I’m nearing the end of two weeks of vacation. It’s an odd and disconcerting thing to have your days free, and I’ve tried to fill my time with constructive things: writing, chipping fecklessly away at various landfills of email, going to the gym, planning unconsummated trips to DC. Mostly it’s all just noise to stave off the void, which requires a surprising amount of staving-off when you don’t have a 9-5 to occupy your mind. But when I run out of stuff to do, there’s always the bookstore.
I’ve always loved bookstores: I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time in them, ever since I was a very small person. The first one I remember was called Four Steps Down, on Hamra street, in Beirut. I remember it with startling clarity: the eponymous four steps down to the glass storefront, the beautiful rows of Tin Tin near the door, the colorful piles of books on their display stands, and — farther back, in the darker, quieter reaches of the store — the shelves: hundreds of volumes with tiny close-spaced text and no pictures, massed to the ceiling. I cared less for this area but still loved to wander through it, for reasons that I didn’t fully understand.
Thirty years later, I still don’t. I’d like to say it was some instinctive respect for the corpus of human knowledge as represented by this temple of the written blah blah blah, but it wasn’t — and isn’t — that at all. It was just the books, as objects. Running my finger across their spines. Picking them up. The heft of them; the way they looked, pressed together in their rows; the smell, both musty and new, rising from the bindings when you cracked them open; the soft whisper of pages fluttering against one another.
I’m typing this in Politics and Prose. Yesterday I hung out in Kramerbooks. I’ll probably stop by my local Borders on the way home. This, for me, is a reliable sort of happiness: the kind that you know where it is, an actual physical, visitable place that’ll consistently deliver the goods.
So it’s with some serious, if conflicted, sadness that I watch the era of the paper book wither away. The eBook industry — and, more generally, the internet — and, more generally than that, the emancipation of data from its physical constraints — is barreling toward the printed page like some oblivious dreadnaught, guns chambered, blithely flattening everything in its path.
As soon as you lay your hands on, say, a Nook — this tiny device into which you can easily fit the contents of every book you own, and then every book you’ve ever read, and much, much more — you can feel the death of the printed page, staring up at you from its tiny, unassuming screen. Once you actually use one of these things, it becomes completely obvious that dead-tree books have run their course. It’s not just the breathtaking, bag-of-holding miracle of having all your reading material stuffed into a device about the size of a grade-school primer — it’s the convenience of having all that stuff at your fingertips, the ease of buying new books, the shelf-space you save, the trees you don’t have to pulp, the instant, searchable, bookmarkable access to every word you’ve ever read. It’s not a fair fight. It’s not even close.
But — the minute I step into a bookstore, all those real and obvious and inarguable advantages evanesce, more or less instantly. My forebrain may be convinced of the superiority of eBooks, but the rest of me — the part that doesn’t respond to reason, that’s guided by the much more powerful edicts of memory and nostalgia and emotion — knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there will never be anything as good as a book made of paper. This is the same part of my brain that sends out sharp bolts of pleasure when I turn a corner and come unexpectedly on a whole shelf of, say, Philip K Dick novels, or an omnibus edition of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or a new printing of The Sound and the Fury. I just don’t get that feeling when I type “Philip K Dick” in a search field at Amazon, and then click bloodlessly through six pages of results.
I realize that this makes me a member of the old guard, and that everything I’m saying isn’t just incomprehensible, but possibly even slightly contemptible, to any whippersnappers who’ve grown up on a steady diet of world wide web, and have never been more than a few iPhone-taps away from getting any information they want, whenever the want it.1
And really, the emancipation of data from the physical world isn’t an unqualified win. There are consequences, both manifest and obscure, to unleashing the entire corpus of human knowledge on our meat-locked brains. Patton Oswalt writes about one of the more subtle aspects of this, the death of traditional nerdery:
When everyone has easy access to their favorite diversions and every diversion comes with a rabbit hole’s worth of extra features and deleted scenes and hidden hacks to tumble down and never emerge from, then we’re all just adding to an ever-swelling, soon-to-erupt volcano of trivia, re-contextualized and forever rebooted. We’re on the brink of Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was Available Forever.
I know it sounds great, but there’s a danger: Everything we have today that’s cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past. Action figures, videogames, superhero movies, iPods: All are continuations of a love that wanted more. Ever see action figures from the ’70s, each with that same generic Anson Williams body and one-piece costume with the big clumsy snap on the back? Or played Atari’s Adventure, found the secret room, and thought, that’s it? Can we all admit the final battle in Superman II looks like a local commercial for a personal-injury attorney? And how many people had their cassette of the Repo Man soundtrack eaten by a Walkman?
This is one of the consequences of the end of scarcity. A lot of the satisfaction that geeks squeeze out of the world used to derive from rarity — from the baroque difficulty of, say, obtaining and building an Altair 8800 in 1975. There weren’t many people doing this kind of thing, but, reading any account of that era, you can feel the joy these select few drew from the experience.
But it’s not just geeks — there’s something more satisfying about a hard-won achievement, no matter who you are, and there are consequences to the dissolution of barriers. Our entire economic system, for instance, is predicated on the scarcity of units of capital — whether the scarcity is real (gold coins) or artificial (dollar bills). There are authentic, material advantages to making it hard to get stuff.
I’m not talking about the real world here, though — this is something much mushier and ill-defined: the universe of information. There’s very little data in the world that someone with a computer and an internet connection can’t acquire eventually, and probably immediately. This seems obvious to us now, but really it’s a very new development.
Case in point: pre-internet, computer magazines used to publish games in the form of source code, which my brother and I would painstakingly type into my Atari 800XL. Pages and pages of BASIC rife with incomprehensible PEEKs and POKEs, DATA statements followed by strings of numbers that made no sense to either of us. And if you mistyped just one character in that wilderness of close-spaced text, the program wouldn’t work, and all your hours of monkish transcription would be for naught.
