At a well-attended bookstore event a few years ago, I remember the featured author asking the audience why people went to readings. He seemed happy enough to be there but, he noted, “it’s a weird thing to do.” Traipsing to a store to hear a book’s passage read by the author is a much larger investment of energy and time than simply reading the passage yourself at home.
The same question could be asked about buying a book versus the considerably smaller investment of borrowing a copy. For that matter, the question “Why make the effort?” could be asked about getting the book free from the library—given limits on library availability and the frustrating presence of library hold lists—when there are instantaneous, frictionless ways to read almost any book digitally via pirate sites and pirate-adjacent sites. Internet Archive and Z Library and SciHub and their ilk, with their sometimes bold claims in the realm of intellectual property, mean that in 2023 most Americans with reliable internet can, if they choose, move seamlessly and risk-free through an endless open landscape of free books. It’s roughly the direction music has migrated for many listeners.
Going to the author reading, visiting the bookstore, borrowing the book from a conventional library—at some level these are readers’ voluntary expenditures of time and (often) money. But readers continue to make these investments in far larger numbers than you’d think, given the bold predictions of futurists going back to the turn of the last century. (I remember enduring a conference keynote in 2013 in which the speaker told assembled book publishers that we were Kodak, manufacturing traditional cameras and film past the point when anyone wanted them. If there’s justice in the world, that keynoter is now in another line of work.) Durable, resilient books are selling more than they were a decade ago. Among Gen Z and Millennials, use of public libraries is up.
Back to the example of music, a comparison to vinyl’s renaissance may help explain the surprisingly successful story of books in the twenty-first century. Something similar is arguably present in contemporary attachments to farmers’ markets, where ideas of virtue and craft are connected to well-being and ultimately happiness. That farmers’ markets are open to critique for their class- and race-based appeal serves as a reminder that Book World, too, needs to be vigilant about welcoming everyone to its pleasures.
If there’s a loose movement of boosters working to keep books alive despite their costs in money and time, then I think it’s worth measuring it (whatever its imperfections) against the movement’s opposite—a cyber-libertarian insistence that anything not immediately and seamlessly available free is inaccessible. Framed as a social justice issue, the cyber-libertarian impulse seems in reality to be inattentive to the mechanisms for compensation that make jobs with books (author, publisher, bookseller, librarian) possible. I think the other side of the equation—the book boosters—understands this, and supports sustainability in something like the same way as customers at the farmers’ market.
My own move from salaried publishing executive to scrappy consultant has reduced my budget for much in the way of book-buying. But I’m genuinely pleased that there’s still so much to read—books that someone paid for, even if it’s a public library. Limits on what’s available and when (those hold lists are real) have if anything made my reading more eclectic. I’ll place a hold on the buzzy new novel and discover, while I wait, something I missed ten years ago.
To wrap up with a recommendation: One book I’ll probably splurge on is David Golumbia’s Cyberlibertarianism, coming from the University of Minnesota Press. I’m grateful to David (who died earlier this year) for introducing me to the term, and for his good work challenging easy assumptions about the relationship of social justice to the digital world.
Enjoyed this, Derek!