Harry and Hogwarts – an altered book project.

A beautiful accordion book.

Detail of an awesome project.

More pictures are available at Flickr.

cartoon by Bob Stein, courtesy of Annie Mole

Some people think Amazon will drive the future of books. They not only sell them (both new and used – in addition to what’s on their site, they own the largest used-book network online), but they encourage authors to bypass publishers and go straight to their site. They print books (using their own print-on-demand service) and wirelessly deliver them to a proprietary gadget (of which they have sold lots, but they aren’t saying how many). They have also provided channels for authors to blog, for readers to review, and even hold reader-rated contests to find out who will be the next American Idol of books. Though Amazon isn’t a monopoly – there are lots of other places to buy books, print books, or acquire digital books – they are building a vertically-integrated business that has a lot of people concerned. They may not be the only book business, but they may be developing an unhealthy level of clout.

Kevin Kelly presented a different, more open, yet radical vision of the future of books. Once books are digitized, they will join in a mass of digital material that will be all-encompassing and available to all. But more than simply making books available, it will erase the edges of books. They will connect in new ways, and every book will be continuously rewritten. They will spill into each other.  Books will become one very big book. (This vision seemed to John Updike a terrifying nightmare. You can listen to his speech made about this article just days after it was published.)

Mass digitization projects such as Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and the Hathi Trust, as well as proposals for a new National Digital Library like those that have been created in other developed nations are approaching the future of books from one direction: create a vast library of accessible books online and bring the riches of libraries to all via the Internet.

Publishing industry responses are taking a different approach. They look toward the future as an opportunity and a threat – an opportunity to sell more books with more control over the product and its use to more people, and the threat the digital texts might get loose and replicate without bringing in revenue. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has spelled out some concerns for consumers as they purchase digital books. Google is in an interesting middle place. They nudged publishers into the digital age by scanning the contents of libraries and making millions of texts available for searching and (for public domain titles) downloading. They have since become another e-book retailer. You can see their bifurcated identity in the two search boxes on the page. Two doors to the future: which one will we pick?

Whatever the future holds, technology is disruptive and copyright law is an attempt to regulate the sharing and use of texts that some argue does not serve innovation or readers. These short films offer some interesting perspectives:

• A Fairy Use Tale (on the nature of Fair Use and how restricting it is bad for culture)
• Creative Commons (a means of letting people reserve some rights instead of all – and why it matters)
• Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, on the shift from an industrial/information economy to a networked information economy

What does the future hold for books? It’s an open question. The only thing I’m sure of is that they have a future, and probably several.

Added later: SF Signal held a “mind meld” on the future of publishing. It’s worth a read.

“Reading is  not ‘interactive’ with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is active collaboration with the writer’s mind.” Do you feel reading books is more immersive than an interactive game or a good film?

LeGuin argues for the “durability” of books and suggests that the insistence on quick profits is ultimately harming profitability of the book business, that publishers would drop the not-lucrative publishing of literature, but to do so, they would lose power and control. What do you think of this argument? Why do publishers continue to publish books that are not guaranteed best-sellers?

Elberse challenges the notion that online distribution of books (and other goods) allows for more choice, and that by offering lots of choice to niche markets can be profitable. In fact, Elberse finds that the digital environment leads to more people knowing about and wanting to read a smaller number of books and suggests that publishers should spend more money publishing fewer popular books that will be read by a larger number of consumers. Do you see any holes in her argument, or do you think it would make sense for publishers to concentrate their resources on potential big hits?

Flickr – a social networking site for photos. To find photos you can use, use the advanced search option and select “creative commons” toward the bottom of the page.
Flickr Commons – a collection of photos from cultural institutions (such as the Library of Congress) that have no known copyright restrictions. These have been put online partly to make them available for use, but also so that people who might recognize subjects can tag them. Not to be confused with the “creative commons” pool at Flickr where members have agreed to make photos available for reuse with only “some rights reserved.”
Life Magazine photos hosted by Google – these low-resolution images are apparently available for non-commercial use
MorgueFile – a collection of royalty-free photos you can reuse
New York Public Library photos via Flickr – with no known copyright restrictions
Wikimedia Commons -over 7 million images you can freely use
WorldImages - a collection of 70,000 art, architecture, and historical images that can be used for educational purposes

Meanwhile, just for a bit of fun, here’s how some Macmillan employees decided to explain publishing. In case something about it seems off . . . uh, yes. It’s a spoof from beginning to end.

Yet, there is a social side to reading. In some senses, the bestseller list is shaped by that impulse to share books. We want to read what others read so we can share an experience with them and be part of the gang. The experiences we have with books as we become readers (or not) are very much shaped by the social encounters around them. We read because we associate reading with a warm lap and a comforting voice. Or perhaps we don’t have that association and books are something from a strange and scary place that isn’t like our personal experience. If books are not something we share with family and friends they may be only a school task and be just as much fun as a math worksheet. Or if you enjoy reading, but nobody in your social circle does, it may be less enjoyable for you.

Often, finding a reading mentor can change someone’s life. Mark Edmundson wrote a book, Why Read? in which he made a case for the importance of reading good books, and in it he described how a teacher opened his life up to books – which totally changed his future. For me, it was a librarian who was the first person to think of me as a reader. Mike Rose, a teacher, has written about the obstacles that stand in the way of inner city kids becoming literate, including the way we stigmatize students and make literacy a problem of productivity and criminality, not about human beings and their potential. So the solitary nature of reading is only one side of the ways we interact with books. They also have a social life.

