. It might mean buying a beautiful edition of a long-loved book. It might mean acquiring a physical copy of a digital book (or, vice versa: the digital companion to the print book).

What is important is that these print versions be quality — good covers, excellent paper, binding that doesn’t fall apart. Handmade, one-of-a-kind, original, limited edition, personal. The shift to digital reading is taking place rapidly, and there will be a point in the not-too-distant future where we stop thinking either/or and embrace either/and.

Is this the future you are preparing for?

File Under: The Future of Publishing

45 responses so far ↓

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez // Jul 6, 2010 at 1:56 pm

Great post, Kassia!

The simple recognition that “different types of content demand different types of interaction” is one that is seemingly lost on so many people, both in and outside of publishing. The evolution of digital content will offer opportunities that print can’t match, while also highlighting the unique aspects only print can offer.

What will be lost in the transition is the “excess weight” the publishing industry needs to lose anyway, and good riddance to all that, I say!

Mark Barrett // Jul 6, 2010 at 1:56 pm

Good stuff, Kassia, and not too far afield from where I stand after (almost) a year of looking at the same landscape. Much of what you describe speaks also to scale, and to the inevitability of an overall decline in printed tonnage in preference of print/object quality.

It’s not necessarily the case that large publishing houses won’t be able to make this transition, but bureaucratic survival instincts will almost certainly give smaller shops the opportunity to excel in this area. Like Hollywood twenty years ago, and the games biz a decade ago, publishing seems ripe for an independent movement — even if the more successful indies are only swallowed by the big fish in the end.

At the very least, practices, models and expectations will necessarily evolve.

Tom Jenkins // Jul 6, 2010 at 2:30 pm

Love the patchwork quilt analogy! And you have totally captured the uncertainties surrounding the shift from print to digital.

I would like to add to your statement “the future of print is irrevocably tied to the consumer’s ability to acquire those books they deem valuable to them,”; it is also tied to printing books as they are ordered and wanted, opposed to printing a million copies of a book that may never sell as such which takes away from the real “value” of the books to begin with.

I came across a “platform” for publishers called “Pipeno” which claims to put the power back in the writers’ and consumers hands. If what they claim is true, will writers start migrating over to “platforms” like these? Will the future of publishing in the digital age steer the power back into the writers’/consumers hands?

Pablo Defendini // Jul 6, 2010 at 4:45 pm

Done and done—perfectly said.

Holly // Jul 6, 2010 at 6:00 pm

I am 58 and grew up in a household filled with books; my current home is also filled with books. All are print; none are digital. If I walked over to my bookshelves right now, I could pick up one of my grandmother’s books, open it to find the notations she wrote in the margin. When holding one of her books in my hands, I feel a connection with her, and the value of the book transcends any literary value contained in the novel that sparked her comments. I worry that connections like this will be lost when fewer books are printed, when throwaway books are read and discarded digitally. The thought of having only expensively bound books in a home troubles me because my grandmother didn’t write in the margins of lavishly printed books, it was the inexpensive ones that allowed her the freedom to pencil in her thoughts.

Kat Meyer // Jul 6, 2010 at 7:09 pm

Kassia – you are so NOT a slightly older woman. You are a hot young thing. But, the rest of your post was dead-on. I’ve been chatting with some really interesting people doing really interesting bookish things with paper. Interesting and smart. “Not throwing the baby out with the bathwater” kind of stuff. I shall keep you posted. :) (DIGITAL DIVAZ DIG PAPER TOO)

Journaling | Like Fire // Jul 6, 2010 at 7:28 pm

[…] on Booksquare, Kassia Krozser weighs in perceptively on the future of print. The entire piece is well worth reading, and I have to say I very much agree with her either/and […]

Jodi // Jul 6, 2010 at 9:25 pm

I will be embarking on the digital road this year with my own work. Funny because I will always need to feel a book in my hand. I would like to think there is room for both in this industry.

Ryan Chapman // Jul 6, 2010 at 9:58 pm

Really enjoyed your post Kassia. I agree that the proliferation of formats will adhere to the content and reading habits of the individual (and, increasing the scope, indicate trending to the market).

And I too have felt really burned out by all the hysterical prognosticating around ebooks and whatnot. We don’t have to “save” anything, or “win” or “lose.” We just have to experiment intelligently, see what the reader likes, take it from there.

Debra Moolenaar // Jul 7, 2010 at 2:43 am

I have to agree with Holly, who at 58, has seen a bit of the way the world turns.

The society in which we live is already ‘disposable’ enough without our inability to see past the end of our noses making it worse!

For example, you won’t be bequeathing your kindle to your grandchildren will you as did Holly’s grandmother her books. And even if you do they’ll be interested in it solely for its antique value, I should think – for by then it will have been replaced with ‘improvements’ a million, zillion times.

Such is the case for many books I must agree.

HOWEVER, some books (at least the good ones) are the recipient of human IDEAS – our shared HISTORY our IDEALS.

As such I believe they should be treated with the same respect as we’d treat fine art – and I’ve not yet heard of anyone suggesting we ought to dump the Mona Lisa in The Louvre for a digital copy – have any of you?

FridayNet » Blog Archive » Bookmarks for June 24th through July 7th // Jul 7, 2010 at 3:00 am

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Patrick Jungla // Jul 7, 2010 at 7:00 am

I have never coveted CDs, I much prefer having 2,000 songs on my mp3 player.

Print books, however, are important to me. I like to look for books in second-hand book shops. I travel a lot, but I’ll only take one or two books with me for the journey. Flights are never usually longer than 12 hours, and at the destination there will be another opportunity to buy a book.

I agree that ebooks would work really well for manuals and academic books, which are heavy and need to be updated on a regular basis.

Self-publishing could yet be the saving grace for print books, as the ebook market is going to be swamped with poor and badly-prepared novels by aspiring writers in coming years.

I know ebook screens aren’t backlit, but my attention span for reading in front of a computer screen is close to zilch, whereas I can sit in a chair and read a print book for hours.

Fancy covers and handbound books aren’t the difference here, the difference will come down to whether you want to hold a computer screen in your hand.

Best wishes,

Kate Sullivan // Jul 7, 2010 at 7:39 am

As a publisher currently working digitally, but planning to expand into both trade and limited-edition print in the next year – AND as someone who has worked in both daily news and the magazine industry – HEAR HEAR. I couldn’t agree more with this post, and you’ve said everything beautifully.

I firmly believe that there will always be a place for print, and even for “low-rent” print…mass-market will probably become digital-only in the future, but I see well-produced trade-size paperbacks and hardbacks, as well as limited-edition, finely bound texts sticking around. People do want to hold a book, jot in the margins, put it on a shelf, give it to their grandkids. That won’t go away. But the printing ecosystem will change – I agree with Tom Jenkins above, that short-run and so-called PoD printing will play a much larger part in maintaining print in the future.

Heather McCormack // Jul 7, 2010 at 7:55 am

Hiya, Kassia.

Good work putting into words some extremely prevalent consumer attitudes toward reading that no one, especially publishers, seem to be bothering to collect. It all makes me very excited about the future of libraries, actually. Like many other people, I believe libraries can–and should–continue to preserve what our culture deems worthy of preserving–in print and in digital. There is personal preference, as you outlined: those physical books you still keep around because you love to touch them and they are so gob-smackingly gorgeous (I’m a tactile reader myself; got this James Dean photo essay book that I stare into every couple of months), for instance; then there are libraries, which, if they’re good at what they’re doing, reflect their communities. In other words, they do macro-curation. Both types of collecting feed each other and are absolutely essential to reading, publishing as a business, and, yes, librarianship. We are nothing without readers and their endearing, maddening loves, hates, and mood swings.

Kevin Smokler // Jul 7, 2010 at 10:07 am

It’s all about choices, isn’t it? Either or/chocolate or vanilla just sounds like reheated Cold-War thinking to me.

As you fabulously point out, Ms. K, want something to survive? Make it beautiful. I spend way more than practical or realistic on vinyl records b/c they are beautiful things. Then I rebuy them on mp3 b/c I can’t carry a turntable in my pocket.

The more choices we have, the more things stick around. Ubiquity is our future. Thank you for showing it to us.

Nicola Griffith // Jul 7, 2010 at 12:02 pm

Great post. Bang on.

My first novel came out as a mass market paperback original with an orange jellybean spaceship on the cover. Utterly disposable. A couple of years later it was reprinted with a nicer cover. Then it came out in a trade edition with a one-page B&W map and glossary.

Mostly, now, readers buy it in digital form but the trade paper edition is still chugging away. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if, one day, some tiny press licensed a luxury hardcover collectors’ edition, sold by subscription, on delicious paper, with full-colour fold-out maps and so on.

Publishing these days isn’t about either/or. It’s and/and.

Clive Warner // Jul 7, 2010 at 12:41 pm

I’m not optimistic for the future of paper books. Market forces are driving consumers rapidly towards EReaders. But the problem with that idea is, who wants to carry an extra device just for reading? No I don’t think so. Everything will possibly end up on the phone. In this regard Apple act like some kind of primitive dinosaur. I wish you would start a dialogue on this, Kassia. Question: I am a small press owner. How do I put a book on the iPhone. Am I supposed to learn Objective C or pay a programmer to render a complex print object into low level source code? Is this really what Apple wants? To turn back the clock to that we all have to learn low-level programming languages? This is crazy. I have no desire to go back to writing in Wordstar with its .op this and its and all that crap. Maybe Steve Jobs would like us to write books in machine code?

Clive Warner // Jul 7, 2010 at 12:43 pm

The blog software caused a typo by removing my angle brackets. Should read: . . . . and its ‘Control W’ and all that crap

Sara D. // Jul 7, 2010 at 2:09 pm

Thanks for the AMMO Books mention! We’re certainly pleased to hear you think our books are the type of print worth investing in. Obviously, our books are the kind that require print to survive indefinitely, so I hope you’ve hit the nail on the head.

Thanks again for thinking of us and for such an insightful post.

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[…] I’m still trying to figure this out.  I’ll let you know once I do.  In the meantime, instead of ranting, I’m gonna give you something more pragmatic: Read The Future of Print. […]

Heather S. Ingemar // Jul 7, 2010 at 4:57 pm

Great post. I think you’ve got it. We’ll keep the books we can’t live without, the children’s books that get passed down through generations, or the ones we love to read and re-read. We’ll keep the treasures, the useful books (cookbooks!), but a lot of the rest will be digital.

The beauty of it all is having choices. :) If you want digital, you can get it. If you want audio, you can get it. Print? Exactly the same.

It’s a beautiful thing.

Kassia Krozser // Jul 7, 2010 at 7:42 pm

Wow — so, so many comments, some that have me thinking more (Clive!). I’ll be responding as time permits — my cloning machine didn’t work the way I expected, so I remain a bit slow.

I’m really pleased that the idea of either/and resonated. It’s not a new thought, and I’m not even sure I recall who I stole it from. I suspect it was Tim O’Reilly. The bottom line is that this change is happening, it’s happening fast, but that doesn’t mean choice is disappearing. I believe the number of options — digital, print, audio — means more people can access books.

To me that’s a good thing.

iamtheangel.com // Jul 7, 2010 at 7:43 pm

Call me old school, but I can’t imagine print going away completely. It’s like CD’s, some people still need something you can hold in your hands.

moimystique // Jul 8, 2010 at 2:31 am

Nice article here. But I hope to provide another perspective: print might become obsolete in certain countries but many countries around the world will still hold a huge market for the same. I’m in the publishing business in India and we have decades to go before print goes out of print, so to speak. The digital experience has not yet made its mark here and we have a long way to go before e-publishing becomes big.

