The Future of the Book

The Future of the Book





By Sam Vaknin


Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"


One of the first acts of the French National Assembly in 1789 was to


issue this declaration: "The free communication of thought and


opinion is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen may


therefore speak, write and print freely." UNESCO still


defines "book" as "non-periodical printed publication of at least 49


pages excluding covers".





Yet, have the innovations of the last five years transformed the


concept of "book" irreversibly?





The now defunct BookTailor used to sell its book-customization


software mainly to travel agents. Subscribers assembled their own,


private edition tome from a library of electronic content. The


emerging idiosyncratic anthology was either printed and bound on


demand or packaged as an e-book.





Consider what this simple business model does to entrenched and age- old notions such as "original" and "copies", copyright, and book


identifiers. Is the "original" the final, user-customized book - or


its sources? Should such one-copy print runs be eligible to unique


identifiers (for instance, unique ISBN's)? Does the user possess any


rights in the final product, compiled by him? Do the copyrights of


the original authors still apply?





Members of the BookCrossing.com community register their books in a


central database, obtain a BCID (BookCrossing ID Number) and then


give the book to someone, or simply leave it lying around to be


found. The volume's successive owners provide BookCrossing with


their coordinates. This innocuous model subverts the legal concept


of ownership and transforms the book from a passive, inert object


into a catalyst of human interactions. In other words, it returns


the book to its origins: a dialog-provoking time capsule.





Their proponents protest that e-books are not merely an ephemeral


rendition of their print predecessors - they are a new medium, an


altogether different reading experience.





Consider these options: hyperlinks within the e-book to Web content


and reference tools; embedded instant shopping and ordering;


divergent, user-interactive, decision driven plotlines; interaction


with other e-books using Bluetooth or some other wireless standard;


collaborative authoring, gaming and community activities;


automatically or periodically updated content; multimedia


capabilities; databases of bookmarks, records of reading habits,


shopping habits, interaction with other readers, and plot-related


decisions; automatic and embedded audio conversion and translation


capabilities; full wireless piconetworking and scatternetworking


capabilities; and more.





In an essay titled "The Processed Book", Joseph Esposito expounds on


five important capabilities of e-books: as portals or front ends to


other sources of information, as self-referencing texts, as


platforms being "fingered" by other resources, as input processed by


machines, and e-books serving as nodes in networks.





E-books, counter their opponents, have changed little beyond format


and medium. Audio books are more revolutionary than e-books because


they no longer use visual symbols. Consider the scrolling protocols - lateral and vertical. The papyrus, the broadsheet newspaper, and


the computer screen are three examples of the vertical kind. The e- book, the microfilm, the vellum, and the print book are instances of


the lateral scroll. Nothing new here.





E-books are a throwback to the days of the papyrus. The text is


placed on one side of a series of connected "leaves". Parchment, by


comparison, was multi-paged, easily browseable, and printed on both


sides of the leaf. It led to a revolution in publishing and,


ultimately, to the print book. All these advances are now being


reversed by the e-book, bemoan the antagonists.





The truth, as always, is somewhere in mid-ground between derision


and fawning.





The e-book retains one innovation of the parchment - the hypertext.


Early Jewish and Christian texts as well as Roman legal scholarship


were inscribed or, later, printed, with numerous inter-textual


links. The Talmud, for instance, comprises a main text (the Mishna)


surrounded by references to scholarly interpretations (exegesis).





Whether on papyrus, vellum, paper, or PDA - all books are portable.


The book is like a perpetuum mobile. It disseminates its content


virally, by being circulated, and is not diminished or altered in


the process. Though physically eroded, it can be copied faithfully.


It is permanent and, subject to faithful replication, immutable.





Admittedly, e-texts are device-dependent (e-book readers or computer


drives). They are format-specific. Changes in technology - both in


hardware and in software - render many e-books unreadable. And


portability is hampered by battery life, lighting conditions, or the


availability of appropriate infrastructure (e.g., of electricity).





The printing press technology shattered the content monopoly. In 50


years (1450-1500), the number of books in Europe swelled from a few


thousand to more than 9 million. And, as McLuhan noted, it shifted


the emphasis from the oral mode of content distribution


(i.e., "communication") to the visual mode.





