Throw the Book at Them

We’ve tackled music, movies, and TV. We’ve touched on fashion, festivals, and the Final Four. Now it’s time for Econotainment to set its sights on another sector of the entertainment world: books.

Groan.

For months, Apple’s iPad has loomed on the horizon, with retailers drooling to let customers light up the screens of the company’s new tablet device. So far, the response has been mild, as the figures trickle in. The Los Angeles Times reports that the Cupterino, Calif. company sold more than 300,000 iPads on Saturday, the day the device finally saw the light of day. (And this doesn’t even factor in the 1 million apps and 250,000 e-books that have been downloaded since then.) And while some experts say that the response to the iPad has been only lukewarm, there’s no denying what some of the numbers say about the publishers of trade books: they’re in trouble.

From 2004 to 2007, print book sales stalled around $24 billion, according to figures from the Census Bureau. Alternately, the International Digital Publishing Forum shows the e-book sales have grown exponentially during the last five years. And I read on Yahoo! News today that Borders is about ready to call it quits.

Peter Olson, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, has heard the groans from these publishers. In an illuminating Q&A on the institution’s Working Knowledge Web site, Olson suggests that in order to keep people reading, publishers ought to embrace technology rather than press their noses in a paperback.

“I think the fundamental issue is not the rate of adoption of the e-reader, or whether publishers will survive in their current form, or what their role will be in the future,” Olson explains. “The fundamental question at the very bottom of this is, will people read books at all?”

That’s a terrifying proposition, and not just because, as an English major, I’ve spent the last four years perfecting the art of reading books (as if such an “art” could ever be perfected). I might not recall the atomic mass of Sodium or what a polynomial is, but I do remember the name of Holden Caulfield’s brother and the words that Sydney Carton speaks at the end of "A Tale of Two Cities" (For the record, he declares, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”) Reading has opened my eyes and sharpened my mind and, like many people, I’m genuinely afraid of what might happen to it as publishers trade pencils for touch-screens. But I have hope that despite the industry’s suffering, the J.D. Salingers and Charles Dickenses of the future are still typing away somewhere.

And even though my cynicism about Twitter knows no bounds, this is still pretty hilarious.

--Michael Morella