My favorite word in the English language (at least for today) is and. I’ve realized it’s the basis of my metaphysics—many Gods and one Brahman—as well as of my literary practice—poetry and fiction (and nonfiction, as here). And how unregarded, how belittled it is! Grammarians take umbrage if its humble three letters dare begin a sentence. Almost never is it allowed to end one. Its proliferation gets your sentence classified as a run-on. Yet I love and-ness and its possibilities and potential. And is the one preposition devoid of prepossession. It is the password of tolerance and pluralism. Its cousin Or is either fanatical—The book or the sword: Choose!—or pathologically indecisive—Boxers or briefs?
What occasions this meditation on and? Reading yet another meditation on the passing of books (this one by Leon Wieseltier at the New Republic). It’s one of many I’ve read over the past year. All online, by the way.
I have seen a trend: Discussions of the rising technology often fear that books will become what VHS cassettes became after the rise of DVDs: an obsolete technology, an inferior and ungainly delivery system for information. This is thinking under the sign of Or. One or the other.
A better metaphor may well be movies versus television. Movies antedated television. Going to see a movie requires people to get out of their houses (that is, it’s less convenient, like a book-book). It costs more (just as book-books do compared to ebooks). A television, like an e-reader, demands an initial modest investment which then gets you access, for a small recurring cost, to a vast amount of content. (The recurring cost is optional, as with television. Public-domain ebook classics are analogous to free public programming: Often healthy but often boring.) Yet television has not antiquated movies.
The comparison is far from perfect, of course. A television show and a movie aren’t the same duration; a movie can’t be watched on your television until it’s a little stale. But that difference is the crux of it: The two media thrive in parallel because they offer slightly different things.
Might that be the way books must adapt to survive? Must they become, as they were in medieval times, works of physical Art? They will have to offer something ebooks can’t. Might they become textured again, works of distinctly material splendor? Cover graphics and Garamond may have to give way to the book as an objet d’art. And don’t forget scents: the only thing better than new-car-smell is old-book-smell. And the hand of the author: Can your favorite author sign a Kindle screen? (Give them time. They’ll make the screen writeable with a special pen that slides out, and you’ll store thousands of scribbled famous names in a little file folder.)
We will pay a premium for your books, just as we do to sit in a theater or playhouse. There will be fewer books out there. But I envision the books of the future as being beautiful and made to last. A given text will be selected to be fashioned into a Book, by an artist or collaborative of artists, and this will be an honor. The book of the future will be a well-made, illuminated thing. Is that so horrible a fate for the physical book? That no more trees will be slaughtered in order to mass-produce pulpable, bargain-bin bestsellers and celebrity memoirs? The rise of e-readers means fewer and fewer chaff-novels will be given permanent form. But (let me dream) the novels that are keepers will be transfigured, because we demand it and the texts deserve it, into a form worth keeping: the Book, one word, with a capital B.
Or not….