E-books are only the latest application of age-old principles to


new "content-containers". Every such transmutation yields a surge in


content creation and dissemination. The incunabula - the first


printed books - made knowledge accessible (sometimes in the


vernacular) to scholars and laymen alike and liberated books from


the tyranny of monastic scriptoria and "libraries".





E-books are promising to do the same.





In the foreseeable future, "Book ATMs" placed in remote corners of


the Earth would be able to print on demand (POD) any book selected


from publishing backlists and front lists comprising millions of


titles. Vanity publishers and self-publishing allow authors to


overcome editorial barriers to entry and to bring out their work


affordably.





The Internet is the ideal e-book distribution channel. It threatens


the monopoly of the big publishing houses. Ironically, early


publishers rebelled against the knowledge monopoly of the Church.


The industry flourished in non-theocratic societies such as the


Netherlands and England - and languished where religion reigned (the


Islamic world, and Medieval Europe).





With e-books, content is once more a collaborative effort, as it has


been well into the Middle Ages. Knowledge, information, and


narratives were once generated through the interactions of authors


and audience (remember Socrates). Interactive e-books, multimedia,


discussion lists, and collective authorship efforts restore this


great tradition.





Authors are again the publishers and marketers of their work as they


have been well into the 19th century when many books debuted as


serialized pamphlets in daily papers or magazines or were sold by


subscription. Serialized e-books hark back to these intervallic


traditions. E-books may also help restore the balance between best- sellers and midlist authors and between fiction and non-fiction. E- books are best suited to cater to neglected niche markets.





E-books, cheaper than even paperbacks, are the


quintessential "literature for the millions". Both erstwhile reprint


libraries and current e-book publishers specialize in inexpensive


books in the public domain (i.e., whose copyright expired). John


Bell (competing with Dr. Johnson) put out "The Poets of Great


Britain" in 1777-83. Each of the 109 volumes cost six shillings


(compared to the usual guinea or more). The Railway Library of


novels (1,300 volumes) costs 1 shilling apiece only eight decades


later. The price proceeded to dive throughout the next century and a


half. E-books and POD resume this trend.





The plunge in book prices, the lowering of barriers to entry aided


by new technologies and plentiful credit, the proliferation of


publishers, and the cutthroat competition among booksellers was such


that price regulation (cartel) had to be introduced. Net publisher


prices, trade discounts, and list prices are all anti-competitive


practices of 19th century Europe. Still, this lamentable period also


gave rise to trade associations, publishers organizations, literary


agents, author contracts, royalties agreements, mass marketing, and


standardized copyrights.





The Internet is often perceived to be nothing more than a glorified - though digitized - mail order catalogue. But e-books are different.


Legislators and courts have yet to establish if e-books are books at


all. Existing contracts between authors and publishers may not cover


the electronic rendition of texts. E-books also offer serious price


competition to more traditional forms of publishing and are, thus,


likely to provoke a realignment of the entire industry.





Rights may have to be re-assigned, revenues re-distributed,


contractual relationships reconsidered. Hitherto, e-books amounted


to little more that re-formatted renditions of the print editions.


But authors are increasingly publishing their books primarily or


exclusively as e-books thus undermining both hardcovers and


paperbacks.





Luddite printers and publishers resisted - often violently - every


phase in the evolution of the trade: stereotyping, the iron press,


the application of steam power, mechanical typecasting and


typesetting, new methods of reproducing illustrations, cloth


bindings, machine-made paper, ready-bound books, paperbacks, book


clubs, and book tokens.





Without exception, they eventually relented and embraced the new


technologies to considerable commercial advantage. Similarly,


publishers were initially hesitant and reluctant to adopt the


Internet, POD, and e-publishing. It is not surprising that they came


around.





Printed books in the 17th and 18th centuries were derided by their


contemporaries as inferior to their laboriously hand-made


antecedents and to the incunabula. These complaints are reminiscent


of current criticisms of the new media (Internet, e-books): shoddy


workmanship, shabby appearance, and rampant piracy.





The first decades following the invention of the printing press,


were, as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it "a restless, highly


competitive free for all ... (with) enormous vitality and variety


(often leading to) careless work". There were egregious acts of


piracy - for instance, the illicit copying of the Aldine


Latin "pocket books", or the all-pervasive book-bootlegging in


England in the 17th century, a direct outcome of over-regulation and


coercive copyright monopolies.





