In an 02008 article for Harper’s, Ursula Le Guin argues that book sales are declining because publishing corporations see volume as the only way to maintain business growth. She further argues that despite the hand-wringing of those who mourn the death of books, reading was only a significant part of life for a relatively brief span of history.
I see a high point of reading in the United States from around 01850 to about 01950 — call it the century of the book — the high point from which the doomsayers see us declining. As the public school came to be considered fundamental to democracy, and as libraries went public and flourished, reading was assumed to be something we shared in common. Teaching from first grade up centered on “English,” not only because immigrants wanted their children fluent in it but because literature — fiction, scientific works, history, poetry — was a major form of social currency.
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Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah Winfrey goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.
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In those departments, beloved by the CEOs, a “good book” means a high gross and a “good writer” is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no matter to the corporationeers, who don’t comprehend fiction even if they run their lives by it. Their interest in books is self-interest, the profit that can be made out of them — or occasionally, for the top executives, the Murdochs and other Merdles, the political power they can wield through them; but that is merely self-interest again, personal profit.
Like most commentators, however, she attacks alternative media as being ‘brain-numbing’ or ‘gross’, and says blogs have not ‘developed an aesthetic form’. While these views are true in various degrees, they are, in my opinion, largely irrelevant to the future of the book. Books are failing because they’re inefficient.
But we must consider what will come after. If we grant that books are dying and that reading on the web isn’t as good, what can we do?
Mandy Brown posits that poor design is a major factor in why reading on the web is an unsatisfying experience:
Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking. We measure how frequently they click but not how long they stay on the page. We concern ourselves with their travel and participation — how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there — but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still. Readers flourish when they have space — some distance from the hubbub of the crowds — and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space.
Is the solution really as simple as better design? Well, no; there is some cultural shift — but people can be fooled into reading. There’s still hope for the web to keep us reading large quantities of text.
The web may never reach the same level as books, but maybe it doesn’t have to.
