If you don’t love books; buying them, looking at them, smelling them and even on occasion reading them, then this article is not for you.

The book occupies a special place in the history of civilisation. It is a very adaptable piece of technology and has been the dominant vehicle to transmit information for the last 600 years. It is a repository of knowledge, of stories, of faith, of hope. As Neil Gaiman puts it,

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

But book are only useful if someone reads them and in the internet age there are plenty of people worried that the art & discipline of reading is dying. And as with so many fears about the future of the world, Donald Trump is being offered as evidence.

Readers & Leaders

President Truman once said, “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” In which case, then perhaps America is in more trouble than we think or Trump is going to prove Truman wrong. Trump symbolises what many fear (for so many reasons) but here because he is a symbol of the disrespecting and disregarding of reading.

Death to the Reading Class

Marshall Poe is one of reading’s doomsayers.

We need to face facts: people do not want to read, they want to watch and listen. Our task, then, is to give them something serious to watch and listen to, something that conveys the richness and complexity of our written work in pictures and sounds.

Adam Roberts & Alan Jacobs disagree with Marshall but if readers are replaced by viewers then the book would become endangered. However we have been living in YouTube’s world for some time now and the book it seems is no hurry to shuffle off and die.

What is the future of the book? It is much brighter than people think.

The Economist has a fascinating essay on the book and all that goes into the writing and selling of one. It also considers what the book might look like in the future.

In the past decade people have been falling over themselves to predict the death of books, of publishers, of authors and of bookshops, even of reading itself. Of all those believed at risk, only the bookshops have actually suffered serious damage.

Having given yourself the big perspective on the book there are a number of other ingredients worth considering.

Old customs are revived with new technology

One notable development is the rediscovery of an ancient custom (although now a solitary and not communal pursuit) is that of having your book read to you by a skilled reader. Not only can you read a book on your phone (should you wish) it is even more suited to letting it read you the book instead. The audiobook has reinvented on a mass scale the art of oral storytelling. In 2016 on Audible alone 1.6 billion hours of audio was downloaded. Laurence Howell, director of content at Audible says,

From the early days of Homer, the origins of western literature have their basis in oral storytelling. Over many centuries, we have told stories to each other and we still retain a love of a great performance, whether that is being read to as a child or listening to audiobooks.

Not only has the book found new life in its audio form, the predicted demise of the physical book hasn’t yet materialised either. Neil Gaiman believes that is because few things are better at being a book, than a book.

As Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath resistant, solar operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.

Indeed last year e-book sales fell and it’s market share dropped. The physical book is proving far more resilient than CDs and DVDs. Yet not all is quite right in the land of the book.

It’s all about the stores

Jason Kottke’s theory as to why e-book sales are falling is the sad and lamented decline of the bookstore. However not all have gone the way of the dinosaurs. I think we all agree that our town or city are better places with bookshops like these in them. Or these.

My life is bound up with books, I’ve loved them, read them, treasured them, collected them, sold them, edited them and written them. In one case I’ve built my life upon its contents. I’m actively, determinedly, passionately seeking to pass this love onto my children. So books will survive one more generation at least.

Photo by ZapTheDingbat