Read an Excerpt
Turning the Page
Book Culture in the Digital Ageâ"Essays, Reflections, Interventions
By Jeffrey R. Di Leo Texas Review Press
Copyright © 2014 Jeffrey R. Di Leo
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-937875-52-7
CHAPTER 1
ROBOTS IN THE STACKS
What is to become of libraries in the digital age? What does it mean for libraries to be "state of the art" at a time when most users prefer to download their books rather than load them into a book bag? When more books than ever are available digitally?
Libraries are finding it increasingly difficult to justify purchasing and shelving new titles when the demand for e-books is increasing and the use of p-books is decreasing.
At most libraries today, the stacks are getting smaller and the servers are getting larger.
Space formerly used for bookshelves is being converted into computer stations, study space, and coffee bars. This repurposing of the stacks is a postcard from the libraries of the future.
Existing p-books are more for decoration than use. They are increasingly merely a nostalgic nod to the library's past, rather than its future. A "service" for the serendipitous luddites who still dream of finding that special book in the stacks that will unlock their imaginations — and send their thought and writing to new heights.
While the undignified use of p-books as set design for libraries of the future is bad news for bibliophiles, it does not portend the demise of the library. Unlike bookstores, many of which had to close in response to changes in technologies of the book, and increasing e-book sales and online p-book sales, libraries do not need to rely on the continuing presence of p-books in order to keep their doors open.
Still, like bookstores, libraries serve particular communities and select their holdings based on the needs of those communities. Unlike bookstores, they can repurpose their physical space to meet the changing informational needs of their communities.
Borders without p-books is not a bookstore; a library without p-books can still be a library — and perhaps an even better one.
In spite of the chorus of dystopian visions of the demise of the library in the digital age, there is an opportunity now for libraries to reimagine themselves at a time where the majority of their physical space need not be occupied by decaying rows of p-books. This should not be difficult as libraries have always been prime fodder for our imaginations.
They are that room in the mansion that is both mysterious and magical — and yet tinged with sadness. That space where the collected wisdom of generations can inspire one day, and be gone the next as was the case in ancient Alexandria when their magnificent library burned leaving future generations to wonder who would commit such a horrific crime — and what irreplaceable knowledge went up in smoke? In fact, it might be argued that some of the best writing that the world has known has come in response to libraries driving our imaginations and pushing our pens.
Think of the library that drove Don Quixote "to become a knight errant, and to travel about the world with his armour and his arms and his horse in search of adventures, and to practice all those activities that he knew from his books were practiced by knights errant." This magical place kept Quixote "so absorbed in these books that his nights were spent reading from dusk till dawn, and his days from dawn till dusk, until the lack of sleep and excess of reading withered his brain, and he went mad." "Everything he read in books," writes Cervantes, "took possession of his imagination: enchantments, fights, battles, challenges, wounds, sweet nothings, love affairs, storms and impossible absurdities."
Unlike Quixote's library, which drove him mad and into the world, Jorge Luis Borges' mysterious library only drove him deeper into the library — which he viewed as the world. "The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries," writes Borges in "The Library of Babel." "In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing," continues Borges. "From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below — one after another, endlessly."
If Quixote's library was a magical "special collec-tion," then Borges' library was the perfect library as it "contained all books." "[T]he librarian deduced that the Library is 'total' — perfect, complete, and whole," writes Borges, "— and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite) — that is, all that is able to be expressed in every language."
With the magic and mystery of Alexandria and La Mancha and Borgesian ventilation shafts, we arrive today at the opening of a new library whose sheer presence addresses the question of what libraries look like in the digital age.
This month an amazing new library opened up on the campus of North Carolina State University. Here 1.5 million books are housed by size in bins where they are retrieved by robots. Having robots in the stacks allows the library to store these books with one-ninth the space of a traditional library.
The space saved has allowed this library to open about 100 rooms for group study and collaborative projects. Many of these rooms have state of the art technology such as video display walls and 270-degree 3D digital environments.
For those who pine to roam the stacks, the library offers a simulated experience through its computer-generated "virtual shelf." And if the book on the virtual shelf is an e-book, one can even browse through it.
For those who actually want to see and touch books on shelves, they have about 40,000 p-books for human browsing. No robots allowed.