Shakespeare's work was repeatedly replicated by infringers of


emerging intellectual property rights. Later, the American colonies


became the world's centre of industrialized and systematic book


piracy. Confronted with abundant and cheap pirated foreign books,


local authors resorted to freelancing in magazines and lecture tours


in a vain effort to make ends meet.





Pirates and unlicensed - and, therefore, subversive - publishers


were prosecuted under a variety of monopoly and libel laws and,


later, under national security and obscenity laws. Both royal


and "democratic" governments acted ruthlessly to preserve their


control of publishing.





John Milton wrote his passionate plea against censorship,


Areopagitica, in response to the 1643 licensing ordinance passed by


the British Parliament. The revolutionary Copyright Act of 1709 in


England decreed that authors and publishers are entitled to


exclusively reap the commercial benefits of their endeavors, though


only for a prescribed period of time.





The never-abating battle between industrial-commercial publishers


with their ever more potent technological and legal arsenal and the


free-spirited arts and craftsmanship crowd now rages as fiercely as


ever in numerous discussion lists, fora, tomes, and conferences.





William Morris started the "private press" movement in England in


the 19th century to counter what he regarded as the callous


commercialization of book publishing. When the printing press was


invented, it was put to commercial use by private entrepreneurs


(traders) of the day. Established "publishers" (monasteries), with a


few exceptions (e.g., in Augsburg, Germany and in Subiaco, Italy)


shunned it as a major threat to culture and civilization. Their


attacks on printing read like the litanies against self-publishing


or corporate-controlled publishing today.





But, as readership expanded - women and the poor became increasingly


literate - the number of publishers multiplied. At the beginning of


the 19th century, innovative lithographic and offset processes


allowed publishers in the West to add illustrations (at first, black


and white and then in color), tables, detailed maps and anatomical


charts, and other graphics to their books.





Publishers and librarians scuffled over formats (book sizes) and


fonts (Gothic versus Roman) but consumer preferences prevailed. The


multimedia book was born. E-books will, probably, undergo a similar


transition from static digital renditions of a print edition - to


lively, colorful, interactive and commercially enabled objects.





The commercial lending library and, later, the free library were two


additional reactions to increasing demand. As early as the 18th


century, publishers and booksellers expressed the - groundless -


fear that libraries will cannibalize their trade. Yet, libraries


have actually enhanced book sales and have become a major market in


their own right. They are likely to do the same for e-books.





Publishing has always been a social pursuit, heavily dependent on


social developments, such as the spread of literacy and the


liberation of minorities (especially, of women). As every new format


matures, it is subjected to regulation from within and from without.


E-books and other digital content are no exception. Hence the


recurrent and current attempts at restrictive regulation and the


legal skirmishes that follow them.





At its inception, every new variant of content packaging was


deemed "dangerous". The Church, formerly the largest publisher of


bibles and other religious and "earthly" texts and the upholder and


protector of reading in the Dark Ages, castigated and censored the


printing of "heretical" books, especially the vernacular bibles of


the Reformation.





It even restored the Inquisition for the specific purpose of


controlling book publishing. In 1559, it issued the Index Librorum


Prohibitorum ("Index of Prohibited Books"). A few, mainly Dutch,


publishers ended up on the stake. European rulers issued


proclamations against "naughty printed books" of heresy and sedition.





The printing of books was subject to licensing by the Privy Council


in England. The very concept of copyright arose out of the forced


recording of titles in the register of the English Stationer's


Company, a royal instrument of influence and intrigue. Such


obligatory registration granted the publisher the right to


exclusively copy the registered book - or, more frequently, a class


of books - for a number of years, but politically constrained


printable content, often by force.





Freedom of the press and free speech are still distant dreams in


most parts of the earth. Even in the USA, the Digital Millennium


Copyright Act (DMCA), the V-chip and other privacy-invading,


dissemination-inhibiting, and censorship-imposing measures


perpetuate a veteran though not so venerable tradition.





The more it changes, the more it stays the same. If the history of


the book teaches us anything it is that there are no limits to the


ingenuity with which publishers, authors, and booksellers, re-invent


old practices. Technological and marketing innovations are


invariably perceived as threats - only to be upheld later as


articles of faith. Publishing faces the same issues and challenges


it faced five hundred years ago and responds to them in much the


same way.








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AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)





Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant


Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West


Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review,


PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International


(UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health


and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and


Suite101.





Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government


of Macedonia.





Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com