I suppose I’m an old-fashioned person and I don’t find ebooks fun to read though I warm to the search option. There’s a thrill in turning a page – physically. Also, used bookstores are my favourite haunt :)

Sean // Jul 8, 2010 at 6:27 am

Went print goes something great, humanity needs to be doing great things these days, will die. It was said earlier by a few commentors, physical books are noble and digital books are merely convenient. Paper books force a sort of attention to things that is dying out. I’m sorry but the death of physical books is not a transition but simply a death.

Theresa M. Moore // Jul 8, 2010 at 11:58 am

I believe in making both kinds of books available. When I was in junior high school I grew muscles because I took seven courses and each course had a book which weighed 5 pounds. We did not have lockers, so I had to lug the things around campus balanced on my hip (this was before the backpack thing became cool). If I had an ereader then it would have made things way easier. But having said that, there are some books which are designed NOT to be read on an ereader, and those are the ones to be treasured. The print book is not dying, per se, it is merely being shelved (pun intended) in favor of the convenience of being able to read unencumbered by sheer physical weight. And in this age of national security and so on, I would not like to have to leave something I just paid for behind. There is no death of physical books, and unless you live in the world of “Fahrenheit 451”, there is not likely to be.

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Shaz // Jul 8, 2010 at 5:31 pm

Couldn’t agree more!

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Shelley // Jul 9, 2010 at 8:50 am

I love the image of your reading even the cereal box. Although my work is on the Internet, I long for it to be in a book, for the reasons you say here–because it’s touch, it’s permanent, it’s closer to…real.

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Anna // Jul 9, 2010 at 4:04 pm

I agree with many of the points made by Kassia, digital is a convenient format and saves us space and time, etc. But…isn’t there always a but?…Warning, there is a high horse below and I am upon it.

I have profound concerns with access for the poor. Printed books allow the poor (which I was one of as a child) to have access to books via the library, a friends loan, second-hand shops, etc. (This obviously doesn’t include the larger world market where the vast majority do not access to computers let alone e-readers.).

The publishing industry has always been an odd amalgam of money making industry and the preserver of ideas, culture, and human experience via stories. It is the second part of that I think needs consideration and perhaps the greatest of care. There is already a gap between the haves and have-nots, what would it mean to deepen that gap by making the ideas that help pull people out of poverty inaccessible? And before folks say anything about kids having access via school, we are all well aware inner city schools and very rural schools have limited/to no access to computers let alone other digital readers. And of course we can say that the libraries have computers. How many does your library have? Should libraries have e-readers to check-out? How many do you think it would take to service a community? What would the wait list be on that?

But what about the idea that there would still be print books? Let’s go with the idea of books moving to a primarily digital format and the print market adjusting to become something that is aimed at people who really want a book experience, etc. How would the market price such books? I would say that the $24 book would be the norm.

Some numbers to consider. 37 million Americans are considered poor. A family of four living on $19,771 is the government threshold for defining a family as poor. Now pay your rent, buy your food, pay the utilities, buy your bus pass or pay your car payment, pay for a doctor’s appointment. Now, get the money to buy an e-reader or even a $24 dollar print edition.

And a last thought in that same vein, America’s poverty growth is increasing every year.

I think about the first time I read The Grapes of Wrath (in the discard bid at a local Goodwill, probably someones “cheap throw-a-way”) and Jane Eyre (same bin) and all the other books that I read from the library, second hand bookstores, and from friends. They all helped inform who I was and am. They allowed me to see a larger world. I would like to know that in the future others, who will never be able to afford an e-reader and the like, will be able to have that same opportunity.

Of course all of the above assumes that in the 21st century, reading and access to books is a human right. I know that an industry is not responsible for assuring that everyone is afforded such a right, and perhaps, money-wise, it is best to see reading and books as a privilege. But maybe this particular industry, that holds the collected ideas of generations, should perhaps think of its product, that great thing called a book, in a different set of terms?

I have heard many arguments pro and con on the move to digital. But I think that people miss a significant part of the issue when they don’t consider what that move means for one a large segment of the population, the ever increasing poor.

…and dismount.

Sean // Jul 10, 2010 at 3:25 pm

Thank you Anna for that reply! I totally agree with your comments on access to books for the poor. I’m a teacher and give away free books to students every year. Can’t very well give away Kindles now can I? I’m also a book collector and feel that the further gentrification of access to quality books means doom for the average person of low or fixed income that wishes to read. Yes I know libraries will still be there but what happens when their copies of books are discarded because of age and no new books replace them? And seriously if there are 50 people on a waiting list for a book from the library and it’s prohibitively expensive to buy an upscale paper copy or an e-reader doesn’t that seem like East Germany in the communist era when a grocery store might have 5 loaves of bread, 50 cases of vodka and one lonely pork chop in it? Again, well said Anna.

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Scott Nicholson // Jul 12, 2010 at 7:54 am

Very thoughtful analysis. Thank you. So little of the “e-book war” discussion actually mentions readers at all, so this is refreshing.

Scott Nicholson http://hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com

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Adrianna Dane // Jul 13, 2010 at 7:03 am

A great post, very spot on. And I used to read billboards and cereal boxes as well. I agree that there will be room for both print and electronic. Perhaps more selective print and print on demand. I also agree with your take on the reasons at least some of us buy print magazines as opposed to wanting to read them in digital format. I do that clipping stuff, too.

Great article!

Ty Johnston // Jul 13, 2010 at 4:02 pm

As an indie author and a former newspaper journalist, I believe this might have been the best post I’ve read on expectations for the future of print. It’s not going to die completely, but it’s going to change. What book publishers need to do is find a way to work with both digital and print. Newspapers didn’t. They’re dying. I know. I’ve witnessed it firsthand.

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Why the Printed Book Will Last Another 500 Years

The future of reading came and went.

It’s always an intellectual mistake to assume that the thing you love the most might be the exception. I remember listening to a public-radio conversation a few years ago in which two people debated the necessity and romance of record stores (a very large and storied one in NYC had just closed) and thinking, Well, of course record stores are going to close, it’s sad but it’s the way of the world , and feeling kind of smug about it because I don’t frequent record stores. And then realizing a moment later that in two, or five, or maybe ten years time—or maybe sooner—I could be listening to two people on the radio having this exact same wistful conversation about bookstores.

I didn’t feel so smug after that.

Bookstores are a sacred space for me and books are hallowed objects. I’ve worked in two of the former and owned and treasured an innumerable number of the latter. (I honestly don’t know the number of books I currently own; I do know that when my wife and I moved most recently, our moving company charged us extra afterward because we’d seriously underestimated the number of boxes of books.) My first and favorite activity in any new city is to locate and visit the best bookstore; I literally Google the city’s name and “best bookstore” and see what comes up. This almost never fails to lead me not only to a great bookstore but to the best, most interesting neighborhood in town.

I’m not alone in any of these romantic sentiments, of course. And not alone in the fear that, in my lifetime, it might all disappear. People once treasured vinyl albums and loitered for hours at record stores, too, arguing favorite classics and anticipating new releases, and then the music industry got shredded by the digital revolution. Vinyl record stores now function like antique shops; you can find them, sure, but what they offer is mostly nostalgia for a format that’s no longer relevant.

Why should books prove to be different?  my rational brain asked my romantic brain.  Shut up shut up shut up shut up , my romantic brain told my rational brain.

After all, e-books and e-readers seemed ridiculous until suddenly they weren’t. The Kindle was everywhere. Even people on the subway in self-consciously literary New York City were split roughly fifty-fifty between tablets and those prehistoric-looking physical books. (In hindsight, I’m sure this also had something to do with the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey  and the number of curious readers who didn’t want to out themselves.) Was it possible that books, that once revolutionary technology, would also become obsolete curios, confined to quaint and musty specialty shops? That my Google searches for “best bookstore” would be tragically shortened to simply “bookstore,” in hopes there would be a single one left?

So I am obviously greatly heartened by this report from the New York Times stating that e-book sales are waning and physical book stores are surviving, even thriving. I’m heartened in part because I’m convinced these are positive goods for the world. And I’m heartened because this reversal seems to confirm a theory I’ve long held but have been frankly too frightened to fully embrace.

The theory is this: Maybe books are different.

I mean, books are different. That’s obvious. People collected records and CDs, and they used to stash physical photos in albums as keepsakes, but among cultural artifacts, books are the one physical package that we proudly retain, archive and display. More than that, the experience of a book—of receiving what a book has to offer through the physical medium of the book itself—is much different than, say, the experience of receiving what a song has to offer through the physical medium of the vinyl 45, or the cassingle, or the shiny CD, or the MP3. Whatever medium the music is delivered in, the song remains the same—once it gets to your headphones, it doesn’t really matter what form it arrived in (esoteric preferences for the “warmth” of vinyl notwithstanding).

It’s different when you read a book. When you read a physical book, or you read an e-book, the physical experience of reading that book is different. It looks different. It feels different. It even smells different. Your memory of having read it will be different. Unlike music, food, or paintings, you can choose what head-hole to put a novel in: You can put it in your eyes (by reading it) or in your ears (by listening to the audiobook). You can read it on a screen, on which each “page” pops up in a kind of context-free procession toward infinity, with no physical referents as to how many pages have already passed and how many are yet to come. All books—all text—start to feel the same, as though dredged up from a vast grey ocean of pixels. Or you can read the exact same book —the same words, the same story, the same ideas, the same emotions—on paper, bound between covers, where you physically sense the heft of what you’ve read and of what you have yet to encounter. Where you can close the book with a satisfying thud when you are finished. Those are two very different experiences of the same book.

Many of my most treasured reading experiences are tied up with the physical books themselves: a used, crumbling Penguin Classics copy of A Farewell to Arms  bought on the cheap and read in college. A particularly well-bound paperback copy of Emma  by Jane Austen, with a pliant spine that let the pages fall open on the table just so. A copy of The Mezzanine  by Nicholson Baker that I took out on a whim from the library, which had extra heavy laminated protective covers and was graffitied throughout with other people’s appreciative marginalia. These physical qualities are all as memorable to me, and as intrinsic to my experience of those stories, as the surrounding restaurant is to a memorable meal that you eat. Put another way: A physical book is like eating a great meal in a beautiful restaurant with a fantastic view; an e-book is like eating that same meal from a takeout box on your lap in a basement.

I’m so enamored of paperbacks, for example, in contrast to hardcovers—how they fit in your back pocket, how they get worn, get bent or torn, bear every mark of your love on them—that, when I wrote my first novel , it honestly didn’t feel entirely real to me until the first paperback arrived. The hardcover, which was beautiful and which I obviously treasured, and which had been out at that point for nearly a year, still felt slightly unreal, like a prank, or something you get at the county fair: A novelty book with YOUR name printed on the cover! The very flimsiness of a paperback, for me, enhances the experience of the story inside: That a cheap and disposable package could contain something that can transport you anywhere, hijack your brain, and maybe change your life.

Again, I know I’m an outlier on this; not alone, exactly, but a member of a weirdo tribe. I’ve seen other people interact with books—crack them open, read them, chuck them without a thought—often enough to know that the true book fetishist is in the minority. But this recent good news about print books at least suggests my own experiences with books—real books—aren’t simply delusions. That the appeal of the physical book itself—its heft, its scent, the tactile quality of its cover, the give of the binding, the paperstock—is not a mirage that no one else can perceive. That maybe books have survived for 500 years for a reason, and maybe they’ll survive 500 more. That maybe books are different.