Though the majority of the books in this library are engineering and textiles books, one can easily imagine other special collections housed in this way — with, for example, robots fetching H. G. Wells and Asimov or old tales of chivalry and romance.
The James B. Hunt Jr. Library in Raleigh is truly a library from the future though one may still ask, "Is it pointless?" In a footnote at the end of his Babel story, Borges tells us "Letizia Alvarez de Toledo has observed that the vast Library is pointless; strictly speaking, all that is required is a single volume, of the common size, printed in nine- or ten-point type, that would consist of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages."
A similar observation may be made about the Hunt Library: strictly speaking, all that is required is a single computer, of the common size, that would provide access to all of the books in the world. Perhaps even an iPad will do. Which presents the question: Why not just scan the p-books rather than create robots to retrieve them?
The answer seems to be that it would take too long. But how long is too long, particularly when perfection is at stake? When the future of libraries are e-books?
What is the perfect library of the digital age? One that contains every conceivable e-book — or one that has a robot that gets your p-books for you?
Libraries have long captivated our imagination–and unleashed our fears. The 18,712 metal bins used to store books in the Hunt are either the future of libraries — or the last hurrah for p-books in the digital age of the library. It is eerie the way these bins look and feel like sepulchers — with robots harvesting books from them.
In his 1939 essay, "The Total Library," Jorge Luis Borges speculated that a "half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all of the books in the British Museum." In the shadows of the Hunt, one might now ask whether it would take robots any less time? For that matter, ask how long would it take them to scan in all the p-books in the Hunt? Or whether the Hunt is merely tilting at digital windmills?
CHAPTER 2
MARCH OF THE PENGUINS
How big can a publisher get? Is it possible that the publishing industry will soon mirror the auto and steel industries? Would a Big Three Book-Maker industry be good for authors and readers?
Looks like the wait to find out won't be a long one.
On October 29, 2012, the two largest trade-book publishing corporations in the world — Random House and Penguin — announced that they will be merging. If approved by government regulators, the new Penguin Random House will account for about one in four books sold worldwide.
"Holy paperbacks, Batman! Penguin is trying to take over the publishing world!"
Or so it would seem. Worldwide revenues from this new publishing company will be in the neighborhood of 4 billion dollars. However, the annual revenues of Penguin's parent company are even larger.
Pearson, the UK corporation which owns the Penguin Book Group, is by far the largest publishing corporation in the world with annual revenues of nearly 8.5 billion dollars. It has 41,000 employees in 70 countries, and publishes over 4,000 fiction and non-fiction books per year. Pearson Education is the source of 75% of its revenue, with the remainder divided between Penguin (18%) and the Financial Times (7%).
Though roughly a quarter the size of Penguin, Random House is the eighth largest publishing company in the world. Owned by Germany's Bertelsmann AG, Random House had annual revenues in excess of 2.2 billion dollars in 2011. However, with revenues in excess of 3.8 billion the previous year, one wonders what role this revenue loss played in their merger with Penguin.
To put these revenue and publishing numbers in some context, remember that of the 85,000 publishers in the Bowker database, twelve of them account for almost two- thirds of U.S. trade and mass-market book sales — and now one of them will account for one-quarter alone. Also recall that the annual revenues of Penguin Random House will be more than the combined revenues of 58,795 U.S. trade and mass-market publishers, that is, over 95% of all U.S. publishers.
This enormous financial and market-share advantage has created a lot of concern — and both companies are already working hard to contain it.
Markus Dohle, Random House chairman and CEO, who will assume the position of CEO of the new combined publishing company, wrote to his Random House colleagues that he aims "to retain the distinct identities of both companies' imprints."
Distinct identities? Who is he kidding? That world was lost when Random House went public and started swallowing up publishing houses back in the 1960s.
