The publishing industry, never calm, has recently seen seismic shifts. A few weeks ago, Amazon announced that it now sells more e-books than print. Add to this predictions that within five years, 50 percent of all book sales will be online, along with reports of a drop in reading among young people, and it’s understandable some are predicting a dire future for the novel and independent bookstores.
Whether this is realistic remains to be seen. Hundreds of thousands of books are published annually, and the success of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” saga and Stieg Larsson’s Scandinavian thrillers indicate people are still buying novels.
The introduction of the iPad and other e-readers has given new life to books in digital form, and independent bookstores have weathered challenges before. Finally, it’s clear young people are reading, even if they’re not reading in the same format as their parents. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, just different.
Writers are less concerned about the success of a few blockbusters than with what they see as the endangered future of serious literature. T.C. Boyle, author of “The Women,” said, “We will always need stories to beat back our primal fears and remind us that there is something about our sad descent to the grave that is different from other animals. I expect that there will always be an audience for the serious novel, even if that audience is smaller.”
Thomas McGuane, author of the forthcoming “Driving on the Rim,” agrees. “The decline of serious readers will continue, just as the number of people who can’t tell you when the Civil War was increases. I don’t think it reflects much on the value of literature when an obtuse general public finds less use for it. In the end, literature will find an irreducible level where it will be attacked as elitist, and elitists will shrug off the attacks. Literature does something nothing else can do.”
Still, a smaller reading public is an audience nonetheless. Would it be so bad if there were a niche market that responded to serious literature as there is for classical music, opera and jazz?
Stephanie Kane, Denver author of “Quiet Time,” has a darker view. “We’re living in a time when not only fewer and fewer people are reading novels, but the literary canon is being dismantled. It is now possible to graduate from college as a lit major without ever reading an entire book.
“The explosion of social networking demonstrates that there’s no shortage of people who think they have something to say. The real question is, what will the next generation of novelists write about?”
George Cuomo, author of “A Couple of Cops,” is more optimistic. “In the first half of the 20th century, people saw Hollywood as a threat to the Victorian ideal of cuddling up with a book. With the emergence of television, pessimists feared the flickering living room screen signaled the end of the road.
“But the incredible changes brought about by the computer-based advances of the last few decades are vastly more profound. Literature may become an ancient relic in our new electronic world. But maybe some still nascent form of e-books will heroically save our future word-and-page types by making distribution far more efficient and universal.”
Edwin Frank, editor in chief of New York Review Books Classics, extended Cuomo’s idea further. “My view is that though the audience for the book will shrink, the audience that remains should be as committed as ever to literature. I like to think that this could be a good moment for (literary) presses and for the independent bookstores on which we crucially depend.”
Regarding the centrality of independent bookstores, Kane commented, “Bricks-and-mortar bookstores are not just places where readers can connect with authors and lose themselves in the pleasure of real books. The loss of a venue where people meet to explore ideas would be a blow not just to literary culture but to the human values that give any purpose to living.”
McGuane summed it all up, saying, “There is no more consoling place than a bookstore, and no digital browsing can compare to drifting the aisles of a well-stocked bookstore. Bookstores are the most civilized places in any town.”
Oren Teicher, chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, scoffs at the idea that independent booksellers could be in peril. “In the future, bookstores will sell digital, as well as print content, because they’ll have to,” he says. “Putting the appropriate book in the customer’s hands is still the particular skill of the independent bookseller. Having the passion, knowledge and skill to do that gives independents an advantage over online sellers. I don’t mean to sound Pollyanna-ish or naïve, but what has kept bookstores solvent until now is the recipe for success in the future.”
Acknowledging recent reports that customers are browsing in physical stores, then buying online, Teicher said, “Our burden is to convince customers who prefer buying online to do so on the website of an independent like The Tattered Cover. “
All this could just be whistling in the dark. If the audience for quality fiction is an aging audience, it’s inescapable that in time there will be no audience at all. “Young people are not reading,” Boyle says flatly. “We have a new culture, and that culture is electronic. Writers of fiction — artists — will have to hope that an audience comes to them. If you are a writer, you write, regardless of what comes of it.”
Boyle doesn’t buy Cuomo’s thought that e-books might provide a ray of hope. “I prefer holding (and smelling), as well as reading, an actual book. Many people of my generation feel this way, but once we’ve died off, I expect the experience of the actual book will die with us.
“I am opposed to e-books and their interactivity because it suggests that the words are not enough and readers must constantly be distracted. This is a world in which the image is presented to you rather than re-created in your own mind. Is it a degraded world? You bet.”
“Degraded?” Strong words, but Kane is even more dismissive. “Judging from my experience, ‘reading’ on the Internet is skimming. The two are not comparable. Reading feeds the thought process, skimming starves it.”
If one is drawn to reading because of physically opening a new volume, turning the pages and marveling at the paper, e-books are bound to be disappointing, but McGuane is open to cultural changes. “Happily, the blogosphere is filled with lovers of art and literature. This is one thing I like about the Internet age: When mass media pushes something valuable off stage, it still has a place to go. I don’t have a problem with e-books, but with a digital book, there is no artifact, nothing for the shelf.”
The book as artifact with a pleasing typeface and illustrations is unusual these days, but in poetry little has changed. “Poetry was never part of the big publishing changes,” says poet Bin Ramke. “Poetry is aware of and responsive to the physical properties of books, the craft of paper, bindings and typography. (It) suggests the object produced is intended to be understood as an art object, the very quality e-books cannot provide.”
Whether we’re facing the apocalypse in publishing or are on the threshold of a brave new world of digital opportunities remains an open question. Literary types have sentimental feelings about the hand- selling that goes on in bookstores, but it’s unclear whether nostalgia will generate future traffic. People felt the same way about mom ‘n’ pop groceries, and they’re long gone.
Give ABA’s Teicher the last word. Referring to Google Editions, which will act as a wholesaler of e-books to independent booksellers, Teicher said, “Google editions doesn’t exist yet, so no one knows exactly what form it will take. When it does launch, we’ll make our e-commerce platform available to our subscribers. Then independents will compete equally, survive and prosper.”
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University. You can reach him at david.milofsky@colostate.edu.