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Brains, Books and the Future of Print

Certainly, for all the fuss made about the Kindle, more than 95% of book buyers are still opting for the print version ... except, possibly, in the hot romance and erotic fiction categories. Earlier this year, Peter Smith, of IT World, noted that "of the top 10 bestsellers under the 'Multiformat' category [of Fictionwise ebooks sold], nine are tagged 'erotica' and the last is 'dark fantasy.'" That's only one list, but it's an interesting side-note that makes sense: just as with the internet and cable television, there's a particularly strong appeal to getting access to what Smith calls "salacious" content without having to face the check-out clerk with the goods in hand.

"My greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps videos (in the new vooks). The child's imagination and children's nascent sense of probity and introspection are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. the attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it."   

Interesting enough, the one computer scientist in the group was of the opinion that the best use of electronic books and capabilities was to enhance print books, not to replace them. But it's all interesting food for thought ... and, hopefully, more research as electronic readers find their way into more households and hands.

(Photo: Flickr/oskay)

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What Will Become of the Paper Book?

How their design will evolve in the age of the kindle..

Book designed by Sara De Bondt Studio/Visual Editions.

The change has come more slowly to books than it came to music or to business correspondence, but by now it feels inevitable. The digital era is upon us. The Twilight s and Freedom s of 2025 will be consumed primarily as e-books. In many ways, this is good news. Books will become cheaper and more easily accessible. Hypertext, embedded video, and other undreamt-of technologies will give rise to new poetic, rhetorical, and narrative possibilities. But a literary culture that has defined itself through paper books for centuries will surely feel the loss as they pass away.

In the past several years, we’ve all heard readers mourn the passing of the printed word. The elegy is familiar: I crave the smell of a well-worn book, the weight of it in my hands; all of my favorite books I discovered through loans from a friend, that minor but still-significant ritual of trust; I need to see it on my shelf after I’ve read it (and I don’t mind if others see it too); and what is a classic if not a book where I’m forced to rediscover my own embarrassing college-age marginalia?

Luddites can take comfort in the persistence of vinyl records, postcards, and photographic film. The paper book will likewise survive, but its place in the culture will change significantly. As it loses its traditional value as an efficient vessel for text, the paper book’s other qualities—from its role in literary history to its inimitable design possibilities to its potential for physical beauty—will take on more importance. The future is yet to be written, but a few possibilities for the fate of the paper book are already on display on bookshelves near you.

*          *          *

We’re warned from an early age not to be taken in by the sensuous aspects of a paper book’s design, such as its cover. Yet the visual effect of a well-made book, even an inexpensive paperback, unquestionably shapes our interpretation and appreciation of the text.

Consider this Penguin UK collection of essays by the German critic Walter Benjamin. The front cover comments on the book’s status as a manufactured object. This is in harmony with Benjamin’s text: “[T]hat which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”

Book designed and photographed by David Pearson.

Now, as we move into the digital age, the well-made copy has come to occupy a familiar, almost nostalgic middle ground between the aura of an original and the ghostly quality of a computer file. A mass-produced paper book, though bulkier and more expensive, may continue to be more desirable because it carries with it this material presence. And presence means something—or it can, at least, in the hands of a good book designer.

The mechanical reproduction of literary texts is a very old story—more than 500 years old. Printed books were an early experiment in the mass production of art. Out of that successful venture, among other literary advances, the novel was born. Writers like Cervantes recognized and realized the potential of the printed book, that ingenious device for delivering stories and ideas to an idle provincial reader.

The story of Don Quixote features countless printed books, and the entire novel can be read as a commentary on and intellectual advancement of that revolutionary technology. Is it any more appropriate to consume Quixote on an e-reader than it is to, say, watch a colorized, 3-D Citizen Kane ?

This question points to a second possible mode of survival for the paper book in the digital age. Purists will argue that some important texts ought to be read in their original form. This may be especially convincing when it comes to the novel, a literary form so bound up in the history of the printed book—and, by many accounts, well past its golden age as the digital transition begins.

Of course, advances in book technology often add to texts as much as they take away. For example, innovations in wood engraving led to Gustav Doré’s famous 1863 illustrations of Quixote .

Plate 1 of Gustave Doré’s illustrations to Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote via Wikimedia Commons.

When we speak of illustrations, book covers, typesetting, and other features specific to a given print edition, we’re analyzing what the French theorist Gérard Genette calls “paratexts.” In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation , he writes, “[A]lthough we do not always know whether these productions are to be regarded as belonging to the text, in any case they surround and extend it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present , to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book.”

As e-books overhaul and re-present many long-standing paratextual categories, we trade off layers of established meaning. The typescript page shown here, from James Joyce’s Ulysses , is a famous example of a paratext with clear authorial intent. Joyce asked the printer to enlarge the final, redundant period at the end of the “Ithaca” chapter. On a Kindle, the reader can adjust the font size herself.

Joyce wanted his free-floating period to be especially visible because it meant more than the average punctuation mark—it gave a full stop to the long “sentence” that was Ulysses . Recently, several young writers have further cultivated paratextual elements like punctuation, typesetting, and binding as arenas of authorial expression. Dave Eggers prints body text on the cover of his book; Mark Z. Danielewski uses colored, upside-down, and Braille fonts ; Salvador Plascencia crosses out words and blacks over whole columns of text. Laurence Sterne’s 1759 novel Tristram Shandy , with its blank, black, and marbled pages, stands as an early precedent for these sorts of explorations.

Tree of Codes , Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2010 novel-by-erasure, is one example of a paratextually audacious paper book that would lose much in translation to an e-book. Foer picked through the pages of his favorite novel (Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles ), pulling out words to create a new narrative composed entirely from Schulz’s raw material. Foer’s originality can be questioned (Tom Phillips’ A Humument tried the same trick 40 years ago), and his finished product arguably fails to bridge the divide between conceptual art and literature, but the design work is unimpeachable. Substantial portions of each page are die cut, creating evocative, three-dimensional wells of negative space. Schulz was killed in the Holocaust at the age of 50 with several good works likely left in him. Foer’s tribute gives paratextual emphasis to this loss.

Tree of Codes designed by Sara De Bondt Studio/Visual Editions.

Unlike Cervantes, Joyce, and Schulz, living writers can raise objections when their work is adulterated to fit new forms of literary consumption. For example, Salvador Plascencia, author of the 2005 McSweeney’s novel The People of Paper , has been vocal in asking that readers enjoy his book in printed form and not on Kindle, Nook, iPad, or other e-readers. He points to the title of his novel by way of an explanation. “Readers would be missing an essential material metaphor if they were on a pixel reader,” he says.

“That, and I don’t want hapless readers enlarging my fonts and thinking that the book lives in this androgynous space that is neither recto nor verso,” Plascencia adds. “The book is sexed: on your left you have a verso, in the middle your gutter, and to the right your recto . E-readers are neutering and spaying our sexy novels.” In The People of Paper , for example, different storylines play out in verso and recto, respectively, with odd-numbered pages following one set of characters and even-numbered pages another.

Salvador Plascencia/The People of Paper/Published by McSweeney’s/Image via Nashville Review/Vanderbilt University.

This is one future for the paper book in the age of digital proliferation—a select group of design-conscious authors will continue to address their creations specifically to the printed medium. Their themes, like Plascencia’s and Foer’s, will likely revolve around the history and practice of writing books, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary—one of literature’s greatest themes has always been itself.

Other writers go even further, making over the entire paratextual edifice, as Anne Carson does for her recent New Directions publication, Nox . “When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book,” she writes on the back cover. “This is a replica of it, as close as we could get.” The book is indeed a facsimile of a handmade original, bound accordion-style and boxed. Verso pages “translate” a Catullus elegy by offering long Latin-English dictionary entries for each word in the poem. Recto pages tell the story of Carson’s relationship to her brother through fragments of lyric essay and primary materials like photographs and letters.

Nox /New Directions Books.

Carson, a classicist, is well aware of the ways texts evolve or disappear when confronted with changes in modes of transmission. For instance, her Autobiography of Red (1999) purports to complete a once-famous ancient Greek epic of which only a few fragments now survive. She must have been thinking in that long view, embracing the uncertain future of the book, as she assembled this tribute to her brother in a mortal coil of paper—fragile, tactually sensuous, and fully incarnate in its physical form.

Carson’s approach fits into the burgeoning category of “artist’s book”—meaning roughly that the design and paratextual elements of the book are at least as artistically significant as the text.

William Blake is often regarded as the father of the genre. To separate his text from its setting is to lose an essential dimension of meaning and expression. So his images, the product of an archaic process of engraving and hand-coloring, have survived through centuries of changing print technologies. Though students often first encounter Blake’s poems stripped of their illustrations in paper anthologies, facsimile editions of his major works remain available in bookstores to this day. The tendency to read Blake in facsimile will likely survive the digital transition as well—a testimony to Blake’s unique and successful blending of literary and visual arts.

Plate with The Tyger poem by William Blake via Wikimedia Commons.

Along the same lines, a first-edition Blake boasts an aura equal to that of a great painting or sculpture. This opens another possibility for the paper book in the digital age: As paper books lose their use value and become collector’s objects, writers gain access to the speculative art market. If Blake were alive today, he would find an art market primed and ready to pay vast sums for limited edition copies produced in his studio. This could become an enticing alternative for art- and prestige-oriented writers squeezed by a declining publishing industry.

Andrew Hoyem’s San Francisco-based Arion Press can be thought of as a sort of laboratory for fine-art approaches to publishing literature. Arion’s catalog features a 50-pound Monotype folio Bible ; an elegant Moby Dick with commissioned wood engravings; a radical, two-dimensional Flatland that folds out to form a 30-foot plane of text; and a Pale Fire with John Shade’s meta-fictional poem printed on index cards in a separate volume.

A common Arion approach is to pair a hand-setting of a text with new work by a contemporary artist. Pictured below are Kiki Smith’s illustrations of “ I Love My Love ” by the early Beat poet Helen Adam. Only 101 copies were printed.

I Love My Love /Arion Press.

Many fine presses around the country put out similarly handcrafted products, often featuring new fiction or poetry. Absent the contributions of well-known artists like Smith, these publications are often labors of love, driven more by an ascendant creative-class interest in pre-digital technologies than any existing profit model. However, as mass-market paperbacks give way to e-books, fine press editions seem poised to appeal to the nostalgic consumer of paper books.

Photograph by Lorika13 via Flickr.

Who will buy these new, well-made paper books? One likely result of the transition to e-books is that paper book culture will move further out of reach for those without disposable income. Debt-ridden college students, underemployed autodidacts, and the everyday mass of bargain-hunters will find better deals on the digital side of the divide. (Netflix for books, anyone?)

As paper books become more unusual, some will continue to buy them as collectors’ items, others for the superior sensory experience they afford. There’s reason to think this is happening already: Carl Jung’s Red Book , a facsimile edition featuring hand-painted text and illustrations, sold well in America in 2010 despite its $195 price tag. When readers believe that a book is special in itself, as an object, they can be persuaded to pay more.

Bookshelves will survive in the homes of serious digital-age readers, but their contents will be much more judiciously curated. The next generation of paper books will likely rival the art hanging beside them on the walls for beauty, expense, and “aura”—for better or for worse.

There’s a whole class of paper books we haven’t discussed yet—the paratextually unremarkable, unimaginatively designed rows of paperbacks and late-edition hardcovers that line most of our shelves. These are headed for the same place most manufactured objects go eventually—the scrapheap.

In its own way, even the well-made paper book may someday reach a similar fate. The art market may have deep pockets, but historically it hasn’t been very hospitable to literature. As far as the “artist’s book” is concerned, the first term in the phrase has tended to take precedence, in the past century at least. A lover of literature can’t help feeling that—as the conventions of the paper book have come under the interrogation of the visual arts—poetry, rhetoric, narrative, and meaning have often suffered.

