Shopping Bag
My AccountThis post is authored by contributor, Teresa Bergen. Ms. Bergen is the author of the novel Killing The President, and in addition to writing, transcribes and edits oral histories, paints animal portraits, makes costume devil horns, teaches yoga, and plays bass in an indie rock band.
More than 100 people came to a talk on publishing in the age of electronic readers Monday night. The University of Oregon’s Turnbull Center sponsored the event, which featured some A list hors d’oeuvres and free drinks, as well as a lively discussion with a lot of audience participation.
Three featured speakers first gave their takes on electronic readers such as Amazon’s Kindle. Katherine Dunn spoke as a writer. Vailey Oehlke, Multnomah County’s director of libraries talked on the library end of it. And Dennis Stovall of Portland State University’s Ooligan Press shared a publisher’s viewpoint. Turnbull Center director Al Stavitsky moderated.
Over the course of the evening, pros and cons came out for both the traditional book and the electronic reader. “I love everything about books,” Dunn said. She pointed out that they make great insulation for draft and noise, can be burned for fuel and, “in times of extreme famine I suspect they may be stewable.” She said she has also used books as toilet paper, to start fires, and to smash cockroaches and scorpions.
“You couldn’t use a Kindle for any of these purposes,” she said.
On the flip side, she admitted books do kill trees and are expensive to produce.
Oehlke polled about forty acquaintances and found that people like the tactile nature of books, and even their smell. She said they were weren’t sure about the notion that in order to read, they’d need yet another device. But they did like the option of increasing font size, and, when traveling, loading up 200 books onto one sleek tablet.
Only three to five percent of total publishing sales currently are electronic versions of books. But from August 2008 to August 2009, sale of e-books tripled.
Stovall mentioned a few ways this is good news for publishers, including providing more access to smaller and edgier presses. Plus, bookstores’ right to return damaged and unsaleable books for a refund – a practice that can be financially catastrophic for small presses – is irrelevant with e-books.
Stovall said that last year Lightning Source, a large print on demand operation, sold an average of only 1.8 copies of each of its more than half a million digital titles. This would be totally unfeasible with traditional publishing. Stovall also mentioned that while there is an advantage to being able to repair any mistakes in a book, how do you know when it’s the final edition?
Audience members asked questions and shared their fondness for books as physical objects during the Q&A session. This was definitely a crowd who were not surrendering their bound books peacefully.
Several audience members bemoaned the loss of bookshelves. One man asked if he would eventually have a collection of incompatible electronic readers on his shelves instead of books. A woman was unhappy to think that she would not pass by her books, glimpse a title, and experience the associated memories.
Oehlke agreed that this would be a loss. “If you’re a snoop like I am,” she said, “the first thing you do when you visit someone’s house is look on their bookshelf.” She has seen new electronic formats enter the library, such as many books being available for digital download to a computer. But she thinks the shift in the balance of traditional to e-books will take a while. “As people like myself who grew up reading books, frankly, die,” she said, that will make room for the digital generation to take over the library catalog.
Other people worried that book signings would be a thing of the past, because what would the authors sign? All the panelists also seemed concerned about a widening gap between a world of technological haves and have nots.
Dunn has adopted a wait and see attitude toward this new technology. She pointed out that long ago, paper came along and put clay tablet makers out of business. Later, the telephone nearly eradicated letter writing. But one hundred years later, email brought it back again.
“There’s no use digging in our heels and hollering we don’t like it and we don’t want it,” she said. “It’s happening.”
