Judging a Book by Its Cover

Posted on March 31, 2010 in Uncategorized

"Emily Brontё dons lilies and blood for the Twilight generation. We sip our tea from Great Expectations but how many of us have actually read it? In the future will we really look back with fondness at vintage Kindle designs?’

Hosted by Alex Clark, the FREE word centre hosted a discussion on that ongoing debate – the future of the book. Will the physical book really ever go the same way as the music album sleeve? Will the Kindle ever become a cherished object of design, revered in the same way that books are today?

Alex started by admitting that despite having read thousands of articles on the topic she was still no closer to knowing what the future really held for the book as we know it. The panel of bibliophiles there to shed some light on the topic were Rick Gebowski, Joanna Prior and Cory Doctorow. Rick is an antiquarian book dealer, summed up by Tatler magazine as ‘Bill Bryson, only on books’. As well as being an occasional writer and broadcaster, Rick is also a publisher, having set up two private presses – 6^th Chamber Press and Bridgewater Press (he explained the concept of private presses as one which creates only a small number of books and then charges too much for them). On top of this he is currently judging the International Man Booker prize and is faced with the daunting challenge of reading 300 books in the next year. Joanna Prior is currently the Managing Director of Penguin General Books, but worked as their Marketing and Publicity Director for many years. Joanna is a founder member of Reading Partners, a cross-industry consortium of Publishers and Libraries that organises the British Book Awards, among other events. Finally, Cory is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, bookseller and blogger as well as co-editor of Boing Boing. He is the former European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group.

The panellists plunged straight into the deep end and discussed how much value we place on the book as an object. Cory highlighted the intense emotional attachment that humans seem to have with books. Books have come to signify culture and civilisation (burning of books is one of the most powerful and resonant images to depict the disintegration of civilisation and also one of the first to spring to mind). He felt that technology takes away this sense of attachment. E-readers might be covetable objects but it is unlikely that people are going to begin collecting Kindles once owned by famous people. They don’t allow for the same kind of personal interaction and do not lend themselves to a sense of personal ownership in the same way that the book does.

Rick expanded on this idea. As a lifelong collector of rare books, Rick was the panel member most attached to the idea of books having emotional value. What he enjoys most is reading first editions. The original cover that the author picked, the type-set and even the turning of the page all contribute to the reading experience for him. Obviously ‘the death of the book’ is not something that Rick desires, although he did go on to admit that he wished it would have a ‘severe illness’ – there are just far too many books being published each year.

The discussion naturally led onto the debate over what will be the role of the publisher in the future. Penguin itself came into being upon the simple ethos of making sure that more books were available to more people. Joanna seemed to place less emphasis on the physical book, and more on the actual words that the author has written. It is the words and the content that are the unit of value and it is the role of the publisher to make sure this content gets to the reader, no matter what format they receive them in. Joanna also pointed out that while there will always be those who prefer to read a book, there are certainly consumers out there for whom a digital format is most appropriate. The key is finding the right content for the right audience and then taking the necessary steps to connect them. Picking the appropriate format for the particular audience is becoming an increasingly important step in the publishing process.

Another issue raised by the debate is copyright. Cory is an activist who firmly believes in liberalising copyright laws. With one exception, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, which he did not own the rights to, Corey has made the content of all of his books available for free online on the same day as publication. Part of Corey’s disdain for copyright laws stems from his belief that we are all ‘copiers’ – which is true, not one of us in the audience could claim never to have made a mix tape, for example. Joanna then made an interesting point about the customer that illegally downloads. As strange as it sounds, the customers that download illegally are the same people who are also most likely to buy content; the people that are most passionate about getting their hands on the content are those that are likely to find it illegally, but at the same time they are the exact same people that are most likely to buy it too. The way that Joanna likes to think of this is that this customer may be denying some writers revenue but they are giving it back, so to speak, to another writer elsewhere.

As the debate went on, Rick began to examine the very definition of the word book. Rick couldn’t get past his confusion over how it could be possible to download a ‘book’. Again, this ties in with the whole nature of the book being a physical object which lends itself more to the notion of ownership. Rick’s take on the concept was how do you ‘own’ a book if you download it? If you own something it is yours to dispose of and give away to others as you please. Rick expressed his concern that this attachment to books in their physical form may be a concept that would die out with his generation; Joanna was quick to cite the example of her daughter who, while she consumes texts digitally, still takes great pride in lining up her physical books. It seems this need to ‘own’ a book and be able to display it as yours is something that will inevitably prevail.

The conversation opened up to the audience towards the end. One audience member pointed out that there can still be a sense of owning digital content; making it a more personal experience that is ‘collectable’, In years to come there is a high chance people will be sitting around discussing Canongate’s innovative digital edition of The Death of Bunny Munro, for example. Another audience member reminded us of how this sense of change within the industry is nothing new, citing the example of the shift from the standard three volume book in the eighteenth century to the norm of the one volume book that we are familiar with now. It is inevitable that the way in which we consume published materials will change as technology advances. Due to this, perceived or not, attachment that people have to physical books it does seem unlikely that we are going to see their extinction any time soon. However, as is the nature of the industry, it is likely that the concept of the ‘book’ being the physical object we know it as is likely to keep on changing.