Dieter Roth’s Multiple Literaturwurst (Martin Walser: “Halbzeit”). Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg c/Dieter Roth Estate courtesy Hauser und Wirth.

German artist Dieter Roth’s Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Work in 20 Volumes (1974) is an ominous example. Roth ground up the philosopher’s complete works and used them as a substitute for meat in a recipe for homemade sausage. The result is literaturwurst —a final possible future for the paper book in the age of digital proliferation. Don’t forget to read about the key and the other objects featured in our series on everyday design .

November 1, 2013

12 min read

The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: Why Paper Still Beats Screens

E-readers and tablets are becoming more popular as such technologies improve, but reading on paper still has its advantages

By Ferris Jabr

One of the most provocative viral YouTube videos in the past two years begins mundanely enough: a one-year-old girl plays with an iPad, sweeping her fingers across its touch screen and shuffling groups of icons. In following scenes, she appears to pinch, swipe and prod the pages of paper magazines as though they, too, are screens. Melodramatically, the video replays these gestures in close-up.

For the girl's father, the video— A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work —is evidence of a generational transition. In an accompanying description, he writes, “Magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives”—that is, for people who have been interacting with digital technologies from a very early age, surrounded not only by paper books and magazines but also by smartphones, Kindles and iPads.

Whether or not his daughter truly expected the magazines to behave like an iPad, the video brings into focus a question that is relevant to far more than the youngest among us: How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read?

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Since at least the 1980s researchers in psychology, computer engineering, and library and information science have published more than 100 studies exploring differences in how people read on paper and on screens. Before 1992 most experiments concluded that people read stories and articles on screens more slowly and remember less about them. As the resolution of screens on all kinds of devices sharpened, however, a more mixed set of findings began to emerge. Recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when they need to concentrate for a long time—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and as reading digital texts for facts and fun becomes more common. In the U.S., e-books currently make up more than 20 percent of all books sold to the general public.

Despite all the increasingly user-friendly and popular technology, most studies published since the early 1990s confirm earlier conclusions: paper still has advantages over screens as a reading medium. Together laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports indicate that digital devices prevent people from efficiently navigating long texts, which may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. Whether they realize it or not, people often approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper. And e-readers fail to re-create certain tactile experiences of reading on paper, the absence of which some find unsettling.

“There is physicality in reading,” says cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, “maybe even more than we want to think about as we lurch into digital reading—as we move forward perhaps with too little reflection. I would like to preserve the absolute best of older forms but know when to use the new.”

Textual Landscapes Understanding how reading on paper differs from reading on screens requires some explanation of how the human brain interprets written language. Although letters and words are symbols representing sounds and ideas, the brain also regards them as physical objects. As Wolf explains in her 2007 book Proust and the Squid , we are not born with brain circuits dedicated to reading, because we did not invent writing until relatively recently in our evolutionary history, around the fourth millennium b.c. So in childhood, the brain improvises a brand-new circuit for reading by weaving together various ribbons of neural tissue devoted to other abilities, such as speaking, motor coordination and vision.

Some of these repurposed brain regions specialize in object recognition: they help us instantly distinguish an apple from an orange, for example, based on their distinct features, yet classify both as fruit. Similarly, when we learn to read and write, we begin to recognize letters by their particular arrangements of lines, curves and hollow spaces—a tactile learning process that requires both our eyes and hands. In recent research by Karin James of Indiana University Bloomington, the reading circuits of five-year-old children crackled with activity when they practiced writing letters by hand but not when they typed letters on a keyboard. And when people read cursive writing or intricate characters such as Japanese kanji , the brain literally goes through the motions of writing, even if the hands are empty.

Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but some researchers think they are similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of indoor physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular passage in a book, they often remember where in the text it appeared. Much as we might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of a hiking trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett at a dance on the bottom left corner of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice .

In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than on-screen text. An open paper book presents a reader with two clearly defined domains—the left- and right-hand pages—and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. You can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing awareness of the whole text. You can even feel the thickness of the pages you have read in one hand and the pages you have yet to read in the other. Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on a trail—there is a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make the text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of that text.

In contrast, most digital devices interfere with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit people from mapping the journey in their mind. A reader of digital text might scroll through a seamless stream of words, tap forward one page at a time or use the search function to immediately locate a particular phrase—but it is difficult to see any one passage in the context of the entire text. As an analogy, imagine if Google Maps allowed people to navigate street by individual street, as well as to teleport to any specific address, but prevented them from zooming out to see a neighborhood, state or country. Likewise, glancing at a progress bar gives a far more vague sense of place than feeling the weight of read and unread pages. And although e-readers and tablets replicate pagination, the displayed pages are ephemeral. Once read, those pages vanish. Instead of hiking the trail yourself, you watch the trees, rocks and moss pass by in flashes, with no tangible trace of what came before and no easy way to see what lies ahead.

“The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized,” says Abigail J. Sellen of Microsoft Research Cambridge in England, who co-authored the 2001 book The Myth of the Paperless Office . “Only when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don't think e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize where you are in a book.”

Exhaustive Reading At least a few studies suggest that screens sometimes impair comprehension precisely because they distort people's sense of place in a text. In a January 2013 study by Anne Mangen of the University of Stavanger in Norway and her colleagues, 72 10th grade students studied one narrative and one expository text. Half the students read on paper, and half read PDF files on computers. Afterward, students completed reading comprehension tests, during which they had access to the texts. Students who read the texts on computers performed a little worse, most likely because they had to scroll or click through the PDFs one section at a time, whereas students reading on paper held the entire texts in their hands and quickly switched between different pages. “The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end, and everything in between and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively,” Mangen says. “You have more free capacity for comprehension.”

Other researchers agree that screen-based reading can dull comprehension because it is more mentally taxing and even physically tiring than reading on paper. E-ink reflects ambient light just like the ink on a paper book, but computer screens, smartphones and tablets shine light directly on people's faces. Today's LCDs are certainly gentler on eyes than their predecessor, cathode-ray tube (CRT) screens, but prolonged reading on glossy, self-illuminated screens can cause eyestrain, headaches and blurred vision. In an experiment by Erik Wästlund, then at Karlstad University in Sweden, people who took a reading comprehension test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.

In a related set of Wästlund's experiments, 82 volunteers completed the same reading comprehension test on computers, either as a paginated document or as a continuous piece of text. Afterward, researchers assessed the students' attention and working memory—a collection of mental talents allowing people to temporarily store and manipulate information in their mind. Volunteers had to quickly close a series of pop-up windows, for example, or remember digits that flashed on a screen. Like many cognitive abilities, working memory is a finite resource that diminishes with exertion.

Although people in both groups performed equally well, those who had to scroll through the unbroken text did worse on the attention and working memory tests. Wästlund thinks that scrolling—which requires readers to consciously focus on both the text and how they are moving it—drains more mental resources than turning or clicking a page, which are simpler and more automatic gestures. The more attention is diverted to moving through a text, the less is available for understanding it. A 2004 study conducted at the University of Central Florida reached similar conclusions.

An emerging collection of studies emphasizes that in addition to screens possibly leeching more attention than paper, people do not always bring as much mental effort to screens in the first place. Based on a detailed 2005 survey of 113 people in northern California, Ziming Liu of San Jose State University concluded that those reading on screens take a lot of shortcuts—they spend more time browsing, scanning and hunting for keywords compared with people reading on paper and are more likely to read a document once and only once.

When reading on screens, individuals seem less inclined to engage in what psychologists call metacognitive learning regulation—setting specific goals, rereading difficult sections and checking how much one has understood along the way. In a 2011 experiment at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, college students took multiple-choice exams about expository texts either on computers or on paper. Researchers limited half the volunteers to a meager seven minutes of study time; the other half could review the text for as long as they liked. When under pressure to read quickly, students using computers and paper performed equally well. When managing their own study time, however, volunteers using paper scored about 10 percentage points higher. Presumably, students using paper approached the exam with a more studious attitude than their screen-reading peers and more effectively directed their attention and working memory.

Even when studies find few differences in reading comprehension between screens and paper, screen readers may not remember a text as thoroughly in the long run. In a 2003 study Kate Garland, then at the University of Leicester in England, and her team asked 50 British college students to read documents from an introductory economics course either on a computer monitor or in a spiral-bound booklet. After 20 minutes of reading, Garland and her colleagues quizzed the students. Participants scored equally well regardless of the medium but differed in how they remembered the information.

Psychologists distinguish between remembering something—a relatively weak form of memory in which someone recalls a piece of information, along with contextual details, such as where and when one learned it—and knowing something: a stronger form of memory defined as certainty that something is true. While taking the quiz, Garland's volunteers marked both their answer and whether they “remembered” or “knew” the answer. Students who had read study material on a screen relied much more on remembering than on knowing, whereas students who read on paper depended equally on the two forms of memory. Garland and her colleagues think that students who read on paper learned the study material more thoroughly more quickly; they did not have to spend a lot of time searching their mind for information from the text—they often just knew the answers.

Perhaps any discrepancies in reading comprehension between paper and screens will shrink as people's attitudes continue to change. Maybe the star of A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work will grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk among older generations. The latest research suggests, however, that substituting screens for paper at an early age has disadvantages that we should not write off so easily. A 2012 study at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center in New York City recruited 32 pairs of parents and three- to six-year-old children. Kids remembered more details from stories they read on paper than ones they read in e-books enhanced with interactive animations, videos and games. These bells and whistles deflected attention away from the narrative toward the device itself. In a follow-up survey of 1,226 parents, the majority reported that they and their children prefer print books over e-books when reading together.

Nearly identical results followed two studies, described this past September in Mind, Brain, and Education , by Julia Parrish-Morris, now at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues. When reading paper books to their three- and five-year-old children, parents helpfully related the story to their child's life. But when reading a then popular electric console book with sound effects, parents frequently had to interrupt their usual “dialogic reading” to stop the child from fiddling with buttons and losing track of the narrative. Such distractions ultimately prevented the three-year-olds from understanding even the gist of the stories, but all the children followed the stories in paper books just fine.

Such preliminary research on early readers underscores a quality of paper that may be its greatest strength as a reading medium: its modesty. Admittedly, digital texts offer clear advantages in many different situations. When one is researching under deadline, the convenience of quickly accessing hundreds of keyword-searchable online documents vastly outweighs the benefits in comprehension and retention that come with dutifully locating and rifling through paper books one at a time in a library. And for people with poor vision, adjustable font size and the sharp contrast of an LCD screen are godsends. Yet paper, unlike screens, rarely calls attention to itself or shifts focus away from the text. Because of its simplicity, paper is “a still point, an anchor for the consciousness,” as William Powers writes in his 2006 essay “Hamlet's Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal.” People consistently report that when they really want to focus on a text, they read it on paper. In a 2011 survey of graduate students at National Taiwan University, the majority reported browsing a few paragraphs of an item online before printing out the whole text for more in-depth reading. And in a 2003 survey at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, nearly 80 percent of 687 students preferred to read text on paper rather than on a screen to “understand it with clarity.”

Beyond pragmatic considerations, the way we feel about a paper book or an e-reader—and the way it feels in our hands—also determines whether we buy a best-selling book in hardcover at a local bookstore or download it from Amazon. Surveys and consumer reports suggest that the sensory aspects of reading on paper matter to people more than one might assume: the feel of paper and ink; the option to smooth or fold a page with one's fingers; the distinctive sound a page makes when turned. So far digital texts have not satisfyingly replicated such sensations. Paper books also have an immediately discernible size, shape and weight. We might refer to a hardcover edition of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace as a “hefty tome” or to a paperback of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a “slim volume.” In contrast, although a digital text has a length that may be represented with a scroll or progress bar, it has no obvious shape or thickness. An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you are reading Marcel Proust's magnum opus or one of Ernest Hemingway's short stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough so-called haptic dissonance to dissuade some people from using e-readers.

