A red letter day

"Change is the only constant" - Heraclitus

The following article comes as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to books and publishing in the last few years, but it's still a bit disturbing to a guy like me with Luddite tendencies.

Kindle book sales surpass hardcover sales on Amazon

This is not surprising for a few reasons.  First, few people I know actually spend the extra money to obtain a hardcover copy of books.  And that's within that small subgroup of friends who are dedicated enough to literature to read actual books in their spare time.  The rest either buy soft covers or the library for all of their literary needs. 

Not to mention the fact that eReaders are the logical next step in publishing.  

Don't get me wrong - there is absolutely nothing wrong with softcover books, and libraries are one of my favorite ideas since man invented fire.  However, I do think hardcover books deserve a little more credit than they get in these strange times.  Few things we buy in our lives will outlast a well bound hardcover book.  That shiny new 42" flatscreen will be lucky to survive the decade; the Xbox you attach to it may not survive to the end of the week.  Your laptop is probably already outdated, and odds are that the CDs you store your data on will be well nigh useless in another 20 years.  Your car will be moldering in a junk yard in 30 years when we finally figure out hydrogen or electric vehicles, and the garage you put it in will probably be imminent domained into a WalMart.

The thing that is mostly likely to keep ticking, and remain timeless, is that hardbound copy of "Dr Zhivago" you wrote marginalia in during your sophomore year of college.  And when your children sell it for 50 cents at a yardsale 5 years after you've bought the farm, someone else will be afforded the dual joys of a great piece of a literature and the reactions of a reader in common from a generation away. 

I have no problem with Kindles or eReaders of any kind.  In fact, I love the idea.  As a traveler, one of my most difficult decisions is what books to bring on a long trip.  An eReader would solve that problem once and for all.  But at the same time, reading from such a device lacks some of my favorite elements of reading.  Have you ever put a bookmark in a long book, like Don Quixote, and then looked at the top just to see how far along you were?  Or smelled the musty, pungent smell of old paper in a book that's older than your parents?  How about marginalia - ever written your thoughts in the margins of a great book, or underlined favorite passages, or dogeared pages to return to later?  Or even better, have you bought a used book and discovered someone else's wonderful annotations to one of your own favorite books?  To a guy who likes some unusual literature, it's the closest I'm ever likely to get to a discussion with a fellow Kazantzakis or Wodehouse fan.  Sometimes the notes are more fun than the actual text.

From another angle, the popularity of eReaders is fantastic news.  One of the old barriers to publication was economics -the fixed costs to publish a physical volume are extremely high, and tens of thousands of copies a book must be sold for a publisher to break even on a book.  Thus, books were often selected by potential profitability rather than literary merit.  As a result, guys like Stephen King could recycle plots for the hundredth time and be guaranteed publication at the expense of less profitable but meaningful writers (Although big name writers like King are also the reason some less profitable writers could be printed in the first place).  Ereaders have extremely low fixed costs for publication, and should theoretically allow companies like Amazon to publish essentially anything with little or no financial risk should a book prove unpopular.  Whether this is in itself a good or bad thing is certainly up for debate.  It could actually make things worse by flooding the market with trash.