It bears remembering that both Random House and Penguin have already absorbed much of their competition over the past fifty years. In the United States alone, Random House includes the imprints Alfred A. Knopf, Anchor, Ballantine, Bantam, Broadway, Clarkson Potter, Crown, Delacorte, Dell, Del Rey, Dial, Doubleday, Everyman's Library, Fawcett, Fodor's Travel, Golden Books, Harmony Ivy, Kids@Random, Main Street Books, Nan A. Talese, One World, Pantheon, Random House, Schocken, Shave Areheart Books, Spectra, Spiegel & Grau, Strivers Row Books, The Modern Library, Three Rivers Press, Villiard, Vintage, and Wellspring, and Penguin Book Group includes Ace, Alpha, Avery, Berkley, Current, Dial Books, Dutton, Firebird, Frederick Warne, Gotham, G. P. Putnam's Sons, Grosset & Dunlap, HP Books, Hudson Street Press, Jeremy P. Tarcher, Jove, New American Library, Penguin, Penguin Press, Perigee, Philomel, Plume, Portfolio, Price Stern Sloan, Puffin, Putnam, Riverhead, Sentinel, Speak, Tarcher, and Viking. Add to this list the UK imprints of both companies, and the combined Penguin Random House company will result in over 100 different imprints in the U.S. and UK alone.
The only distinctive difference that will come out of this new company are its profits — which will be the largest ever by one company in the history of trade publishing.
There is also worry that authors will lose more of their creative autonomy and will be reduced even more to merely equations or numbers by the new mega-corporation. To assuage this fear, Dohle wrote in the same letter that "authors remain the center of everything we do" and that "creative autonomy" "will be a defining hallmark" of Penguin Random House. It is one thing for Dohle to say it, but quite another to realize it in a publishing environment where capital — not creativity — is the prime directive, and where autonomy must be cleared by the accounting office.
Of all the things in Dohle's letter, the least controversial is his claim that the other defining hallmark of Penguin Random House will be "great resources." We know what this will mean for shareholders, but what will this mean for authors, agents ... and readers?
A major fear of course is that reduced competition between Random House and Penguin will result in lower advances and profits for authors and agents, and fewer publishing options for writers — now that two of the Big Ten are One.
Both Dohle and John Makinson, who is slated to become Chairman of the new company, and who is currently Chairman and CEO of Penguin, try to calm these concerns. In fact, Makinson writes in his letter to the global Penguin Group that "exactly the opposite will happen," namely that the "publishing imprints of the two companies will remain as they are today, competing for the very best authors and the very best books." But again, it is hard to believe that the merger will result in more choices and more competition in the book industry. So are we really to believe that the imprints of this company are going to compete vigorously against each other for titles? For example, in the same way that one imprint of Random House bid against another imprint for the follow-up novel to Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain?
Recall the imprint competition: on the basis of what is said to have been a one-page proposal, one of Random House's imprints offered an advance of over five million dollars to the author. Not to be outdone, another of their imprints offered an 8.25 million dollar advance. Frazier's follow-up novel, Thirteen Moons, however, did not even cover the initial advance, let alone the actual one. Though the competition benefited Frazier, it did not add to the bottom line of the company. One would assume that Random House now has more safe-guards to protect against events like this occurring again — though this year's 1.6 billion dollar revenue dip might suggest otherwise.
Make no mistake: this merger is not about protecting creative autonomy or bringing about more opportunities for authors and options for readers. Rather, it is about maximizing profit in an industry that is rapidly changing. In fact, it may be more about the digital transformation of the publishing world than anything else. And the competition may not be from within the publishing world, but rather from the distribution and sales world.
Amazon reports that it sells 114 e-books for every 100 printed books. And it has been predicted that it will soon account for 50% of U.S. trade sales in all formats as early as this year. Dohle's letter indirectly confirms their worries about the challenges presented by Amazon when he says that the merger "will accelerate our digital transformation, while ensuring a strong future for print." He also says that it will put them in a better position "to provide copyright protection, and to support our authors' intellectual property."
To be sure, the path for the world's largest book publishers will continue to be bigger and bolder mergers. And soon, the publishing industry will probably need to be renamed the "infotainment" industry when suitors like Walt Disney and Time Warner come knocking. This is publishing in the age of neoliberalism. A world, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, with "no other law than that of maximum profit." It is "unfettered capitalism without any disguise," writes Bourdieu, "a very smart and very modern repackaging of the oldest ideas of the oldest capitalist."
Though Makinson may try to make the case that this extreme concentration of publishing capital is going to benefit "creative and editorial independence," and will allow them "to take risks with new authors," don't believe it. It will be about as much risk as the market analysis of radical capitalism allows — which won't be much. I'm certain that a William Gaddis or Djuna Barnes would not get very far in the world of neoliberal publishing risk.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Turning the Page by Jeffrey R. Di Leo. Copyright © 2014 Jeffrey R. Di Leo. Excerpted by permission of Texas Review Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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