To amend this sensory incongruity, many designers have worked hard to make the e-reader or tablet experience as close to reading on paper as possible. E-ink resembles typical chemical ink, and the simple layout of the Kindle's screen looks remarkably like a page in a paper book. Likewise, Apple's iBooks app attempts to simulate somewhat realistic page turning. So far such gestures have been more aesthetic than pragmatic. E-books still prevent people from quickly scanning ahead on a whim or easily flipping to a previous chapter when a sentence surfaces a memory of something they read earlier.

Some digital innovators are not confining themselves to imitations of paper books. Instead they are evolving screen-based reading into something else entirely. Scrolling may not be the ideal way to navigate a text as long and dense as Herman Melville's Moby Dick , but the New York Times , the Washington Post , ESPN and other media outlets have created beautiful, highly visual articles that could not appear in print because they blend text with movies and embedded sound clips and depend entirely on scrolling to create a cinematic experience. Robin Sloan has pioneered the tap essay, which relies on physical interaction to set the pace and tone, unveiling new words, sentences and images only when someone taps a phone or a tablet's touch screen. And some writers are pairing up with computer programmers to produce ever more sophisticated interactive fiction and nonfiction in which one's choices determine what one reads, hears and sees next.

When it comes to intensively reading long pieces of unembellished text, paper and ink may still have the advantage. But plain text is not the only way to read.

Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for Scientific American . He has also written for the New York Times Magazine , the New Yorker and Outside .

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, the future of the printed book in the era of technological advancement: an imperative for digital innovation and engagement.

Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society

ISSN : 1477-996X

Article publication date: 23 September 2021

Issue publication date: 13 December 2021

The purpose of this paper is to establish the place of the printed book in the era of technological advancement with the assumption that the print media is facing imminent death in the face of readily available and convenient online information. Also the paper aims to assess how the development of new technologies have affected the production, circulation and readership of the printed book, especially among the young generation.

Design/methodology/approach

Explanatory study was used with closed-ended approach to collect data from 50 students of the Technical University of Kenya and 5 key informant interviews with selected book publishers in Nairobi. The uses and gratification theory was used to explore the knowledge-seeking behavior among the respondents.

Findings showed that more than 80% of the respondents preferred the internet to the printed book, which, according to them, has no future in the face of technological advancement. Book publishers, on the other hand, felt that the printed book has a bright future among specific audiences who are committed to it, and especially those in the rural areas who have no access to the internet. While they agreed that the internet has posed a major challenge to the sales and readership of the printed book significantly, it is helping in marketing the printed book as opposed to killing it. New bookshops in Nairobi and modern libraries in high schools, tertiary institutions and universities demonstrate that the printed book is not dying soon.

Research limitations/implications

The researcher experienced challenges in data collection as the respondents were busy preparing for final examinations and hence many of them were not willing to spare time to fill the questionnaire. To solve this, the researcher had to spend more time to collect data as opposed to if the students were free and ready to participate in the study without any pressure.

Practical implications

The findings can be used as a basis for further research to widen the scope that can help bring a wider perspective to the topic. The results can also inform policy guidelines on the topic and also contribute to the body of knowledge.

Social implications

The topic touches on social phenomena that are affecting a number of young people and their information-seeking habits in the era of digital revolution. The way the young generation seek and use information should be of interest not only to academic staff but also to policymakers.

Originality/value

The paper is original based on primary data that was collected by the researcher from the respondents. It is backed by secondary data to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

• Communication technologies
• Technological
• Printed book
• Digital revolution
• Technological advancement

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the students of the Technology University of Kenya and selected publishers in Nairobi Country without whose cooperation and commitment, this paper could not have been possible to have it published. She also want to thank the management of Emarald Publishers whose professional input greatly improved the quality of the paper. Their patience even when she seemed not to get their point of view was remarkable.

The study which was funded by personal resources is finally coming to fruition.

Nyambane, R. (2021), "The future of the printed book in the era of technological advancement: an imperative for digital innovation and engagement", Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society , Vol. 19 No. 4, pp. 537-559. https://doi.org/10.1108/JICES-10-2020-0106

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited

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Why Printed Books and eBooks Are No Longer Enemies in 2021

When personal computers and the internet first became popular, only about 25 years ago, many feared that this would be the end of the print industry. Perhaps nobody would ever want to buy and read printed books again, let alone use paper to publish information. It could be that digital media was to dethrone the printed book after its 500 years of reign.

Well, here we are today, still waiting for that to happen! In 2019, American publishers raked in a revenue of $26 billion: 74.7% of that came from paper books and a mere 7.48% from eBooks. The rest, some 17.8%, came from other sources, like audiobooks.

The pandemic, however, changed this scenario a bit. According to a Nielsen Book Research Survey , print book sales dropped 17% in the UK during the first half of 2020. While eBooks sales rose 17% in the same period. A remarkable achievement, since eBook sales had been on the decline ever since 2014. Audiobook sales did even better, seeing a whopping 42% increase in sales in the first six months of 2020.

Why Paper Books Won’t Die

The truth is, that the printed book is still a great medium, willfully embraced by the new generations. A 2019 survey made by the Pew Research Center in the US showed that 62% of 16 to 24-year-olds preferred reading printed books over electronic books. This figure rose to 74% among readers between 18 and 29 years old.

With so much competition from other media, the publishing industry still had to routinely reinvent their business. And reinvent, they have. This is evident in the creation of beautiful collector’s editions in high-quality print and elaborate bookbinding. Or the mesmerizing covers accompanying co-productions of highly consumable books that retell the content of the popular film and VoD streaming series. Readers want to collect these beautiful books to proudly present them on their bookshelves - even if only as a popular background for video calls during the pandemic.

Apart from the aesthetic aspect, modern readers also want to consume the books behind their most favorite films and series, which were actually based on a book - like Game of Thrones, The Handmaid’s Tales or Normal People. One way or another, books provide readers with a strong connection to their favorite movie & series characters. They are now just as much memorabilia as they are a good read.

Comparing eBooks vs. Printed Books and Audiobooks

Have physical books, eBooks and audiobooks ever truly been enemies? In reality, these formats aren’t mutually exclusive, they are rather complementary. Readers choose which format is best for every occasion or even genre! For instance, did you know that most readers still prefer to read cookbooks in print? So is revealed by data from Nielsen Book International . These data, along with other insights into the book industry, show that the following topics are more popular in a specific format:

Popular Genres per Format:

• Print Book | Cookery, Children books
• eBooks | Crime, Romance, Thriller
• Audiobooks | Business, Self-help

Now let's take a look at the benefits of each format:

Advantages of Reading eBooks

• Downloadable in seconds.
• Apps and e-reader devices can hold thousands of titles and are very portable.
• Prices tend to be cheaper.
• Digital features: make notes, highlight, search, share and dictionaries.
• Adjustable fonts and sizes are handy for people with visual impairment.
• They are never out of stock

Excellent for: Public transport, traveling, longer reads (less weight), reading in foreign languages.

Advantages of Print Books

• They are sentimental objects and inanimate memories.
• A multisensory experience: you can hold a real book, turn the pages and feel the paper.
• Illustrations have better quality.
• Some unique and beautiful design projects are only possible in paper and print.
• No batteries or charger required, just open and read.
• Very collectible.

Excellent for: Unwinding before bed, quality leisure time, making a memorable gift.

Advantages of Audiobooks

• Streamable, even without downloading them.
• No extra device needed -Your phone is all it takes.
• Save time by listening to them at a higher speed.
• It’s a good alternative for the visually impaired.
• Get an enhanced experience by listening to a title read by the author themselves or a renowned actor, for instance.

Excellent for: Background noise while driving, jogging, cooking or any routine activity that leaves your ears free.

How to Read eBooks in 2021

So what is the best way to consume a digital book? For many book lovers, especially the older ones, digital forms can feel a little daunting. One that can easily be overcome though! Getting an ebook reader is easy and inexpensive, and some avid readers even prefer this type of reading experience.

Amazon Kindle

Let’s start with one of the most popular devices, the Amazon Kindle, which you can buy in any country where Amazon operates. The most simple model costs U$ 89.99 in the US while the price of the fancy Oasis amounts to U$ 249.99. There are also models in between, like the popular Paperwhite, which can all be compared in one single table . Regardless of your choice, you will have to register your Amazon account on your device. After doing so, just browse on the Amazon website or in the store from your Kindle, buy a title, and it will be available in seconds on your device. Remember that you don’t need wifi to read on a Kindle, but you do need it in order to buy the books.

Mobile App eReaders

There are also free apps that you can use on your electronic devices, phone, tablet or computer, such as Google Play Books & Audiobooks for Android or Apple Books for iOS devices. Both work as a digital bookshop, as well as an eReader. With just a few clicks, you can have an entire library at your fingertips.

How to get free eBooks

If you are looking for free eBooks, Amazon has many classics downloadable at no cost. With a Kindle Unlimited subscription , you can read thousands of eBooks per month for only a small fee. Another great asset is Project Gutenberg . This digital library is accessible to everyone with access to the internet and holds many public domain titles that have been digitized into an ebook format. You can download and read them for free -and absolutely legal- from their website!

How to Buy and Use Audiobooks

Audiobooks have been the big promise of recent years, and the pandemic has only given them one more massive boost. As mentioned before, the audiobooks sales rose 42% during the first six months of the year 2020 in the UK.

Fans like to listen to books while driving, traveling, cooking, doing the dishes... you name it! Some even swear to save time with audiobooks, because they can be played at a higher speed. What is more, some researchers suggest it can be beneficial for your brain.

There are many ways to get and use audiobooks. Amazon offers Audible , an app to listen to Amazon titles that you can buy per title individually or binge-listen to with an Audible subscription. Google Play and Apple libraries also offer a wide range of titles. Many people don’t know that it’s also possible to listen to audiobooks on Spotify , it takes a little more effort, but they are already included in your Premium subscription.

The Invincible Gift: How to Give the Right Book Format in 2021

With the pandemic, the act of gift-giving also went through a huge change. Celebrating birthdays and special days was an important way to keep our bonds strong, even from a distance. Gifting books is a great way to share a great experience with a colleague, friend or a loved one because reading a good book is like taking a journey - even when you can’t leave the house! Nothing beats offering a great title or bestseller that you have read and loved yourself, hoping that the other person will love it too. A connection over a beloved story is a wonderful thing.

But what if the person lives far away? Consider a gift card. You avoid shipping and your bookworm friend can get that obscure title they will surely convince you to read too later on. For a safe bet, get them credits for the Amazon Store of their country, so the person can buy traditional books, eBooks and audiobooks online. Or perhaps support their local bookstore if they have gift cards. Take the iconic Gandhi bookstore in Mexico, Bol.com in The Netherlands or Empik in Poland for example. Thousands of private booksellers can share their collections with the masses, a perfect gift for your reader.

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Think Books: What's next for book publishing

Find out how digital print is driving innovation

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Printed books are thriving in the digital world

The fear that printed books would be consigned to history by digital media have proved unfounded. With a global industry valued at $151 billion¹, demand for hard copies is stronger than ever, with consumers in need of a ‘digital detox’ turning to print for a more intimate reading experience.

But what is the next chapter for books? While consumers’ love for physical books remains strong, technological innovations and cultural shifts are having a profound effect on the way books are produced. Publishers and book printers are adapting their business models and finding new ways for print and digital to co-exist in an increasingly interconnected world.

Canon’s infographic is a companion piece to our ‘Think Books’ report. It highlights key consumer trends and industry statistics, showing why printed books have a strong future and highlighting the potential digital production has to transform publishing.