But — you couldn’t go buy these games in stores, and the magazines hadn’t yet started shipping disks. You couldn’t download the source off the internet, because there was no internet. You had two choices: type that shit in, or don’t play the game. It was a drag, and it was frustrating, and it sucked.
Then again, I can barely remember any of the games I’ve downloaded in the past couple of years, and I’m pretty sure I’ve played and then discarded them all in the space of an hour. But I do remember those old Atari BASIC games. Even the ones we couldn’t quite get working. I remember the breathless possibility of them.
Another case in point: there was a writer for Analog — one of these old Atari magazines — whose prose I greatly admired. All these games-you-had-to-type-in had little blurbs describing their “plot”, and the world in which they moved, to give some context to the blocky 8-bit graphics stuttering across the screen. They were generally poorly written throwaway space-fillers, but this guy always managed to make them cool, well-written, and interesting. So I wrote him a letter to tell him how much I loved his stuff.
Let me pause here and explain, for the benefit of my younger readers, what I mean by “letter”. There was once a time, before the end of the Cold War, before email and instant messaging and Facebook statuses, when, if you wanted to write things for other people to read, and they didn’t sit very close to you, you had to send them a letter. This meant writing words on one or more pieces of paper and putting them in an “envelope”, writing an address on the front of the envelope and sticking a “stamp” on it and then walking around until you found a stumpy blue R2-D2-shaped thing called a “mailbox”. You’d open the mouth of the mailbox, and put your envelope inside. And then you’d walk away, placing your faith in an invisible system of conveyance that would, by dint of a bucket-line of human-mediated stages, transport your letter to its destination.2
Amazingly, this worked far more often than it didn’t, but it worked at a ridiculously glacial pace. You can literally upload the entire contents of the library of congress to your blog in the time it took for your letter to get where it was going, and still have enough time to write the first version of Facebook.
Anyway. I was amazed and overjoyed to get an actual response, some time later, via this same creaky paper-based mechanism — thanking me for the compliment, and even writing a couple of sentences about the satisfaction a writer feels when someone unexpectedly says nice things about his work.
I pinned that letter to my corkboard, where it stayed until I left for college. I can’t remember what color socks I’m wearing on any given day, or what I ate for lunch this afternoon, or anything I was doing at work before this long vacation started — but I have an incredibly clear image of that letter, hanging under its red pushpin, in my old room.
I’m not trying to make an argument for the return of scarcity and difficulty and delay here. That genie’s out of the bottle, and there’s no putting it back. And even if you could, I wouldn’t want to — nostalgia-tinged emotional satisfaction aside, I love the fact that I can IM my brother whenever I want to talk to him, no matter where he is. It’s time for us to move beyond physical constraints, with all their limitations, inconveniences, and dangers.
Dangers? Yes. I came across an article in the New Yorker 3 recently, about the Vatican’s efforts to modernize its venerable library. The Vatican Library is an incomprehensibly rare and valuable treasure, a storehouse of human knowledge going back thousands of years, but all its data are trapped inside of books and scrolls and incunabula, one fire or flood or careless archivist away from being lost forever.
The Vatican is embarking on an effort to digitize its entire catalog, bringing its priceless archives to the masses — but, perhaps as important, allowing it to slip its shackles and flee into infospace4, where it can be endlessly shared and replicated. Where it can be safe. Ubiquity is a far more effective sentry than any locked and guarded and fireproof vault could ever be.
What this will also do, however, is convert all of these physical documents from storehouses of knowledge into artifacts — still precious, of course, but no longer valuable for their contents as much as for their historical significance. They’ll become monuments to a bygone era, and totems of a time when our knowledge was at the mercy of its terrestrial media.
David Mendelsohn, the article’s author, felt this transition firsthand when he visited the Vatican library and asked to see Procopius’s “Secret History” — a very old document that chronicles the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of Justinian’s court, and serves as a counterpoint to the largely laudatory press that Byzantine emperor received in his day. It was literally the only document of its kind.
So it can be an emotional experience to hold in your hand something like Alamanni’s copy of Procopius, which for a thousand years was the only object in the world that prevented a big chunk of history — a fragile but crucial truth — from being lost. I sat quietly with the text, thinking of how many hands it had to pass through to reach the Vatican Library, how overwhelming the odds had been against its survival into the digitized present, with its heady promise of infinite availability in time and space.
Assuming that we manage to make it into the future without blowing ourselves up or killing the planet, we can look forward to a world where everything we know and ever knew is universally available, replicated on a grand and staggering scale. Yes, the weight of all that information could crush us — but that’s a filtering problem, and one that we will presumably solve, eventually.
All of this is great for us, but not so great for physical books. I mean, they’re not going to simply disappear, any more than the British Empire disappeared when its fortunes failed and it had to draw back into its own borders. Novels will eventually be — in many ways, already are — another emanation of the datasphere, one mechanism among millions for breathing the atmosphere of information in which we live. Paper books will likely remain popular among the people who grew up reading them, but over time, as we die out, the medium will slide inexorably into the outskirts of popular culture, preserved in museums and lining the shelves of hipster antiquarians.5
Which makes me very sad. Future generations won’t even have the chance to choose between the efficiency and convenience of eBooks and the subtler, less quantifiable pleasures of walking into a bookstore and losing yourself in its stacks — literally, physically surrounded by fiction and philosophy and history and biography and memoir, the thoughts and deeds and dreams of thousands stamped onto squares of pulp and bound together and shelved: row upon tantalizing row of books that you can touch, and take down, and page through, and hold.