Elizabeth Long wrote about women’s reading groups and the ways they both are influenced by literary norms – our collective expectations about what makes for a “good” book – but also how they negotiate their own responses to books and their place as women in culture. A sociologist, she was criticized by colleagues for choosing this as a subject – “oh, book clubs. My wife belongs to one of those.”  Because they were for middle class women, they presumably were unworthy of attention.

When people get together to discuss books, their reading practices are not those of the literary elite – the professionals – even if they try to adopt those practices. They talk about characters as if they are people in real situations, not as if they are constructs to be disassembled and examined. There’s a level of support and connectedness in the groups. And they have  complex identity as middle-class women who are privileged, but who are also devalued because they are women. This article very much reflects its time, when scholars were trying hard to figure out the power relationships involved in gender and questioning how class intersects with those power relationships. Yet still – as reactions to Oprah’s Book Club such as l’affair Franzen demonstrate, there’s a certain devaluing of reading when it’s done by women.

In addition to face-to-face book clubs, there are thousands of online communities focused on reading and discussing books. And now there are several social networking sites specifically geared to books, including these:

• LibraryThing
• GoodReads

Oprah’s book club is somewhere between those experiences. Reading one of her chosen books is voluntary, but readers are encouraged to delve into the book and explore its meaning. Because the numbers of people reading the books she recommends is so vast, she’s credited with “saving the alphabet.” Though the existence of the book club didn’t significantly raise the numbers of books sold, it certainly raised the sales of the books she chose – and the profile of books in general.

Oprah has made reading both a  part of her autobiography (in that being a reader was a saving grace in a difficult childhood). Her narrative is a story, just like the books she recommends, and there is a connection between those stories and her story. She identifies with the writers of books that were important to her as guides. And makes her television book club an invitation into her home and her life, which gives her a connection to potential readers. She’s not the same kind of authority figure as a teacher. But while she dismisses pretension, or a visible authority, she does want to challenge readers to read difficult books because reading will improve them in an inspirational way. They are both self-improving and a means of self-discovery, a mix of social betterment and social change.

This distinguishes her from the literary elite who shun the “self-help” and uplift through books that Oprah promises. Literary critics do not encourage readers to relate books “lessons” to their own lives. They are more focused on the books and how they work; on developing certain critical frameworks for understanding books without reference to what those books do to readers and their personal lives, which is often considered irrelevant to the reading. Reflecting on parallels between characters in a book and your personal life is considered an unsophisticated approach to reading.

The Franzen affair: when Oprah chose Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for her book club, he commented to the press that he had mixed feelings. He didn’t want the corporate brand on the cover of his book, and he was afraid that people would think less of its literary merits. He knew people who avoided Oprah books because they thought they were too sentimental and too accessible to the middle class readers and to women. She was furious, disinvited him to her show, and soon after discontinued her book club. Many characterized this controversy as a gap between those who feel literary novels are those too sophisticated to be appreciated by the masses and those who feel literary types are snobs.

Eventually she restarted her book club with classics. When she departed from the classics for a popular book, there was yet another huge controversy – when James Fry’s Million Little Pieces was debunked as untruthful.

The Idea of “Bestsellers”

Bestseller lists first appeared in 1896. These are based not on books shipped to bookstores (because they may not sell, but be returned) but on sales information gathered from stores around the country. Now there is a system to gather these numbers electronically (“Bookscan”) but no bestseller list includes every bookstore everywhere in the country.  Still, it’s a fairly accurate estimate.

Sometimes deciding what counts is a problem. When Harry Potter nailed the top three spots in The New York Times list, they decided children’s books should be counted separately and started a different list for them, fearful there would be nothing but Potter on their list. At some point, religion got its own list, too, and that has changed what “makes the list” over the years. But by and large, we have over a century’s worth of information about what books have been popular year by year.

Though there are far more books available now to more people than there were fifty years ago and some pundits think the key to satisfying people’s interests is to offer them a wealth of niche-market books – Chris Anderson’s idea of the “long tail” – the fact is, the book industry still makes a lot of money from a very few books, and to make it to the bestseller list far more copies need to be sold than before there were massive chain bookstores and Internet sales.

1. When you think of an “Oprah” book, what comes to mind?

2. What kind of reading experience did she present to her viewers? What did she say her audience would get out of reading the books she chose?

3. How does that reading experience differ from the reading people do in English courses at school?

4. Offering choices emerged as a good way to encourage reading during our discussion Wednesday. What makes people want to read a book chosen by Oprah? What value does it add to the reading experience?

5. Why did Jonathan Franzen object to the Oprah label on his novel The Corrections?

6. What do you take away from the James Frey affair? How did Oprah’s perspective on Frey’s book change?

After our discussion of Oprah’s Book Club, we’ll research best sellers, developing hypotheses about why certain books were popular at a given time.

The report didn’t highlight one intriguing fact: that writing for pleasure was on the increase. It also reported sales of books were down, but didn’t account for the enormous growth in used book sales or in library circulations. It also bemoaned the lowering of standardized reading scores among high-schoolers without celebrating the fact that scores were up in earlier grades.  It only looked at reading of fiction and equated that with “literary reading” – and only counted reading that had nothing to do with school or work. It didn’t look at data from years before 1982, which yields a very different picture. Nor did it consider the fact that what “counts” as valuable reading has changed vastly over time. In short, the analysis seemed determined to find bad news.

Interestingly, just before the NEA chairman left his post as the new administration swept into town, a report summarizing preliminary data from a new study found reading fiction for pleasure was on the rise, especially among youth. What is soft-peddled in that report is the head-scratching finding that reading all sorts of books for pleasure (non-fiction included) other than required by work or school was down by 4%. This is good news? I guess it depends on what you’re looking for.