Infographic: The next chapter for books

Find out what lies in store for printed books, and how they are evolving for a digital world

Books have a bright future

By 2022 the total volume of digitally printed books will reach 100 billion pages². Read all about the future of books here.

Download Think Books guide

¹ 'The Changing World of European Book Publishing and Manufacturing’ - IT Strategies, November 2016

² Western Europe Production Digital Printing, Market overview report - Caslon, 2017

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Op-Ed: When reading to learn, what works best for students — printed books or digital texts?

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As the pandemic drove a sudden, massive and necessary shift to online education last year, students were forced to access much of their school reading assignments digitally. Turning so heavily to screens for school reading was a temporary fix — and should remain that way.

A wealth of research comparing print and digital reading points to the same conclusion — print matters. For most students, print is the most effective way to learn and to retain that knowledge long-term.

When measuring reading comprehension, researchers typically ask people to read passages and then answer questions or write short essays. Regardless of the age of the students, reliably similar patterns occur.

When the text is longer than about 500 words, readers generally perform better on comprehension tests with print passages. The superiority of print especially shines through when experimenters go beyond questions having superficial answers to those whose responses require inferences , details about the text , or remembering when and where in a story an event took place.

Part of the explanation for discrepancies between print and digital test scores involves the physical properties of paper. We often use the place in the book (at the beginning, halfway through) or location on a page as a memory marker. But equally important is a reader’s mental perspective. People tend to put more effort into reading print than reading digitally.

Op-Ed: Distance learning? Even my students will tell you that’s not the future

Magic happens in a physical classroom, not through online platforms popularized during the coronavirus quarantine.

May 26, 2020

We can learn a lot about the importance of print by asking students themselves. Overwhelmingly, college students report they concentrate, learn or remember best with paper, according to my research and studies conducted by colleagues.

For instance, students say that when reading hard copy, “everything sinks in more” and can be pictured “more vividly.” When reading digitally, they admit they get distracted by things like online social media or YouTube.

However, not all students relish reading in print. Several of the more than 400 I surveyed commented that digital texts seemed shorter than the print versions (when they’re actually the same length) or declared that digital is more entertaining and print can be boring. They said things like digital screens “keep me awake” or “print can tire you out really fast” no matter how interesting the book.

Such attitudes support research that finds when students are allowed to choose how much time to spend reading a passage, many speed more quickly through the digital version — and do worse on the comprehension test.

Reading digitally only started becoming a norm about a decade ago, thanks to advancements in technology and consumer products such as e-readers and tablet computers. Meanwhile, another seismic shift was beginning to happen in education. Academic courses, and then whole degree programs, became available online at universities before such technology-driven offerings percolated down through the lower grades.

As academic e-books made their way onto the market, students and faculty alike saw these more affordable digital versions as a way to combat the high cost of print textbooks . Open educational resources — teaching and learning materials available free (almost always online) — also became another popular option.

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Education and the Federal Communications Commission unveiled a plan for all K-12 schools to transition from print to digital textbooks by 2017 . The rationale? Improve education, but also cost savings. The big three textbook publishers (Pearson, McGraw-Hill Education, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) were quick to develop digital initiatives for K-12 materials. The pace accelerated in higher education as well, most recently with inclusive-access models , where publishers provide reduced-price digital texts to all course enrollees.

Regrettably, both the textbook industry and school decision-makers rushed to embrace digital reading platforms without assessing potential educational implications. Yet below the radar, teachers and students have often recognized the educational mismatch.

A recent survey by the research group Bay View Analytics found that 43% of college faculty believe students learn better with print materials — the same message students have been sending, when we bother to ask. Yes, cost issues need to be addressed, and yes, digital has a vital place in contemporary education. But so does print.

There’s a pressing need to rethink the balance between print and digital learning tools. When choosing educational materials, educators — and parents — have to consider many factors, including subject matter, cost, and convenience. However, it’s also important to remember that research findings usually tip the scales toward print as a more effective learning tool.

What can parents and educators do? For starters, explore students’ perceptions about which reading medium helps them concentrate and learn more easily. Conduct a short survey and discuss the results with students in class or at home. Make sure everyone who has a stake in students’ education — teachers, librarians, administrators and parents — thinks about the consequences of their choices.

The pandemic drove society to educational triage, not just by pivoting to digital materials but also by reducing curricular rigor . As schools continue to reopen and rethink their educational goals, research about learning should be used to help find the right balance between screens and print in the digital age.

Naomi S. Baron is professor emerita of linguistics at American University and author of “How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio.”

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

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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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Academic print books are dying. What’s the future?

Deputy University Librarian, University of California, Merced

Disclosure statement

Donald A. Barclay does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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The print-format scholarly book, a bulwark of academia’s publish-or-perish culture, is an endangered species. The market that has sustained it over the years is collapsing.

Sales of scholarly books in print format have hit record lows. Per-copy prices are at record highs. In purely economic terms, the current situation is unsustainable.

So, what does the future look like? Will academia’s traditional devotion to print and legendary resistance to change kill off long-form scholarship? Or will academia allow itself to move from print-format scholarly books to an open-access digital model that could save, and very likely rejuvenate, long-form scholarship?

Sales down. Prices up

First, let’s look at some of the sales trends. Take the book-centric academic field of history as an example.

In 1980, a scholarly publisher could expect to sell 2,000 copies of any given history book. By 1990, that number had plummeted to 500 copies. And by 2005, sales of a little over 200 copies worldwide had become the norm .

From my own field – library and information studies – the numbers are no less bleak. The editor of a major academic publishing house confided to me this summer that, circa 1995, he could expect to sell 1,000 copies of even a ho-hum library studies book during its first year of publication. In 2015, an outstanding book in the field is considered doing well if it manages to sell 200 copies in its first year.

In a classic response to a downward spiral, publishers ended up raising prices of scholarly books. In 1980, in the field of history ,the average price for a hard cover history book was US$22.78; by 2010, that price had almost quadrupled to $82.65.

Similar increases were seen in every other academic field. The average price of a hardcover book on the subject of religion went from $17.61 in 1980 to $80.88 in 2010. For education, the price climbed from $17.01 in 1980 to $177.59 in 2010.

Libraries losing buying power

Neither an anomaly or a bump in the road, this total market collapse is the result of a long-term trend from which the print-format scholarly book cannot recover.

A root cause for this market collapse is the loss of buying power among academic libraries, traditionally the biggest customer for printed scholarly books.

Libraries have been hit by a double economic whammy of beyond-inflationary increases in the cost of journal subscriptions and an ongoing drop in governmental support for higher education in the past few decades.

As a result, academic libraries have been forced to choose between maintaining their paid subscriptions to journals, the favored information resource of the STEM fields, and scholarly books, the workhorse of the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

Here are some numbers that tell the story of where academic libraries have chosen to put their money:

In the mid-1980s, the ratio of spending on journal subscriptions compared to scholarly books was roughly 50-50. By 2011, that ratio had shifted to 75-25 in favor of subscriptions to academic journals.

The fact that only about half of the scholarly books in academic libraries are ever borrowed has further discouraged librarian investment in the scholarly book.

Changing nature of market

In any case, in a perfect ivory tower world, the economics of the print-format scholarly book would not be a consideration. After all, university presses were created for the specific purpose of publishing scholarship that, while rich in intellectual value, has little or no economic value.

However, in a higher-education environment in which the subsidies once enjoyed by university presses have shrunk or entirely vanished, editors are left with little choice but to consider sales potential before accepting a manuscript for publication.

Consequently, academic rigor aside, the market value of a scholarly book on a perennially popular historical figure like, say, Theodore Roosevelt or a current hot-button social issue such as racism is simply going to be more attractive to a scholarly publisher than a book on Spain’s Golden Age ( Siglo de Oro) or land-ownership patterns in Hungary’s 12th-century Árpád Dynasty , whose sales prospects might be dismal.

Even so, in many academic fields the publication of scholarly books still remains the standard by which emerging scholars are credentialed. Is it acceptable that a PhD student in one of those fields might feel forced to choose a dissertation topic based on how a publisher views its sales potential as a book rather than on its contribution to the field?

Why not consider open access?

Bleak as it may seem, the good news is that this need not mean the end of long-form scholarship.

Facing a dismal market, a number of leading scholarly publishers are taking steps to change the economic model of the scholarly book. This change involves moving from a foundation in print to a foundation in digital, and from a focus on sales to libraries to a focus on open access.

In a notable example, the University of California Press announced the publication this October of the first five titles as part of its Luminos initiative. Luminos titles are fully peer-reviewed, professionally edited scholarly books initially published as open-access e-books with a print-on-demand option for those who prefer physical books.

Hardly a one-off venture, similar open-access models for publishing scholarly books are being implemented by such presses as The Ohio State University Press , Penn State Romance Studies , Amherst College Press , ANU (Australian National University) Press, De Gruyter Open, and others.

Open-access initiatives such as these are positioning themselves to disrupt the scholarly book market by shifting to a model in which the cost of publication is recouped by upfront underwriting rather than via sales of copies.

Besides rescuing the scholarly book from oblivion, open-access digital books offer many advantages over their print forebearers: The number of potential readers dwarfs what is possible for a run of a few hundred printed copies. Open-access scholarly books can be used, wholly or in part, as course texts at no costs to students.

Additionally, digital formatting loosens constraints on the number of pages and illustrations. Scholars are free to employ tools of digital-age scholarship ranging from timeline-enhanced maps to data visualizations to embedded video. Open-access books can be read in regions of the world where few people can afford First World price tags.

Academic distrust

However, open-access scholarly books can still fail if those senior faculty who make decisions about hiring, promotion, and tenure refuse to embrace it.

In my experience, many among the senior faculty harbor a lingering distrust of digital publication. Some faculty consider any underwriting of publication costs by the author and/or the author’s institution as nothing more than vanity press publication, where authors have to pay to get published.

For faculty who take this view, such new models of open-access publication are considered to be academic sins in the rank of plagiarism and “diploma mill” degrees.

In my view, there is no reason why scholarly books published under legitimate open-access models cannot undergo rigorous peer-review and editing processes. Quality peer review and editing are not, after all, functions of paper and ink.

Additionally, with very few exceptions, the cost of publishing a scholarly book has always been subsidized to one extent or another. Circa 1980, publication costs for a printed scholarly book were very likely underwritten by a university press’s campus subsidy.

Arguing that publishing a book under the auspices of a subsidized scholarly press occupies some higher moral ground than publishing under one of the emerging models of subsidized open-access publishing is entirely specious.

If, in the end, the forces of academic conservatism kill the open-access scholarly book by refusing to hire or reward emerging scholars who publish in this way, an unintended consequence will be the death of the scholarly book.

Will the academy stand by and allow the market to determine who succeeds and who fails as an academic? Or, will it move toward open-access publication that offers a viable alternative to a market in collapse?

• Higher education
• Book pricing
• Open access

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Printed Books:

Necessary in a Digitized World

Books have been an important part of human culture since the era of caveman writings on walls. The importance of documenting stories, beliefs, and other information was seen early on in human development. Over time, books have acquired millions of different uses. From entertainment to information, books have played a large role in human culture, enjoyment, and knowledge for many years. However, through modern technological developments, virtually anything is available on the internet. The majority of libraries have established online databases with print articles available on a computer anywhere in the world. As the modern era ventures farther into developing technology, many people are beginning to question if printed books will still be a necessity.

Despite recent developments in technology, many people fail to remember that computers, the internet, and other electronics are far from perfect. While data can be wiped out  of existence, accidentally or not, books can be recreated, preserved, and copied a million different times in their original physical form. Manuscripts of books from the time periods of Aristotle and Jesus have been retrieved, kept intact, and still used today. Books also provide people with the opportunity to improve reading and writing skills while also allowing room for creativity and imagination when reading storybooks. They play a large role in the development of human culture and, even with the digital age of modern media taking over the world, they will continue to do so in the future.

