Reading Local: Portland

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about what the future may hold for Reading Local, and since that future is in a way intrinsically linked to the future of the book industry, it’s inevitably led to pondering what lies ahead for said industry as well.  These thoughts have been further provoked by Matt Briggs first post for Reading Local: Seattle, an article in the latest Fast Company on how Amazon is embracing their inner Apple, and an article on how the Espresso Book Machine is being used in a Vermont Bookstore.  I’ll post these essays as a series organized by sector, starting with the reader and then working backwards to the bookstore, the publisher, and then finish up with the author.  What follows is nothing more than my thoughts put to paper, or screen if you will, and I invite you to explain why they are entirely off-base.  That’s the essential function of the blogging platform, to provide a vehicle for an ongoing discussion on some topic or another.  With that preemptive strike out of the way, here is where I think the future for readers may be headed.

The Future of Reading

There has never been a better time to be a reader.  We have a multitude of different ways to access and enjoy the literature we desire.  The standard hard cover, trade paperback, and mass market paperback are still the primary vehicles through which we quench this thirst.  But this will be less so for today’s youngest generation of readers, and is already diminishing at an increasing rate for the current reading population.  If Amazon has it’s way the Kindle DX will be used in the majority of classrooms, instead of the backpack full of textbooks assigned today.  In the process, generations of readers will shift their reading habits away from print and towards digital, with Amazon there to fill their ever-expanding terabyte libraries. The eBook’s, as we refer to it today, found on those Kindle’s will look less like the digital version of the book found in the store, and instead will be something akin to the extras found on your latest Blu-ray purchase.  As the Fast Company article put it, along with your download of the book you may receive “a blend of text, video, audio interviews, 3-D maps — an entire ecosystem of content built on top of the book.”  They use Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series as the basis for an example of how this could play out:

the multimedia might consist of a video game within the book, mini bios of characters, maps, music, and discussion threads. An interactive element would allow readers to create their own stories, or even their own animated short movies, using the characters in the book. Inevitably, the experience would also include links to products based on the game: T-shirts, action figures, vampire toothbrushes. Suddenly, a book with mere words on a page seems so limited.

Additionally, the continued advance of web-only lit journals like Born Magazine, and future iterations of Google Books and the like, will further relegate the print model to dinosaur status, but will only play a minor role in our overall reading habits due to our flippant online attention spans.

For future readers to actually be amenable to the idea of purchasing something in print it will have to fulfill either of two seemingly dichotomous human desires, our love of the bargain, and our love of status symbols.  The bargain itch will be scratched by used books.  The massive quantity of books currently in existence won’t just up and dissapear, and with an increasing amount of readers shifting to digital and looking to dump their print libraries in the process, a large amount of these books will find their way to the used booksellers.  As the vaunted supply and demand cycle comes into effect, these books will have to be nearly given away in order to entice potential buyers.  The “Bag of Books for $10 Sale” that The Title Wave Used Bookstore put on a few months back will become the norm, and booksellers may end up being forced to compete on the size of the bag offered.

On the other end of the spectrum, books that are designed to stand the test of time as pieces of art, will fill bookshelves as symbols of their owners values and status.  These books will most likely be handmade one-of-a-kind editions, or offered in vastly reduced print runs so as to maintain their scarcity.  Works crafted by local artisans in places like the Em Space Book Arts Center will be in high demand, with the price set accordingly.  The emphasis will be less on the quality of writing found inside, and more on the beauty with which the book was bound, the typeface used, and the art adorning the cover.  Art which just so happened to be contributed by the latest design wunderkind.

One genre of books that will largely be unaffected by this shift are childrens books.  Babies are stimulated in large part through touch, which is something that an eBook, no matter how fancy it’s added extras, really allows for.  We will still plop our baby on our knee and grab their favorite touch and feel book, in order to distract them from the abstract reasoning behind their current crying fit.  This may actually end up being how books in print maintain some stronghold beyond what is currently being forcasted.  As babies continue to be trained to read on good old fashioned print books, they will not seem like such foreign objects once those babies have grown up and are making their own decisions about what format to enjoy the latest Oprah Pick.

Up next, my thoughts on the future of the bookstore.  Until then, please join in the discussion below by leaving a comment with your reaction to this post.

I found it interesting that upon completing this post and looking for a picture to include, I came across this article from last July in the New York Times.

Author: Gabe Barber

Founder and publisher of Reading Local. I am an avid reader, primarily of non-fiction, and am ever curious to discover how local literature fits into the increasingly volatile literary landscape.

Gabe Barber has written 1025 articles for us.