The end of the printed word, revisited
Just when you thought that ink was over and paper was passé, along comes word that the world of books isn’t disappearing after all. In fact, its death has been greatly exaggerated.
Skeptics of the virtual life are scorned as Luddites or antiquarians. With the arrival of every new laptop, tablet and smart phone, we are to fall on our knees in wonder and gratitude.
In two particular but significant ways, though, we may be having second thoughts. One is how we are reading. The other is how we are writing.
In recent years, the electronic book has been all the rage. Forget print, cloth and binding, and other anachronistic notions of reading; hail the ascent of the e-book, coming to a small screen near you.
No doubt it has advantages. You can get the book immediately, perfect in the age of instant gratification. You can store it, and many others — your own virtual library — in a portable, compact device, often lighter than that door-stopper gothic novel. You can read anonymously, which accounts, in part, for the runaway success of Fifty Shades of Grey. And yes, it is cheaper than a hardcover (though not necessarily a paperback.)
Advantages there are, but enough to kill the physical book? BookNet Canada reports that the market share of e-books reached 17.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2012, but fell to 12.9 per cent in the last quarter of last year. It thinks e-books may be “plateauing” at about 15 per cent of the market, a trend confirmed early this year.
In the United States, e-books grew by five per cent in the first quarter of 2013, far less than a year earlier. An excellent analysis by blogger Nicholas Carr in Rough Type concludes that e-books now account for only one-quarter of the U.S. market, questioning the inevitability of “the digital revolution.”
Why? Readers have learned that e-books are more suited to the airplane than the couch; “early adopters” have already switched to ebooks, while 59 per cent of Americans are not interested; e-book prices have not fallen as sharply as expected. The best explanation, Carr says, is “the advantages of printed books have been underrated, while the advantages of ebooks have been overrated.”
Bingo. While e-books may work well for travel, they don’t for other purposes. One is historical research. If you want to check chapter endnotes and consult the bibliography as you read, e-books are cumbersome.
And while you can highlight and search in e-books, there’s nothing like underlining the text and scrawling notes in the margin, once scorned as desecration by purists, when writing in books was the greatest danger to them.
The bibliophile keeps these annotated books, treating them as living things, to be read and re-read. My father, who built a panelled Georgian library, organized his books with such precision that he could retrieve a particular one from the shelf with his eyes closed.
Ah, but we can store the e-book, and our marginalia, electronically. That’s, of course, until we want them in 10 years, only to find that the technology is obsolete or the device has been lost.
The apparent skepticism of ebooks makes them less likely to displace physical books than complement them. But it may also represent a broader reaction to the dictators of digital playing out in other ways, too, such as the popularity of Moleskine notebooks.
Who would have imagined that? Instead of tapping on a keyboard, there are traditionalists who prefer pen on paper. They cherish its unique, incomparable feel, smell and sound.
Moleskine is a byword for the sort of leather-bound notebooks used by Hemingway for notes and by Vincent Van Gogh for sketches. The word was coined by the late author Bruce Chatwin, describing a simple black, oilcloth-bound rectangular notebook with rounded corners, an elastic page-holder and an internal expandable pocket.
Having virtually disappeared in the 1980s, the Moleskine is now a cultural phenomenon. Enthusiasts are snapping them up.
Moleskine is designed in Italy and made in China. In Shanghai, where the future mugs you on every corner, there is a shop that sells nothing but Moleskine. Behind the counter, Nicholas Wu, who runs Moleskine in China, proudly explains how the company has adapted: “China gave the world paper,” and now it is finding new ways to present it.
The shelves boast a dazzling display of colours (red and pink are popular), shapes and sizes. It makes journals for travel, reading, cooking. It makes pens (though not yet a slender one to insert seamlessly in the spine of a notebook).
Embracing the digital world but not bowing to it, Moleskine makes notebooks that can be linked to the Internet through apps and virtual archives. Naturally, Moleskine has blogs and online groups.
Whatever the bejeaned hipsters of Silicon Valley insist, the notebook, like the printed book, is not disappearing. We still want to read and we still want to write, and we’ll do it our way.