On The Unintended Benefits of Print
Imagine a book. Chances are you’re thinking of a printed book, possibly in hardback. Certainly there’s materiality involved. Yet the printed book is often assumed to be headed toward a nostalgic realm alongside other media vessels such as betamax video, cassette tape and the floppy disc. So, our imagined, Platonic form of the book is far from the reality of how “content” is consumed today. Except that it isn’t.
After the initial excited race to digitize backlists and soft furnish libraries with eBooks, print sales remain dominant. At the same time, dedicated eReaders are being usurped by other, more monetizable devices. All the while, the evidence mounts up that deep reading requires print. Is all this going to be enough to save print from the technological solutionists? Perhaps not, so let’s consider the unintended benefits of print and the dirty secrets of eBooks.
By “unintended”, I mean benefits that are less tangible, less measurable – the best kind. First and foremost is what I will term “subtle bragging”. The art of subtle bragging is nearly impossible in the digital world. There is absolutely no digital equivalent for decorating your home and workplace with books that you have read (or pretend to have read). This is the ultimate subtle brag – “look how well read I am”, you don’t have to say. “Look at the culture that permeates my very being.” What can the digerati do? Project spines of books onto their walls? How vulgar! Talk loudly about how many books they’ve read and what variety? How lurid!
Then there’s the relative effort required to skim read print books. We’ve all acquired books thinking we know what we want from them only to get drawn in by other elements we didn’t even know we wanted to know. Print books also sustain bookshops, which unintentionally creates the relationship between bookseller and book buyer. In stocking a bookshop, a bookseller won’t be distracted by an algorithm. The bookseller may therefore introduce readers to ideas and worlds their previous reading would never have led them to discover.
The messy world of print publishing also unintentionally creates a more magical reader experience, with our tiny human brains having to creatively remember the positioning of words, phrases and feelings during a book – aided and abetted by those vehicles for sniping, humour and reference, footnotes and indices. Compare and contrast the humanoid eBook reader struggling to recall if a favourite line was 18% or 27% into the content.
Other unintended benefits of print vary from reader to reader – how can an eBook (which is literally nothing) compete with the smell of print? The feel? The giftability? The portability? The throwability?
In fact, the only unintended benefits of eBooks are on the dark side. You doubt me? Next time you see someone reading a Kindle, stop and wonder whether the anonymity of their Minion-sheaved content delivery device grants them the licence to read without thought. What’s to stop them reading only ghost-written celebrity memoirs, the works of Russell Brand or even a Palgrave Pivot?
