What will become of books?

Although I have reached the minimum number of blog posts, I still want to write this one about the future of books. I figure this is a fitting way to end the class, since we did talk about everything about books, including the future.

This is the video I included in my presentation, so you can see it better now. This is what the video on which this post will be centered.The video comes from the Digital Theatre and Sonia Friedman Production's stage production of "Much Ado About Nothing" starring David Tennant (in the Superman shirt) and Catherine Tate as performed in London's West End.

This scene, especially the boy's shoulder shrug at the end, leads me to my question of what will become of books in the future? I don't know if it was the purpose of the director to make the boy look like he didn't know what a book was, but that's what it looked like to me. I feel like we all hope this never happens where children literally don't know what a book is. I think it could be argued that even people who don't like reading would not want to see this happen, if, for nothing else, to preserve the book as a "novelty" or a historical artifact.

Personally, I do not think it will ever get to the point of someone saying, "I don't know what this book is that you speak of." I think it will be more along the lines of: "Why would you want that? Don't you have an iPad?" Now at least with the second scenario, books still exist and are recognizable. It might not necessarily be the first choice of relaxation or leisure, but at least the next generation would know what a book is.

Although elementary, middle, and high schools are trying to become technology-driven schools (I know, I went to one of these high schools), books are still going to be just as important now as they were five or six years ago. (Side note: it's scary to think that five or six years ago meant I was in sophomore and junior years of high school! Crazy how time flies!) But as long as schools do not completely ditch the book, it will continue to survive as more than just a reminder of day's of old.

a scene from the Doctor Who episode "Silence in the Library"

Just to bring in a little pop culture and my own little nerdiness, there is an episode of Doctor Who (starring Tennant and Tate) that portrays a library in the far distant future FULL of books. It is so large that it is in fact it's own world. Now, of course, this is science fiction, but it is nice to think that at least the writer, Steven Moffat, thinks the future will have tons and tons of books. I'd like to think that way too!

Props to Wendy the booky

I was watching The Wendy Williams Show Tuesday morning, and she was announcing that her new book “Ask Wendy” was being released. She said that she is a reader and does not like e-readers and e-books, but LOVES books. She specifically said she likes the smell of books and just to have one in her bag. 

The more celebrities, like Wendy Williams, show their support for printed books, the less likely it is that printed books will fade away and essentially become novelty items. That is not to say that celebrities are going to be the saving grace for books, but it doesn't hurt to have a few power hitters on the side of printed books. If nothing else, it will slow the process. And as far as I can tell "Ask Wendy" is only available in printed (and it looks like hardback) form. Props to her for sticking to what she wants and how she wants to reach her audience. Instead of trying to reach a broader audience by having a digital version of her book, she didn't cave in on what she knows and loves - books!

In the Words of Alberto Garcia

Bookstore employee interview:

Alberto Garcia, store manager for Barnes and Noble at University Park Village

CK: Explain the history of bookselling for you?

Alberto Garcia: “It started 17 years ago for me. I was going to school at A&M and just wanted to get a part-time job, and when I came here for summer months, I started working part time at a Bookstop, which was another bookstore chain and was owned by Barnes and Noble. They’ve all be shut down now. I started in a Bookstop then, and just fell in love with working books. I loved getting books in and putting  them on the shelf, and talking with customers about books. So I started as a part time bookseller, even after graduating, I ended up staying, and 17 years later, I’m not store manager. I’ve been a store manager at three different Barnes and Noble stores now over the last 10 years. I just love the book business, mostly I love interacting with customers, making my suggestions and getting from them the books that they like, so I can pass that information along to other customers too.”

CK: How long at this B&N?

Alberto Garcia: Since February 2005. It’s been a long time at this Barnes and Noble store. Out of all the Barnes and Noble stores I’ve been at, I really enjoy this one out of all the other ones I’ve worked at.”

CK: Do you deal a lot with publishers and authors directly?

Goodnight Cowtown

Alberto Garcia: “We do a lot of that ourselves. Obviously since we’re a corporation, a percentage of our books that we’re getting in are already pre-determined because we already have buyers at our home office that will purchase books directly from publishers. Here, locally, at the store we have say over what we carry too. Unlike other retail stores, like say the Gap, what you see is what you get there. Usually the store can’t order more pairs of jeans or anything like that. Here we can tailor our store to what the community wants, and that’s where we do our in-store ordering here. We do order a lot of books from publishers, but the majority do come from our home office, but we can add on and get more books here. And more than anything else, we order a lot more local titles, because obviously, in New York, they’re not going to know about the Fort Worth or Texas books that people are asking for here, so we do a lot more local ordering for books for this area. The biggest seller over the past year has been a children’s book for Fort Worth Goodnight Cowtown. But it’s something that our company didn’t know anything about, and, obviously, it would really only sell in the Fort Worth area. Somebody in Seattle really isn’t going to care about a book called Goodnight Cowtown about the city of Fort Worth. So we do a lot of local ordering here ourselves.”

