In 1980, I dropped out of college and spent a year writing a play about a bibliophile who one day changed course and began to build furniture out of his books. Today, after 25 years in the publishing industry and having edited some 200 works of long-form nonfiction, I continue to see physical books as largely symbolic, aesthetic objects. In my house, they weigh down the corner of a kid’s art project or hold up the edge of a shelf.
They are not sacrosanct.
“Books have had a kind of spooky power, embedded as they are in the very structures of learning, commerce, and culture by which we have absorbed, stored, and transmitted information, opinion, art, and wisdom,” wrote the acclaimed editor Elisabeth Sifton in a magazine article last year. But in truth, the books on our library shelves are little more than furniture.
And that is why the current attempt to hold a mirror up to the mouth of the book-publishing industry to see if it is still breathing strikes me as misguided. We do not need books. Civil society is not predicated on lovely-to-hold objets d’art that can double as flower presses.
What we cannot survive without is ideas. Life on earth would be severely diminished without the well-thought-out, well-researched, written works that communicate expertise, insight, and creative ideas from one human being to another. That, historically, has been the role of books, and they have played it admirably, in works from the Bible to Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Silent Spring and The Shock Doctrine.
In our angst about the Kindle and the iPad, we are conflating the “how” of written works with the “what": We are mistaking the package for the thing itself. What would be terribly frightening to lose is not the book per se but the tradition of long-form texts—call them “lofties"—that for centuries have been the primary vehicle through which creative, illuminating, controversial, and important ideas have been communicated. What is crucial at a time when habits of consumption are changing—for reasons both economic and technological—is to ensure the future of lofty ideas, whether they are set in Bodoni or pixels, hand-sewn at the binding or backlit and scrolled.
Lisa Dodson spent eight years interviewing low-wage workers and their managers. She raised money to underwrite her travels and research, which included interviews with 800 people from three sectors of the American economy (retail, education, and health care) where middle-class managers interact on a daily basis with the working poor.
Though she set out to write about low-income workers, Dodson heard in her research a bigger story, one that took many years to draw out. When middle-class managers have firsthand contact with ill-paid workers, they have epiphanies about the fundamental unfairness of the American economy, and—here’s the riveting part—begin to subvert the system. They bend the rules, pad paychecks, falsify time sheets, and ignore eligibility requirements for treatments and special services on behalf of the workers they supervise. In short, they refuse to be complicit with a set of rules they have come to see as wrong.
Dodson is a sociologist, not a journalist, so her first draft of The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy, which took the better part of a year to write, was still a diamond in the rough when I saw it. The concepts were there, but the case studies were not yet pulled together powerfully, and Dodson had yet to figure out how to deal with what we came to call the “underground railroad” question—how to write about subversive and illegal behavior without compromising sources and their methods.
We went through two structural edits before the manuscript was ready to be line-edited for style, and then copy-edited for grammar and consistency. While the copy-editing was under way, Dodson worked on her bibliography, source notes, and methodology chapter, so that other sociologists would know how her research met the standards for the field. We published the book this year, to acclaimed reviews. American University selected it as the text for all incoming freshmen.
Putting aside novels, which (unless you are Joyce Carol Oates) can take many years or a lifetime to complete, I can’t help but wonder how many drafts Gunnar Myrdal did of An American Dilemma or Frances FitzGerald of Fire in the Lake. Did David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd come to him as a twitter in his ear, or was some research involved? How about Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, or Rebecca Skloot’s recent The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks? I do know that last year’s history of the NAACP, Lift Every Voice, by Patricia Sullivan, was a decade in the making. And Michelle Alexander gave birth to three children in less time than it took her to produce this year’s The New Jim Crow.
Today’s book publishers are cast in the role of dinosaurs—lumbering over the media landscape, unaware of their own imminent extinction. But publishers and editors are acutely aware of the difficult, time-consuming process by which lofty ideas are nurtured and developed. Furthermore, it is the rare lofty idea that is the product of a single mind. Readers might be surprised at how many books begin as ideas in the minds of editors, a part of whose expertise involves understanding the role of long-form writing, assessing gaps in the national discourse, and commissioning works to fill those holes.
Wherever ideas originate, they are often simply the starting point on the long road to a finished book, which typically includes extended conversations and conceptual discussions between author and editor about how the material might best be structured, the project’s ideal parameters (knowing what to leave out is often an editor’s key contribution), how much background is necessary for lay readers to grasp an argument, and so forth. Manuscripts that arrived in “finished” form typically require at least a line edit and a copy edit to maximize the impact of the underlying ideas, to make them coherent and a pleasure to read.
All this is to say that, however we produce lofties, a wealth of money, time, labor, and expertise goes into the creation of any long-form text worth reading, well before a single designer, printer, sales rep, or bookstore clerk is paid. Lofty ideas do not come cheap. For all the talk about how the future lies in Kindles or iPads, the Kindle and iPad have yet to bring into existence a single lofty idea that did not already exist elsewhere. If downloads are to supersede printed books as successive generations migrate to newer media, the key question is not “Is the book dead?” It is “Who will pay for the lofties?”
Today the new media exist in a symbiotic relationship with the old. The one cannot survive without the other. Amazon.com, which developed the Kindle, accounts for almost 20 percent of the sale of the printed editions of most trade books; but publishers create close to 100 percent of books available for Kindle and other e-readers. The three leading electronic purveyors of books—Amazon, Google, and now Apple—are just that ... purveyors of books.
Thus the primary way the electronic triumvirate engages with the publishing industry is by selling old-media products via new media. As a result, most industry conversation continues to be about terms of sale: What is a fair revenue structure for hardcover books sold over the Internet or for downloads of long-form texts? It’s like arguing about a fair royalty for audiobooks or whether the unit cost paid to publishers’ book-club sales should include the author’s share of revenue. Those are important subsidiary-rights issues, to be sure, but nothing in our current conversation speaks to the future of lofty ideas as we know them.
The conversation that is important to our intellectual future has to do with where the germination and cultivation of ideas will reside, and whether that work can or will shift its center of gravity.
For now, e-book companies seem happy to repackage intellectual property. And that is not a bad thing. While the parties involved may argue about how to divide the spoils, almost everyone sees the virtues of increasing access to the world’s collective writing—what publishers somewhat prosaically call “the backlist.” But creating a virtual “e-Library of Babel” of all books old and new—without opening the discussion of who will bear the costs of creating the long-form texts of the future—is essentially a new form of cultural appropriation. It does not bode well for the intellectual lives of our grandchildren, who might face a din of undeveloped online manuscripts. Unless the new-media mavens take seriously the job of producing new lofty ideas, they will want to come up with a revenue structure for selling e-books that allows traditional publishers to stay in business.
If, on the other hand, e-retailers deep-six existing publishers by selling lofty ideas at prices that do not cover creation costs, they will lead us to a point where, in the words of the Microsoft partner architect Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Thorndike Press, 2010), “culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.” Will the new media take up the mantle of lofty idea creation? The jury is out.
Lofty ideas are slow media. They require intensive labor and time, and they are expensive. But they provide the intellectual scaffolding for our national discourse, and are at the heart of our cultural well-being. The standard language of a book contract gives the author final approval of the text but reserves decisions about the jacket and design for the publishing house. That is because the jacket, along with all the other attendant apparatus of book publishing—dingbats, page layouts, point-of-sale displays in bookstores—are acknowledged to be “marketing.” They are window dressing to attract attention to an underlying lofty idea that can open the window on to a new way of seeing the world.
We can live without the window dressing, but the world would be a much darker place without the windows.