Scartol

I never took an economics course in college but even I can read the writing on the wall—something is rotten in Denmark when it comes to the future of the traditional book. I read on Huffington Post on Tuesday how eBooks, many of them free, outsold good old-fashioned books, you know the kind where there is ink on paper, this holiday season. Apparently, “free” is the killer app when it comes to this mode of acquiring books and then (allegedly) reading. But that’s a topic for a completely different conversation. Mr. Amazon, Jeff Bezos, said in an interview that he believes the printed and bound book is headed for eventual extinction. The article also talks about the continuing blog-to-book phenomenon—Julie and Julia (a mediocre volume now a hit movie) meets Cake Wrecks? You can check out the whole mildly alarming article here.

I haven’t yet seen, let alone used a Kindle; I’m not a likely candidate since I remain fairly low-tech when it comes to sorting out what I want to read—a primary requirement is often that the volume fits in my purse—and prefer something that does not need its battery charged. And I’ve never taken to the audio book. Oh, I tried and I wanted to like them. But I find the medium way too distracting when I’m trying to defensively navigate a huge hunk of metal zooming along I-5 at 65 mph, keeping my eye out for those wild and crazy text-messaging, good-as-drunk drivers. That said, another more death knell tolling for the print book isn’t good news for those of us who (continue to) write.

Maybe none of this is a bad thing; people are at least (still) reading, I can already hear you say. All of this took me back to an article I read in Poets & Writers way back in the pre-Kindle, pre-iPhone Dark Ages of 2006, “The Law of Diminishing Readership.” The title gives a hint of what is to come. The author, Joseph Bednarik, marketing director of the independent Copper Canyon Press, runs some numbers—MFA graduates, book-length manuscripts produced to get the degree, the losing-money proposition that is the production and distribution of literary titles for publishers these days—and concludes that we are living in a time of a “bloated ‘writership’ vying for the attention of an anemic readership.”

His doom-and-gloom pronouncement? The practice of literary reading in the US is in serious decline. Harsh words for those of us who sit scribbling in our spiral notebooks and/or typing furiously on our QWERTYs. And it seems not to matter very much what you are writing. The penultimate chapter in your fiction magnum opus. Counting the syllables for a blank-verse pantoum. Blogging or tweeting about your latest cake-baking disaster. The reality is that fewer and fewer people are going to ever actually be reading our work. And, surely these days when everybody and their chia pets are “writers,” this imbalance is only going to get worse. It’s hard to believe that the now 400+ creative writing graduate programs in the country can sustain themselves, given this sorry state of affairs. Trust fund lucky dogs aside, do you know anyone these days who is willing to, let alone even can, take out a second mortgage on her or his underwater home to pay the tuition for a program that cannot guarantee you will make from a contest slush pile, forget about becoming the next J.K. Rowling or Twilight vampire-writer girl? Read these articles.

It really is that discouraging. Yet maybe it’s forever been like this. Maybe books have always had to compete—with chamber music recitals, curling matches, gladiator bouts in the Coliseum. Which takes me back to the writing practice itself, that daily showing-up-at-the-page. On one of my previous Apostrophe posts, a writer friend recently wrote: “It's easy to say, hard to accept, that you can't let other people define your success as a writer.” Is success having a reliable posse of groupies, a circle of trusted (hopefully reading) friends and family, other wordsmiths in your weekly or monthly writing groups who listen to you read, take your words to heart, invite them in? Is it possible—like an Emily Dickinson—to keep writing in these branded, writing-as-marketable-product times purely for the love of it, because it is what you do, what you are good at, what fires your cylinders, floats your creative boat?

Words are all we have, as Samuel Beckett once said. That may seem like part of the problem in these “bloated writership” days. Days when words—often, I find, in the form of way-too-much, often out-of-context information—abound. But there is also something exhilarating about knowing that so many of us (optimistic? hapless? nothing better to do?) fools are still willing against the odds to keep writing and reading—whether free eBooks or the ratty, yellowed copy of The Catcher in the Rye found in the bargain bin at a used bookstore in, let’s say, Redondo Beach. And, in turn, seeking out our readers. I still believe this work we do is in line with what the Buddha called, “right livelihood.” These days, when so many people I know (and you likely, too) are feeling ethically challenged, even morally compromised in their jobs, that revelation is no shabby thing. So keep on readin’ in the free world! It really is up to us.