Books possess many advantages, one being the affects on the literacy rate of the world's population. As a result of the drastic improvements in education over time, many different studies have been conducted to determine the role of books in improving literacy. A study performed in 1988 determined that “the amount of time students spent in independent reading was the best predictor of reading achievement and also the best predictor of the amount of gain in reading achievement made by students between second and fifth grade” (“Effects of Independent Reading”). In addition, the study discovered increased vocabulary to be a prominent effect of reading, explaining, “One of the best-established relationships in the field of reading is the very significant relationship between vocabulary development and achievement in reading” (“Effects on Independent Reading”). These studies show that frequent reading helps students to improve their writing skills, speaking skills, and other mental abilities such as focusing, listening, and generally becoming more knowledgeable and intelligent as a result.

In addition, the enjoyment of books is seen as an important form of entertainment by many, such as writer Lois Lenski. She describes her desire for children to read by explaining, “We want [every child] to learn how to read so that he may read and enjoy books, so that the whole wide book world, made up of the greatest thoughts of the greatest minds of all ages, may be open to him, and his life enriched thereby” (Lenski). Books have many different uses, but Lenski believes the most important to be the ability to tell stories through books. They provide opportunities to incorporate visual imagination to stories that television and digital media lack. Through reading stories in books as a form of entertainment, children learn basic creativity skills that will be apparent throughout their entire life.

Books possess many disadvantages as well that the digital age seems to provide a solution for, but these solutions are not always the best option. For example, in a growing age of environmental awareness, books play a major role in the destruction of trees for paper used to create them. Digitized books seem to provide an alternative to this, yet electronics use up other energy forms. Electricity is used up by millions of people every day, and ways to become more energy efficient are often overlooked. It is encouraged to turn off electronics more often and use them less frequently (“Energy Savers”). According to the United States Department of Energy, “As we use more electricity in our homes, our electric bills rise. In turn, fossil-fueled power plants not only generate more electricity, but also more pollution. The continued reliance on and depletion of fossil-fuel resources threatens our energy security” (“Energy Savers”). This poses a larger threat to our environment than books, as fuel has become an important part of every day life for not only Americans, but citizens in each country throughout the entire world. Although factories that make books may have the same energy issues, each time a person reads a book rather than using a computer, they are saving electricity and helping the environment in a more effective way.

In addition to energy problems, an issue that the physical form of a book can be destroyed exists as well. Books may fall apart or be physically damaged in other ways. By digitizing books, people can keep the contents protected in virtual form for any amount of time. Yet computers can crash or delete files, sending various items into virtual outer space. “Technological difficulties” occur frequently in today's imperfect world of digital media. An article appearing on IdeaConnection.com describes that software programmers are not the easiest people to receive help from when problems occur. “Corporate computer programmers spend 80% of their time repairing software and updating it to keep it running. Software projects are typically 100% over budget and a year behind schedule. The best programmers can be 25 times as competent as the worst, with many software design supervisors unable to evaluate or even understand their programmers' work” (“Unreliability of Computer Software”). Virtual content can be destroyed in ways that can make it impossible to retrieve the information. Books, however, can be reprinted into multiple copies over and over as time goes on. If one version is destroyed, the content can easily be found in another identical copy.

Technology is one of the great innovations humans have created to incorporate in every day life. It provides many advantages, but can be disadvantageous as well through malfunctioning or becoming difficult to use. The use of books is still necessary in the present and near future. Books provide more than the content inside of them. They are a physical form of entertainment, knowledge, imagination, creativity, and information. The overall affect of reading a book, whether for educational purposes or enjoyment, is something that will never die, no matter how digitized the world becomes.

Works Cited

“Effects of Independent Reading.” Education Place® . N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2010.  < http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/literacy/     in_read1.html >

Energy Savers: Electricity.” EERE: Energy Savers Home Page . N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Feb. 2010.  < http://www.energysavers.gov/your_home/electricity/index.cfm/mytopic=10390 >.

Lenski, Lois. “What Are Books For Anyway?” The National Elementary Principal 31 (1951): 268-274.

"Unreliability of computer software." IdeaConnection: Solve your open innovation challenges. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2010. < http://www.ideaconnection.com/solutions/6851- Unreliability-of-computer-software.html>.

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Our Next Live Debate: Should the U.S. Still Police the World?

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Ideological fanatics and fear have crippled the major houses. But new book publishers are rising up to take the risks they won’t.

By Alex Perez

November 28, 2023

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On September 19, 2022, Elle Griffin, a freelance writer in Salt Lake City, published the first installment of her new fantasy novel, Oblivion , on Substack, under the title “We will create a more beautiful world.” 

Since then, Griffin, who has written for Esquire and Forbes , has picked up a few hundred paid subscribers. She’s now earning more than $30,000 annually from her writing—more than she’s ever made. 

By contrast, if she’d gone the traditional route and landed an agent and a major publisher, Griffin said, the best she could have hoped for would have been a $10,000 advance, and she would have been lucky to sell 1,000 copies—meaning no extra money. 

Plus, serializing the novel on her newsletter means she can include her 11,000-plus subscribers in the creative process. 

“They can comment on each chapter,” Griffin told me. “I’m crowdsourcing my wisdom from them.” 

Griffin is not alone. Other authors now on Substack include Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club ; Junot Diaz, who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize ; and the award-winning short story writer George Saunders.

But this story is not about Substack, the self-publishing platform that also hosts The Free Press . 

It’s about a parallel publishing space that has risen up while the legacy publishing houses in New York have been declining thanks to a combination of threats that are both external (the internet; the upending of print) and internal (new progressive staffers; sensitivity readers; etc.). A publishing space in which writers, known and unknown, can make more than they’ve ever made traditionally. A space where there are not only self-publishing platforms but tons of small, private presses across the country—like Heresy Press and Zando Projects and Zibby Books , the latter created by the podcaster Zibby Owens —that have maximal creativity. One in which there are no politics or committees or sensitivity readers—and no activist mobs on Goodreads or Twitter (now X) who can frighten your editor into canceling a contract or a book tour. 

This is a world I know a little bit about. 

I’m a Cuban American former baseball player from Miami who turned to the writing life after I couldn’t hit a fastball anymore. 

After I left baseball and started writing stories, I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference , and I aspired to join that rarefied literary world. But at a certain point it became impossible to reconcile that place with my own—and the stories I wanted to tell about where I came from. 

I live in a working-class Miami neighborhood, where Spanish is predominantly spoken. My friends, first-generation Americans and recent immigrants, are just trying to make it here. They have no idea what professors at writers’ workshops or editors in New York think of them. 

Unlike the literary elite, I actually see how working-class people of color—at least, those in my world—live and struggle. In many ways, I am still one of them. They’re not victims concerned with academic tropes like “whiteness,” nor are they oppressed by “structures” and “systemic” hatreds secretly making it impossible for them to get ahead. They’re complicated, and to simplify their “narrative” is to simplify them.

But again and again, those in the New York literary universe explained to me that it was my job to tell stories that furthered The Narrative—their narrative. It didn’t matter, in their view, that the stories they were publishing were detached from reality—or, in some cases, turning reality upside down. What mattered was educating the masses, the idiots outside New York. 

The frustration I experienced, along with that of so many other writers, is helping fuel the emergence of this new, parallel publishing space.

“The freedom to write what you want to write without it going through any ideological filter—that is a massive advantage of self-publishing,” Tim Urban, the blogger and illustrator behind the site Wait But Why and the successful author of the recently self-published book What’s Our Problem: A Self-Help Book for Societies , told The Free Press . 

John Pistelli, an English professor in Minneapolis who is self-publishing his novel on his Substack, added: “Online platforms and independent presses can pick up what the major publishers have put down.”

The Old World

The disruption of the so-called Big Five who make up the publishing industry—Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins—has been a long time coming. For two decades, their collective revenue, which was $25.7 billion in 2020, has been basically flat . Then, in 2022, that figure declined by 6.5 percent. 

Editors who spoke with The Free Press attributed that drop to people emerging from the Covid lockdowns and socializing more than reading.

But that’s not the whole story.

For years, there has been a growing politicization inside the industry, which editors describe as a slowly percolating illiberalism that makes it difficult to publish books by authors who don’t adhere to the new dogma. Out of fear of losing their jobs and friends, these editors (we spoke with ten across these publishing houses) insisted upon speaking anonymously.

“It’s so much harder to publish controversial books than it was when Judith Regan published Rush Limbaugh back in the day,” said an editor at a major publishing house, referring to Regan’s time as a Simon & Schuster editor in the early nineties, when she acquired a book by the conservative radio host.

The new dogma, industry insiders told me, is two-pronged: books should advance the narrative that people of color are victims of white supremacy; and nonblack and non-Latino authors should avoid characters who are black and Latino—even if their characters toe the officially approved narrative. (White authors who write about black or Latino people oppressed by white people have been accused of exploiting their characters’ trauma.) 

“It began, really, in 2010, 2012,” the award-winning author Lionel Shriver, best known for her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin , told The Free Press . “It’s just been getting worse, and there are a lot of characters or plot turns in my own earlier books that, especially if I didn’t have this pretty solid relationship with a mainstream publisher, would get me into trouble or would be called out, and I’d be told to change them, or if I were just starting out I would be rejected because of them.”

One of the biggest flashpoints in the politicization of the publishing industry arrived in early 2020 with publication of Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt .

Cummins’ novel—about a Mexican woman and her son who cross the U.S. border to escape violent cartels—won a seven-figure advance and was hailed by celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to Stephen King. But Cummins, being half-white and half-Puerto Rican, ran into trouble with Latino activists who accused her of appropriating Latino struggle. After protests erupted outside her publisher, the Macmillan imprint Flatiron, Cummins’ national book tour was canceled , and the publisher apologized for how the novel had been marketed. (Despite the controversy, American Dirt went on to sell more than three million copies . Cummins declined to comment for this article, saying she is busy working on her next book.)

At the same time, publishing houses started canceling books by established but “problematic” white male authors including Woody Allen, whose memoir was dropped by Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette imprint, in March 2020.

Then, in late May 2020, George Floyd was murdered. 

In an immediate attempt to appear committed to combating racism, the major publishing houses rushed to hire and promote editors of color. Several editors described the hiring and promotion frenzy of 2020 and 2021 as “excessive” or “obviously political,” and they identified several key diversity hires who alienated longtime editors, agents, and writers.

These included Dana Canedy, who had spent most of her career at The New York Times doing “corporate communications,” according to her LinkedIn profile , before being named publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint; Phoebe Robinson , a stand-up comedian who now runs the Penguin imprint Tiny Reparations Books; and Adenike Olanrewaju , who was a publicist at Penguin and The New York Times , where she was also a newsroom contributor, before being named executive editor of HarperCollins. Since joining the house in late 2021, Olanrewaju has secured one deal, according to Publishers Marketplace . 

Neither Robinson nor Olanrewaju replied to requests for comment. Canedy, who left her position in July 2022 after two years at Simon & Schuster, told The Free Press that any claims she was “unqualified” for the job “are cheap shots likely made by an incredibly small number of unnamed sources who do not deserve my energy.” 

Human Resources departments at the Big Five were mostly behind the drive to hire and promote unqualified job applicants without any guidance, an editor at a major publishing house told me. The editor added that it was not uncommon, in late 2020 and 2021, to encounter new editors and editorial assistants who were out of their depth—“young people without previous publishing experience who struggled to write a professional email.”

