Guest Post: Michael Lindgren on the Next Decade in Book Culture

by Michael Lindgren | Jan-02-2010

As we wind down the "aughts" decade, the NBCC seeks the best guest posts about the future of book culture, including essays,interviews and free-range opining. The topic: How do you see book culture evolving over the next decade? This, from New York-based NBCC member Michael Lindgren:

The evolution of book culture—if it can be called that; perhaps "dissolution" would be a better word—is a troubling and unhappy spectacle for a variety of widely documented reasons. Blaming the Internet has become so banal in certain circles that it has been effectively drained of meaning; nonetheless, a couple of observations.

The first is that the race to make "content" increasingly cheap, or better yet free, is in the process of destroying the value of creative activity. With art, as with most things, you get what you pay for, and since the Internet's function is to make everything free, writing will become a field only for the rich or those who are willing to place themselves radically outside of the consumerist mainstream.

Secondly, I foresee a world where publishing is exclusively electronic, where publishing houses are basically the vanity arms of multimedia reality-show conglomerates, and where the familiar pleasures of printed books and conversations about literature are boutique niche products, available at great price to the elite, and considered by the rest of society to be an outrageously outré, like taking snuff or listening to 45s. The simultaneous acceleration and fragmentation of our culture is taking place with such brutal efficiency that very few people will notice, or care, that literature as a general cultural phenomenon has ceased to exist.

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Reading this post reminded me that old-school literary agent Nat Sobel has been pushing publishers to start delaying the release of the e-version of their books several months, so that the hardcover version has a chance to sell at full price—a strategy somewhat analogous to the way the DVD version of a movie will come out only after a movie has run in theaters. While I’m not sure that this specific remedy will last long even if it is widely adopted (largely because I agree with Lindgren that book publishing is likely to become exclusively electronic at some point), it does point to a middle ground that can be explored in terms of book pricing. Publishers would also do well to look at the recent failures and successes of the music industry as they chart their own course in the digital age.

– DM (01/04 at 4-Jan 08:40 -05:00)

I hope Lindgren’s view is overly pessimistic and that publishing does not become all electronic. As an “oldtimer,” I remember that when television first became widespread, many people declared that it would be the end of radio—but, perhaps not an accurate analogy.

– Chaucie (01/04 at 4-Jan 15:39 -05:00)

I think book publishing wouldn’t become a “thing” of the past. There are those who treasure real hard copies, in lieu of electronic books. The quilty may shrink, but that would make it easier to tell who’s really passionate about book publishing.

– Teddy (01/04 at 4-Jan 22:55 -05:00)

Simultaneous acceleration and fragmentation is an apt description for the state of the culture (digital). In music, digital culture has brought headaches and worries in terms of distribution and sales but it has meant wonders in terms of production, enabling a single person to produce a great deal of sound. Similarly, I think we have to continue to explore what digital culture can mean for literary production. Most of what people are doing online is reading and writing, whether blogs, tweets, etc. Granted, not skilled reading and writing, but nevertheless, we’re in a hyper(text)-literate era. How do the producers of literature, or those who aspire to produce literature engage this new reading public? What will this mean to how we produce literature? Literature itself is the story of acceleration and fragmentation. Plots drive, reach their climax, and conclude, and fragmentation is the story’s terrain, where it starts from and often where it ends, what it swims in. This may be a particularly literary moment, if we live up to the challenges.

– Anitta (01/05 at 5-Jan 02:05 -05:00)

Very interesting, and disturbing, view of the future. I would not want to live in such a pseudo-orwellian society such as the one put forth in this article, but unfortunately there is some alarming truths coming out of it. Hopefully this is not going to be the fate of the book reading populace

– charlie (01/09 at 9-Jan 07:49 -05:00)

Interesting, insightful and so sad. Why must we watch this unfold like this? Why do we tend to allow things to happen and then try to fix the terrible, culture-crushing results? Where are all the smart people, like the ones who built the publishing industry? Lindgren, you’re smart, you can do it.

– Melanie Maslow (01/22 at 22-Jan 23:30 -05:00)

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"Guest Post: Michael Lindgren on the Next Decade in Book Culture" was posted January 02, 2010 and written by Jane Ciabattari.

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