All change... or maybe not quite

After last week’s rant, or cry in the wilderness as one person described it, and the surprising amount of support it seemed to attract, my thoughts have been turning to change, in all its manifestations, but mainly in the book trade.

The last year or so has seen one change tumbling over another, and not only in my own little corner of the world. If I’m reading the signs right (though we don’t necessarily have to believe it), conventional bookshops are on the way out; online booksellers and eBooks are the future. Publishers too find themselves running to keep up; authors are claiming back control of their words. Libraries… who knows? Here in the UK they’ve always been a soft target when public funding is in short supply, but this time around all attempts to cut their budgets and close them down has met with voluble dissent – a change in itself, since during past straitened times there’s been the occasional remonstration, but in our terribly restrained British way we’ve just kept shtum and let it happen. This time loud protest from high-profile people has been backed with petitions, letters to the newspapers, days of action from ordinary readers, complete with banners and marches… the people have spoken pretty vociferously, and it’s actually having some effect.

There’s one change we might have expected, but it doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon. The great survivor de nos jours appears to be the hardback book.

In some ways I can see why. There’s the collectors’ market for one thing: a whole bunch of people who buy books not to read, but to keep them in pristine condition and watch them appreciate in price. Paperbacks, even first edition paperback originals, don’t quite cut it in that arena.

Libraries, god bless ’em, are another strong market for the more robust style of book which doesn’t fall apart after a dozen or so borrowings. My local library was on its third set of copies of Maureen Carter’s Working Girls not much more than a year after it came out.

Then there’s my favourite survival strategy: the sheer beauty of a hardback book. Not all hardback books, of course; some are just workaday. But others are objects of splendour.

I don’t buy hardbacks often; in fact the few I possess are either decades old and weren’t available as paperbacks, or were given to me as gifts. But I do have a few that I treasure, and if my house was on fire and I had time to save just one book, I’d be hard pressed to choose between C J Sansom’s Sovereign and Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T S Spivet. OK, they’re both first editions, so one day my descendants will read them on their eReaders and sell these copies on eBay for serious money; but as a book lover rather than a book collector, that’s not my agenda. They are simply beautiful things, and to me the tiny creases and marks which show that they’ve been read and enjoyed enhance them like laughter lines on a lovely face.

On the whole, I think Spivet will win (though heaven forfend I’m ever in that unfortunate position). The hardback really is a remarkable piece of artistry. I haven’t seen the paperback, and I can’t quite imagine how it can be done. And this is one book which certainly won’t deliver the same experience, if you’ll pardon a moment of pretentiousness, on an eReader.

I suppose that one day soon mass market paperback books will go the way of the fair copy manuscript of pre-word processor days: the one the publisher received, neat and pristine, retyped three times, as free as possible from Tippex corrections. These days it’s so easy to correct and reprint that manuscripts are disposable and fair copies have just about ceased to exist. And soon the eReader will send paperbacks the same way.

But hardbacks? I think they may be around for a decade or seven yet.

 

Incidentally, wasn’t it interesting to see that Amanda Hocking is close to signing a lucrative deal with a conventional publisher? Kind of turns things on their head, doesn’t it?

Comments

[michael]

And how about Barry Eisler turning down $500,000 contract from a major publisher to take his books to the e-world?

Don't try to make sense of it. The readers, not experts or media, will decide what is the future of the book. I really believe print and e-books will co-exist, just as hardcovers and mass market have.

The smart writer will write the best book and sell it on every format available. The reader will make his or her choice with each purchase.