Death or Rebirth?

Let’s kick off-the new Altered Fluid Blog — thanks to Matt Kressel — with a subject near and dear to the heart of everyone who strives to land a book deal:  The collapse of the writing industry as the world knows it.  Last week Bruce Sterling posted an article at Wired.com concerning this imminent collapse, his Kindle, and the fate of the big publishing houses.

What I find interesting about Sterling’s piece is that it deals not with the death of print, but with the death of the book.  He says “but I do wonder what weird form of American culture emerges when nobody has ever cracked a book”.  As a lover of books I agree on some level, but I also have to wonder if Aristotle ever wondered what weird world would result if no one ever unrolled a scroll?

To me the word is the thing.  Yes, I want a nice thick novel with my name on the spine to sit on my shelf.  But perhaps that book can be one of a few copies that I and a few family members and friends have custom made, limited edition works of art, while the rest of the world reads my work on a Kindle, iPhone, computer screen, or whatever else comes down the pike.

Mr. Sterling brings up book publishers as the biggest losers in a such bookless society.  I agree.  I worked for one of the big publishers he lists in his piece, and every six months we listened to management wring their hands about how “nobody reads” anymore (this speech was generally right before raises were announced) and the implied decline in literacy it pointed to.  By their admission, though, their statistics only extended to those who read novels; other printed media and most non-fiction books did not count in their tallies.  During my childhood I remember my father reading exactly two novels (“Dillinger Days” and “The Right Stuff”), so he definitely falls into that group of the publisher’s “non-readers” sliding towards illiteracy, even through he reads a newspaper cover to cover every day and has subscriptions to several monthly magazines.

The death of the print world has been foretold many times in the past.  The arrival of radio, television, and the internet have all been its heralds.  Maybe this time it will come to pass, or maybe not.  Maybe what we are looking at is a shift in the medium, not the content.  I truly love the feel of a book and magazine in my hand, it’s more solid and real to me, but I have to admit I spend more time clicking through emails, blog posts and news articles on my computer than I do turning paper pages.  Perhaps in that case a fundamental shift in the publishing world wouldn’t be a bad thing.  Look at the music industry and digital music’s impact; the fans and musicians have welcomed it, the record labels bemoan their lost revenue.

Will the written word die?  Not for a long time.  But, the book might outlive its usefulness, and for that I am truly sad.