Books Were Nice

Don’t get me wrong. I liked books. They were great.

I had a dream last night recalling the story of Allen Ginsberg’s attempts to get publishers to take a work none of them thought anybody would read. Ginsberg would stop publisher reps and editors on the streets of New York City and plead for them to publish this author, but they brushed him off as crazy. They rejected his inquiry letters. They tried their best to ignore him.

The author Ginsberg was trying to get them to take was Jack Kerouac. A man who in a few short years would be arguably the most famous American author in the world.

What caused this struggle? What was the reason for Ginsberg’s and Kerouac’s anxiety and stress?

They needed a publisher to print their books.

Jeez.

Glad that’s over.

***

Boing-Boing is one of the most popular blogs in the world. Cory Doctorow is one of the co-editors. In 2003, Doctorow’s first book -- Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- came out in both book and Creative Commons licensed digital format. It was the first published novel ever to do so.

Now, there are at least a few more free texts available online. Everything from commercially available ISBN’d four-on-the-floor ‘Books’ (with a capital ‘B’), to open textbooks, to the 2 million public domain ebooks available through WorldBookFair. And, I'm sure you've seen Open Library? (Whoa).

When it comes down to the brass tacks, publishing today -- in it's pure form -- is really just a matter of distribution of online content. And you can do that yourself.

Growing up, one of my heroes was Dischord Records founder Ian MacKaye who as a teenager in the early '80s started his own record label. The whole idea was about doing it yourself. Unapologetically. Without a corporate safety net. For your friends. For your community.

Imagine what young DIYers are able to do today. The kinds of ways they can use the Web to level the playing field. Hurdle the old obstacles. Create their own legends.

***

Working in a paperless classroom for the last couple years, you can imagine the amount of times I’ve heard the refrain “But I just prefer the comfort of a real book”.

And I completely understand where that sentiment is coming from. After all, I take my own kids to our public library twice a week and have become over the years somewhat locally notorious on account of the amount of late fines I rack up. Rarely are there less than three or four library books next to my bed; it’s just a matter of fact that the rest of our borrowed selections all too often get lost among the thousands of books I’ve picked up and pack-ratted over the years working jobs in bookstores, universities, and for nearly the last decade as a classroom teacher.

I love books. In college, I used to spend countless hours roaming the stacks. Ever notice old books present what the wine afficinados might call a ‘chocolate bouquet’? In fact, when I met my future wife, I was living in a studio where we made all of the furniture out of recycled mass-market paperbacks. You could say I’ve seen multiple values in the bound tome.

In fact, I was working the rare book trade for a couple of years and I had the pleasure of handling old first editions of Coleridge, Eliot, Joyce, Kerouac… I have nothing but fond remembrances of those days. I have books in my own collection that hold memories and inscriptions from dead relatives and long lost friends.

Books have been important to me. And that’s why I take it so seriously in saying that they are on the way out.

***

We’re an assuming bunch -- myself included -- and we like to think that what is always has been. Especially with the ubiquitous stuff like deodorant, arch-supporting shoes, and printed books.

Fact of the matter is, in the long chronology of literature, printed books have only been around for about five minutes. The rest of the time, we wrote on goatskin. And before that on dried reeds. And before that on wax and clay. And before that, hell, we just talked to each other.

That's where literature came from: not the printed word, but the spoken word. The Epics of Greece, India, Anatolia transmitted orally for generations.

As previously I wrote in a post on my blog, printed books themselves are something of an anomaly. They mark the only time in history that we’ve mass produced perfect copies of literature, text, and illustrations. We’ve assumed that’s been for the best. Certainly it was convienent. But why would we ever have assumed that it would last?

As a species, we are glossers. That’s why there are signs in public and university libraries that read ‘No Marking or Highlighting in the Books’. It’s because we have an impulse to do that. Always have.

If you look at the majority of texts from the Medieval manuscript codex, they are full of glosses. After all, it’s this era more than any other that defines for us the term ‘palimpsest’.

That is, up until now.

I’ll tell you what I think. I think we’re in the process of correcting the anomaly of printed mass produced text. I think we’re going back to our natural instincts. We’re bookmarking online. We’re highlighting and commenting via Diigo. And we’re also doing something unique in the history of our vandalism against text: we’re sharing our glosses globally with immediate effect.

And this isn’t limited to text.

We’re taking back music. Taking it out of the hands of the Great Oz of the music industry and mashing it up to sound like whatever we want. Mash-ups are the first folk music of the 21st century.

We’re doing it with movies. We’re re-dubbing movie clips at a rate the young Woody Allen would never be able to comprehend. We’re pirating and we’re cannibalizing. We’re destroying the entertainment industry and we’re creating a new culture.

And we’ve had the itch to do this ever since we saw our first mass marketed printed books start rolling off the presses.

I've said it before, but: maybe this isn’t a paradigm shift at all. Maybe it’s just a realignment. A way of getting back to our true selves and our true relation to text and information.

A way of getting towards a future where we’ll never have to worry about them burning books and banning books again. Because the books will be ubiquitous; floating on the Cloud; waiting only for us to access them.

And access will be had by all. That was in my dream, too.

Photo by Soul Pusher cc 2.0.