http://www.libertarian.co.uk/multimedia/2014-10-07-books-sig.mp3
On Tuesday the 7th October 2014, Sean Gabb was interviewed by Mark Cummings of BBC Radio Gloucestershire, the subject being “The Future of the Printed Book.”
Sean makes the following comments:
- Amazon has its current dominance of the e-book market because that is what the readers and writers of books want. Should it ever abuse this dominant position, there are other on-line book sellers – iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, etc – which would grow at Amazon’s expense.
- Sean welcomes the democratisation of publishing that Amazon has helped bring about. Though he has had half a dozen novels brought out by a mainstream publisher, his dozen or so other books would never have found a substantial market without Amazon. He is grateful for this.
- The real problem at the moment in the book market is not Amazon’s alleged wickedness, but the end of the filtering process that the mainstream publishers used to undertake. This kept out a lot of very good stuff, but also kept out a lot of dross. This dross now pours straight onto the market through the Kindle trapdoor. The answer, though, is not to attack Amazon, but to evolve new filtering mechanisms via the market.
- As for whether printed books will survive in the next fifteen years, we are only five years into a revolution the course of which no one predicted. Saying what will happen next is to risk talking nonsense. However, Sean believes that printed books will survive. The Publishing industry wil go increasingly on-line. But printed books will survive, like fountain pens, as luxury goods and as gifts.
See Sean Gabb’s, essay on “The Future of the Printed Book“
Richard Blake’s new book, “How I Write Historical Fiction: Advice from a Practitioner,” is available for pre-order via Amazon.
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A good post.
This is a very interesting line of thought. I think it will take much longer than some people think for the “idea of the printed book” to die out – if indeed it does at all. Books have been around in some form or other for about 3,000 years: in the first 2,000 or so they didn’t evolve much in shape or form (Sean will know rather more about this than I do, having studied book-binding – a skill I’d love to add to my list) probably being mainly scrolls or bound collections of same. But the Book-Shape then began to become more convenient for use, and began to resemble what we think of as a book today.
All that printing did was to enable many more – more or less faithful – copies of stuff to be available per unit-time.
One advantage of printed books in the _/Coming Age Of The Fabian Socialist Endarkenment/_ is that having a load of them means you don’t have to rely on electricity and modern forms of energy and power, such as if all you read was on Kindle and the internet-thingy and so on.
Instead of this, when the electric power for the masses is turned off by order of the Righteous Ones (who will need it for your good, and have built themselves “wind turbines” which you paid for), and you can no longer even charge up the batteries in your “reader” for there is “no electricity any more”) you will not be bereft so long as you know how to make candles or even better lights than that, from nothing-stuff in your secret-scrap-land-plot-behind-the-RighteousNazis’-metal-collective-turnip-farming-sheds-where-you-grow-bees/illegal-tobacco-plants/food-plants/two-goats-a-billy-and-a-nanny/while-the-Gestapo-aren’t-looking. Books will continue to continue to continue to contain such stuff. I have lots here, just in case.
You will be able to use physical books to learn necessary and useful stuff, find how to do needful stuff, and be able then to write stuff about how nasty and wicked the GramscoFabiaNazis were, how wicked they yet are, and how wicked they will insist on remaining as, until they are all dead.
It’s no effing use storing “tinned and dried goods” like all the Montana-Mountain-Survival-freaks – mostly leftoids anyway – do. What will you do when it runs out, or you’re raided and scragged-to-death for your tins (they will be) or the tins all corrode and it goes off before you eat it all? You have to know how to carry on carrying on after that. Life will be nasty and hard for a few centuries while liberalism recovers – if it ever does – but at least you’ll survive.
Book libraries, being paper, will of course have to be armoured and booby-trapped. They should also be scanned and copied if possible, multiple times, even onto DVDs which are small and can be hidden well and run on fossil-computers even with lekky from the smallest of chicken-manure-methane-powered-generators. It’s possible also to make motor fuel for small Honda generators from nuts, olives, cabbage seed, and even fermented apple/other fruit juice if you have fires to distil with. And you mustn’t forget the passwords/mechanical-combinations for disarming the library-protection-weapons, and also you MUST NOT reveal them under torture, at the moments the GramscoFabiaNazis find you: because they will try.
