Are Books On Their Way To Being Mere Decoration?
Here is another article about the ebook reader book versus book debate that seems to go on - and on - and on. I think I have come to the determination that book publishing as we know it today will be forever changed (and soon - very soon)... but that private presses will step up to fill the gap and continue to produce beautiful collectible (though more expensive) books.
Source: The Sacramento Bee
By Gina Kim
For sale: Several coverless books bundled together with jute twine. They can't be opened or read, but with pages faded and foxed – as aficionados call the discoloration that comes with age – the books add an antiquarian touch to any home for $29.
"Like it or not, books really do harken back to an older time," said Donata Maggipinto, spokeswoman for the Corte Madera-based Restoration Hardware, which has sold out of its first run of antique coverless book bundles introduced this spring. A second run will be available in June.
"These add texture to a room; they add a sense of age to the room."
Is this it, the epilogue? As the Kindle, iPad and other e-readers become increasingly popular in the digital age, dog-eared books are no longer simply a tool for transporting literary works. They've become decoration.
"I guess you could say books are disposable now that we have e-books," said Henry Petroski, a Duke University professor who teaches history and civil engineering. "I understand there are interior decorators who will choose books for you – you don't have to read them, look at them or even put them on the shelf."
Although just 1.3 percent of the $23.9 billion book market, e-books soared in sales in 2009, increasing by 177 percent to $313 million that year, according to the Association of American Publishers. The next-highest categorical growth was in higher-education books, which rose by 13 percent.
E-book content is expected to reach more than $500 million in sales this year, according to Forrester Research.
Still, electronic chapters and verses can't be displayed on bookshelves. So people are turning toward companies like Juniper Books and Half Price Books, which sell literature by the yard with the promise that multiple copies of the same book will not be in their shipments.
"What's interesting to me is in spite of what everyone says about the death of books, people still care to show off that they own books," said Edward Tenner, a research affiliate at Princeton University's Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.
Stylish-looking books aren't a new leaf in the manual of interior design.
In the early 19th century, the elite would have favorite books uniformly bound in red or green leather to look nice in receiving rooms, said Richard Ring, special collections librarian at Providence Public Library in Rhode Island.
Later that century, publishers started mass-producing those sets for the working class, Ring said.
"You're Joe Blow in the late 19th century America and you want a library like Lord So-and-So has but you don't have the wherewithal to collect books and put them in their own bindings," he said. "So you buy the works of Washington Irving in sets. Did you read these books? One hopes, but generally speaking, they're window dressing."
Christopher Harris, a librarian and blogger from New York, tossed 12 boxes of books to make room for his daughter, who was born in January. Harris reads to her from both physical books and his iPad.
"It was very easy to get rid of (the books) because we have them digitally," he said. "The ones we kept were the beautiful books – beyond the story-on-paper format. They were the signed copies from authors. They were those we received as gifts with handwritten inscriptions."
Harris notes that pulp novels are making the fastest switch to digital because they're not valued as physical treasures – they are easily left behind at the beach resort.
"A book is storage technology, sort of like a 3 1/2-by-5 floppy drive," he said. "We didn't have an attachment to floppy disks, that was just a way to move things around. For me, the book is the same way – it's storage technology."
But beautiful books still have a place on the bookshelf, said Coralie Bickford-Smith, a designer for Penguin Books.
Bickford-Smith designs intricate, clothbound covers for titles such as "Great Expectations" and "Oliver Twist," with several of her books being sold at trendy shops like Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie.
"I think that as the volume of physical books declines, the average quality of the design will increase because books will have to work harder to justify their physical presence," she said.
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