For those of us who link the continued dominance of the physical book to the survival of civilisation as we know it, news from distant lands this past fortnight has been heartening. In Britain, The Guardian reported, sales of e-books dipped 17% in 2016 — within this, and sale digital editions of fiction titles dropped by almost the same amount, 16%. CNN, meanwhile, reported that in the United States e-book sales went down by 18.7% in the first nine months of 2016 — over which time, sales of hardback books went up 4.1%, and of paperbacks 7.5%.
The reasons put out for this arrest in migration from deadwood edition of books to their digital variants are many. Adult colouring books have been selling briskly these past couple of years (and that this is so demands a speculative piece of pop sociology of its own). Obviously, these books don’t retail on a Kindle reader. Young readers, they say, are plumping for physical books. A growing number of people are choosing to move all their reading from tablets to smartphones to avoid shuffling devices — and while this may work fine for reports and long reads, getting through the digital equivalent of a door-stopper on a smaller screen is not easy. Or conducive for complex texts.
Maybe it is that having read on tablets for a few years, readers are finding that returning to old favourites in that format just does not compare with the memory-jogging pleasure of flipping through a print copy. The digital revolution has still not yielded anything for those of us who settle even into a new book only after flipping through its pages, with a half an eye closed to prevent ourselves from finding out the ending.
Moreover, as Wendy Lesser pointed out in Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books , a deep reading of an e-book is impossible for those who recall “specific passages in the spatial way”. Try it. Close your eyes are recall a favourite passage read in an e-book, and another in a deadwood edition.
And surely, the idea that our reading on a digital platform can be tracked is a bit creepy. For instance, while I love checking out the popular highlights in an e-book — I am wary of being part of this crowdsourced enterprise. If my highlights overlap, am I too much of a conformist? If they don’t, am I missing the big things for the small stuff? Anyway, why should anyone know? It’s just a little leap from here to concerns about censorship. In his history of the bookselling trade, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop , Lewis Buzbee writes, “Able to sell anything, booksellers have sold everything, including those works that threaten and offend others. Over the centuries, the bookstore had continually found itself a stronghold of the rights of free expression.” Or: it’s much easier to buy a non-pirated copy of a banned book than an e-book.
A deeper relationship
However, as someone whose reading is currently scattered across physical books and the e-books in an unsatisfying division, I suspect that we have a qualitatively deeper relationship with the actual books. How this may be so is hinted at in a book just out, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensure by Pamela Paul. Paul, who is currently the editor of The New York Times Book Review , has kept a notebook (the said “Bob”, or Book of Books) since high school listing every book she has read and when. In recapping the experience, she reminds us that most of the books we read are not separate texts, but that they come together to thread together our individual biographies.
To run her eyes through the list is to know not only her reading life, but glimpse the curvature of her personal evolution, intellectually and emotionally. She writes: “Bob offers immediate access to where I’ve been, psychologically and geographically, at any given moment in my life. How I decided on a certain book. What I’d read previously that had either put me in the mood for more of the same or driven me toward something different.”
Paul revisits some of the books read during significant and life-changing moments of her life, and in this chronological narration, she demonstrates how a person’s way of reading may change over time, so that all the books read over a lifetime are not discrete texts but building blocks that combine uniquely for each of us. Perhaps that’s why we are eternally curious about what the next person, a stranger even, is reading. It tells us more than he or she may want us to know. This is why Paul refers to an article in which she first wrote about Bob, with a photo of a page from this book of books, as “exposing” herself.
But make your own book of books, and my guess is that the ones that left a deep impress were read in physical editions.