At the same time, the new generation of junior editors and editorial assistants—steeped in the progressive identitarianism of the campus—were making their voices heard inside those companies. 

“Most of the people who we hired were literature majors,” another editor at a major publishing house told The Free Press . “They come in having read a lot more bell hooks and Jacques Derrida than even The Atlantic , not realizing they’re pretty radical.”

After the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, many publishing staffers were “like, ‘Ben Shapiro is definitely a Nazi,’ and there was no point in trying to explain to people that Ben Shapiro”—a conservative Jewish commentator—“is definitely not a Nazi,” the editor said. 

Another editor said: “People were scared. People were afraid to lose their jobs. Still are.”

In addition to the new editors, a gradual feminization of publishing has made the industry less adventurous, Lionel Shriver said. “The problem is the editors, almost all of whom are women,” she said. “Women err on the side of trying to please, they tend more to be communitarians and risk averse and therefore, I think, the female takeover of publishing has made it cautious and bland.”

‘A New Generation of Ideological Fanatics’

With the new editors came new books by mostly untested, “diverse” writers whose stories featured characters struggling to overcome the shackles of whiteness or the patriarchy. 

These include Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me , which was published in 2022 and has been described by its publisher, Flatiron, as “an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story” about a gay, black man. 

Nadxieli Nieto, an editor who joined Flatiron in the wake of the American Dirt fiasco, bought the book for $250,000. So far, according to the sales tracker BookScan, it has sold nearly 4,500 copies—not nearly enough to cover the advance. (BookScan, the book industry site from which sales-copy figures come, does not include digital book sales.)

Similarly, in 2022, Flatiron bought Elliot Page’s book—a memoir that revolves around the actor’s gender transition—for more than $3 million. So far, it has sold south of 68,000 copies, according to BookScan.

In 2021, Dial Press, a Random House imprint, bought Lucky Red —described as “a genre-bending queer feminist Western. . . following a young woman’s transformation from forlorn orphan to successful prostitute to revenge-seeking gunfighter”—for more than $500,000. So far, it’s sold about 3,500 copies.

Then there’s Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan , described by The New York Times as “a story of three young girls, Black and biracial, who are kidnapped and thrown into the basement of a decaying house in Queens.” Ferrell’s book was acquired in a “significant deal” (a.k.a. more than $250K ), but has so far sold 3,163 copies since it was published in 2021.

“The rule of thumb,” one editor said about book advances, “is that if you paid $7 per book sold, you paid the right amount.” The editor added: “You can pay $1 million for something and have it be a bestseller and still lose hundreds of thousands of dollars,” even if you sell tens of thousands of books.

All the while, according to some prominent writers and editors, these publishing houses appeared to be discriminating against white male writers. In June 2022, best-selling author James Patterson called the difficulty white male authors were facing “just another form of racism.” After a backlash, he quickly apologized and said: “I absolutely do not believe that racism is practiced against white writers. Please know that I strongly support a diversity of voices being heard—in literature, in Hollywood, everywhere.” But one month later, acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates made a similar point. In a tweet , she wrote: “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.”

A senior editor at one of the major publishing houses echoed these thoughts, telling The Free Press : “We flat-out decided we weren’t going to look at certain white male authors, because we didn’t want to be seen as acquiring that stuff.” 

When asked whether editors openly acknowledged that they were discriminating against writers because of their skin color, this editor replied: “I don’t think it was worded quite as blatantly as that. It was worded more like, ‘Is this the right time to be championing authors of more traditional backgrounds?’ Often, the language was a bit opaque.”

Adam Bellow, who spent many years at HarperCollins and St. Martin’s Press, a Macmillan imprint, before moving to Post Hill Press, a conservative publishing company in Nashville, acknowledged “generational change” is a fact of life. 

“It just so happens that, in this case, the new generation is a generation of ideological fanatics,” Bellow said.

These “fanatics” have led the industry to lose sight of its market, he added. 

“People within the business who want to work on books that fall outside of the boundaries of what’s publicly treated as acceptable have to be willing to deal with interpersonal discomfort, being treated as marginal, or looked on with suspicion by their colleagues,” an editor at a major publishing house told me.

The New World Emerges

The new publishing dogma wasn’t just pushing out white male writers. Consider Alberto Gullaba Jr.

Gullaba was en route to becoming a big-shot novelist. He’d graduated from the writing program at the University of California, Irvine, and he’d written a novel, University Thugs , about a black college student with a criminal past. He had an agent, and they were about to go to market.

That was when Gullaba’s agent asked for a short autobiographical letter that he would include with the book submission. The agent asked Gullaba to include his race.

“I said my parents were from the Philippines, and we got on the phone quick,” Gullaba told me. His agent had assumed the writer was black, like his protagonist.

That’s when all the energy fizzled. “The fall blitz was canceled,” Gullaba said, referring to his agent’s plan to submit the novel to a bunch of imprints and, presumably, stoke a bidding war. “ ‘Let’s wait until the winter,’ ” Gullaba said his agent told him. “ ‘Let’s hunt down the right editor.’ And then we kept less and less in contact.” Eventually, they fell out of touch.

In September 2021, Gullaba self-published his novel under the pen name Free Chef. It has since sold about 1,000 copies—unimpressive if he’d had a huge publishing house behind him, but great for a little known, self-published author. He’s now hearing from the television people. “Several Hollywood and New York-based production companies,” he said in an email. “Super big companies, A-list, award-winning outfits. It’s crazy.”

Eighteen months after Gullaba self-published, Bernard Schweizer, a former English professor, launched a brand-new publishing house in January 2023. Called Heresy Press , Schweizer gave it a mission statement of embracing “freedom, honesty, openness, dissent, and real diversity in all of its manifestations. . . . We discourage authors from descending into self-censorship, we don’t blink at alleged acts of cultural appropriation, and we won’t pander to the presumed sensitivities of hypothetical readers.” 

Heresy’s board includes the novelist Joyce Carol Oates, the writer Meghan Daum, and New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In the past year, Schweizer told me, he’s been flooded with submissions.

“I got so many out-of-the-ballpark great stories and manuscripts that I realized the magnitude of the problem even more so,” he said.

Also in January of this year, Chelsea Hodson, a writer who formerly taught at Bennington College in Vermont, started her own imprint— Rose Books .

“I left Brooklyn as well as a job in academia to live in a small Arizona town and reimagine what my life could be outside of an institutional setting,” Hodson, whose essay collection Tonight I’m Someone Else was published in 2018 by Henry Holt, told me.

Rose Books’ first title, Someone Who Isn’t Me , by the punk-rock musician Geoff Rickly, was released in July and is in its fourth printing—a big feat for a first-time novelist and press. Up next: Christopher Norris’s The Holy Day . (Hodson said she’s planning to announce additional new titles in 2024.)

In February, Zibby Books made its debut, publishing Alisha Fernandez Miranda’s memoir My What If Year , which CNN International called the “the next Eat, Pray, Love .” That same month, Tim Urban published What’s Our Problem . Urban declined to share how many copies had been sold or how much revenue he had brought in, saying only, “I’m happy with the results.”

He noted that the major publishing houses provide important, costly “concierge” services: copy editing, page design, marketing, audiobook and e-book production. “But it’s not rocket science,” he said. 

The big thing, Urban said, is the freedom to write and think critically. When it came time to pitch his book, he said, “I was running into issues. I was being told that this is going to cause too many problems. You have to soften the language. You can’t criticize certain sacred figures like Ibram Kendi”—the black writer whose Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University drew millions in donations until publicly imploding in September. “But that was the whole point of the book, that we have to be more courageous.”

And then there are the independent or right-leaning publishing houses like Post Hill Press and Skyhorse Publishing that have popped up over the past decade or two—and are now seeing an uptick in business. 

Case in point: soon after Grand Central Publishing canceled its contract with Woody Allen, the Skyhorse imprint Arcade picked up his book. Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing , went on to become a New York Times bestseller .

“A lot more liberals and leftists who are at odds with the reigning ideology and can’t be published by conventional houses have sought us out instead,” said Bellow of Post Hill Press.

Meanwhile, there are signs that executives at the Big Five are changing course, however tentatively. Sources said there seems to be a growing awareness of, or fatigue with, the excesses of a progressive-identitarian orthodoxy that grossly distort complex, three-dimensional characters. It’s a sign of change that new feature film American Fiction can even make a joke of this identity obsession in publishing. The movie, starring Jeffrey Wright, tells the story of a long-suffering black author who finally finds success when he writes a book that cynically leans into negative stereotypes about black people. 

One editor at a major publishing house told me that many of the top execs who run their own imprints have been pushing back against the new ideology. “The people who run those companies know what makes money, and really devote their time to getting more of that, and it couldn’t be more separate from the woke stuff.” 

Another editor, also at the Big Five, agreed with that. “It’s people listening to market forces and realizing that what happens on social media isn’t necessarily real life.”

When woke took over and I found myself self-deporting from the literary world, I considered dropping out of the writing game altogether. But something about my upbringing, where I was from—and even my days as a jock—didn’t let me quit. My family left everything behind to make it to America, so it would be an insult to them if I just took my ball and went home, afraid and defeated by the literary gatekeepers.

So, at the onset of Covid, after years of stewing in silence, I started dabbling in political commentary and literary criticism for journalism outlets and more recently on my own Substack , saying what I’d been thinking about—what so many had been thinking about—for years. The literary ecosystem was broken. Talented writers, from all backgrounds, had either been banished or quit. 

I found a large readership immediately as one of the lone dissenting voices pushing back against the anti-art craziness that had overtaken the publishing industry. I’m still one of the lone voices willing to speak out publicly. Writers are still that afraid.

Then, in September 2022, literary magazine Hobart published an interview with me, in which I took the publishing world to task. It went viral. Most of Hobart ’s editors resigned in protest. But something else happened, too—Iowa classmates I hadn’t heard from in years reached out in solidarity. Famous writers contacted me. Writers at glossy magazines got in touch. They still are.

I get why the established writers who haven’t flocked to the independent publishing world can’t speak publicly. I get why they feel compelled to nod along with the herd while secretly signaling their support for those who won’t play along. But eventually, if they want the traditional literary world to return to some semblance of normalcy, they will have to speak up. In the meantime, alternative voices will continue to take their place.

Alex Perez is a cultural critic and fiction writer living in Miami. Follow him on Twitter (now X) @Perez_Writes .

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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 Evolution of Books: From Print to Digital

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The Evolution of Books: From Print to Digital. (2016, Sep 08). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-future-of-books-essay

"The Evolution of Books: From Print to Digital." StudyMoose , 8 Sep 2016, https://studymoose.com/the-future-of-books-essay

StudyMoose. (2016). The Evolution of Books: From Print to Digital . [Online]. Available at: https://studymoose.com/the-future-of-books-essay [Accessed: 13 Sep. 2024]

"The Evolution of Books: From Print to Digital." StudyMoose, Sep 08, 2016. Accessed September 13, 2024. https://studymoose.com/the-future-of-books-essay

"The Evolution of Books: From Print to Digital," StudyMoose , 08-Sep-2016. [Online]. Available: https://studymoose.com/the-future-of-books-essay. [Accessed: 13-Sep-2024]

StudyMoose. (2016). The Evolution of Books: From Print to Digital . [Online]. Available at: https://studymoose.com/the-future-of-books-essay [Accessed: 13-Sep-2024]

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IELTS Writing Task 2/ Essay Topics with sample answer.

Ielts writing task 2 sample 691 - printed media will soon be a thing of the past., ielts writing task 2/ ielts essay:, with the recent development in technology like e-books some people feel that the printed media like books, newspapers and magazine will soon be a thing of the past. others feel that those forms of media will never disappear..

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