Excellent comments, David. (Except that properly canned food can last forever, depending on what it is. Not pears! And I’m not sure that the true survivalist types are mostly lefties.)
In addition to all you said, there is natural degradation of anything stored electronically–or magnetically. Isaac Asimov pointed out there is going to be a process of decay in which one bit per æon (for some value of the æon) is lost, so that eventually anything stored that way will turn into gibberish.
There’s also the simple fact that if somebody swipes your kindle, there you are, but if somebody swipes your paperback (even at $10/book) you’re out $10 or one book, depending on whether you replace it or not. The same goes for dropping your Kindle into the bath (you do take long, healthful reading soaks, I hope). Or into the ocean. Or into the washing machine. Or — this is true — perhaps your cat has some Siamese ancestry, which moves it to kleptomania. One of ours likes to steal things and stash them in his water bowl. Usually harmless enough stuff, like used Kleenex or rubber bands, but on two occasions he hoisted my daughter’s cell-phone and stashed it there. The first time she managed to dry it out, but the second time it was a dead duck. Tsk. So far he hasn’t tried to nab her Kindle, but it’s only a matter of time.
Also, computer (or tablet) screens are not particularly kind to the eyes. Provided a truly matte paper is used, books don’t have such problems. (But why, oh WHY, do publishers print material — whether words or images — on glossy paper? In any direct-lighting situation, it’s impossible to see what’s on the page because of the glare.)
Also, you can interact with a book in a way you can’t with computer text. You can physically, yourself, underline. You can actually with your own hands write notes in the margins. You can dog-ear the pages (yes, it is sacrilegious, but the point is that it’s possible).
And you can insert 59 physical bookmarks amongst the leaves and turn instantly to any of them in a way that you can’t on the computer. Admittedly, the counter to that is the search function for computer text, which is surely a blessing from on high. But nothing can replace the capability of having 15 different volumes open on the table before you, each with its 59 bookmarks….
And there is the fact that yesterday’s text went out with the garbage. Today there is a new OS, a new Reading program, new software, new and improved no doubt…but it won’t read your old stuff, no matter how sincerely the software houses promised, guaranteed that their products would always maintain backward compatibility.
And then there are links. And there are hackers. And it is said that some devices or e-publishers or Amazon itself — I’m not clear on which — can “update” your text all on its own, so that the book you are reading today is not, in fact, the one you were reading yesterday. It’s bad enough trying to keep up with writers like Mr. Heinlein, who has the reputation that he never did finish revising anything he wrote, so that subsequent editions were never the same as earlier ones. But now suppose that you are trying to do serious research using electronically stored materials, and the material itself changes at the whim of the publisher or of the gremlins who live in electric-land….
E-texts are great in some ways, but they come with plenty of downsides. And in the end, as all serious computer-security folk will tell you,
KEEP HARD-COPY BACKUP.
David: You have I think over-egged that pudding –as in mixing Humpty-Dumpty in with a batch of fairy cakes.
People who like books should soon be able to print their own. 3d printing dont’cha know. If you can print anything else under the Sun–so it is promised–there is no reason you could not print yourself a Library to rival Alexandria in its heyday. The only obstacles would seem to be legal–copyright etc –and the Jolly Rodger answers that objection nicely.
The late Colin Wilson had 30,000 or so books in his house. Perhaps we could all do the same one day.
I may be guessing, but it’s possible that Sean and I do own about 60,000 books between us. Mine are mostly science/engineering/biology/radio/electronic/electric-stuff/maths/physics/chemistry/history. His library I think will complement mine admirably. His I am thinking are, these days, mainly historical (different periods from my focus)/linguistic/political/economic/philosophic/musical.
Perhaps the two of us ought to start a university. I very much doubt whether even Padua, Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge all put together owned that many books in 1209. And we’re heading backwards fast.