CK: Have you seen a change in readers’ appetites for books and what are selling most, over the past few years?
Alberto Garcia: “One of the biggest changes because when I started 17 years ago, the only books people knew about were the ones on the shelves. If you were looking for a biography on Benjamin Franklin, you only knew about the four different books that were on that shelf. You might find a few more at the library, but you weren’t exposed to all the different books that are out there on that subject. Over the last 10 or 15 years, with the Internet, a lot of people do a lot more research before they come into a store. So they’ll know about the 150 books available on Benjamin Franklin. We might only carry the four or five in our store, but there’s a lot more available out there. Our store is a typical-sized Barnes and Noble store. We have room for 125,000 titles. There’s three million books in print. Obviously we can’t carry everything that’s available, so we call ourselves book sellers, but in a way we’ve become book finders because people will come in asking for items that we don’t always have in stock immediately, so we have to find ways to get those for our customers whether it’s carrying it in other Barnes and Noble stores in the area or ordering it, finding it for them through one of our other third-party distributors. We’ve become book finders over the years because people can see more of the titles that are available, but it doesn’t necessarily mean their neighborhood bookstore is going to carry it. There’s just no possible way we can have a bookstore that carries three million books – it’s just not possible – but our distribution center can and can ship those out to us in a timely manner for our customers. For different subjects, the changes over the years, when I started, every Barnes and Noble store had a whole aisle of books on cassette, and I remember through the years, that section would get smaller and smaller and books on CDs would get larger and larger. And then also the rise of the Sudoku books. That was something that was unheard of 10 years ago, and then all of a sudden it just exploded. Every Barnes and Noble store is going to be different [because] we tailor it to the community. This store, in particular, we sell half the company average in graphic novels and Manga because we just don’t have that kind of customer here. A lot of our customers here are older, so we sell a lot more fiction, a lot more hard covers – a little bit more expensive books – versus like, say, one of our stores that’s connected to a mall, like our South Arlington Parks Mall store. They have a lot more younger customers there because of the mall traffic, and they sell twice what we sell in graphic novels and Manga. It changes from location to location what each Barnes and Noble store will carry and what the community wants.”

CK: Has that demographic always been that way?

Alberto Garcia: “It has been. It’s very literate, a little bit older crowd here in this area, and they’re also very proud that they’re from Texas and from Fort Worth. Again, we sell huge number of books on Fort Worth. Anything having to do with Fort Worth does really well here. Like I said, one of the best selling books over the past 12 months has been Goodnight Cowtown. That’s something that’s not going to sell anywhere else, but at the same time, if they made something like that for Dallas, you wouldn’t see that kind of buzz in Dallas – and I’ve managed a couple stores in the Dallas area also – like you do here in Fort Worth. The people here are very proud of being from Fort Worth and love books about Fort Worth. Where you don’t have that kind of passion about being from Dallas in Dallas.”

CK: Has there been any shift or change with e-books?

Alberto Garcia: “Definitely there has been. One of the biggest thing has been the decline in romance sales in our stores because the biggest selling category for e-books is romance. So people will buy a ton of romance novels on the e-reader, but they’re not buying anymore in print. It kind of has brought down in-store sales of romance books, even though the number of romance books is increasing because they’re getting a lot more on the e-readers. Everyone thought that years ago when e-readers were really starting to catch on that it would be a decline in the book business, and it hasn’t really been yet. There’s been a shift in some aspects, but when we sell a Nook here, a majority of customers still come back into the store, they’re still looking for other books here. Sometimes they’ll buy a book in print while they’re actually looking for another book to buy on their e-reader in the store. We see people in here all the time with their Nooks, but they’re browsing our shelves to see what they can download for their Nook. So they still have to get an idea of what they want to purchase within a bookstore, but at the same time, that doesn’t stop them necessarily from ever buying a print book because not every book is still available as an e-book anyway. There’s going to be items, [like] bargain books. [There’s] still a lot of very picture-intensive items like photography books, art books, interior design books – you just don’t find that many of them on e-readers because the fact that if you have a plain ol’ ink e-reader, you’re not going to be able to see all the graphics on that device, and even on a regular tablet, it might be a 7-inch tablet where you might want to see the full, maybe, 15-inch spread of a photography book or  an interior design book. You know, you want that larger page with the larger photos. So a lot of sections like that haven’t caught on onto e-readers, and I don’t know if they’ll ever catch on. They’re still more of a genre that fits more within the printed format instead of the e-reader format.”

CK: Has there been a shift in children’s novels on e-readers or has that stayed steady?

Alberto Garcia: ”For us, it’s stayed the same. We haven’t seen any significant decline in our children’s sales. What happens a lot of the time, is that they’re exposed to more books. Like I said, they’ll come in looking for ideas, but they’ll still buy books. They buy almost the same number of printed books as in the past, but they’re also buying items for their e-readers on top of that, so they’re getting more books than they would in the past. And, again, there’s still going to be some items that don’t translate well over to the e-reader format. If you think about picture books, they just don’t transfer to a smaller screen. If you look on a 7-inch screen, the text would be too small for a child to read. It’s great for them to have for some of the beginning reading books or even older kids, kind of in the 7- to 12-year-old range when they’re starting to read. Some of the young reader books, getting into those kind of formats. But, especially for picture books for really small kids, a 7-inch screen – even a 9-inch screen – might still be too small for the text for the child to really be able to read.”

CK: Has movie and music section been the same and what else has been added outside of books besides movies and music to engage more people?

Alberto Garcia: “The music business has changed for just about every retailer. The amount of CDs that we carry today versus what we carried seven years ago is much less, but the decrease has been offset by the number of DVDs we carry. When I got to this store years ago, the music department was about 90 percent music and 10 percent DVDs, and now it’s more of a 60 percent DVDs, 40 percent CDs, so it’s kind of shifted in that way. In other areas of the store, it’s the increase in space we’ve allotted in all of our stores for all of our educational toys and games, especially for the kids, and the way we have it divided up between age groups. With those educational toys there, and then on the other side of the store we have adult games and puzzles, so there’s are different things we’ve added to all Barnes and Noble stores to be more of a one-stop-shop other than just specifically for people who just want to get books.”

CK: Anything to add?

Alberto Garcia: “I’ve been very happy in the 17 years I’ve worked with Barnes and Noble. I love working with books. Obviously, I wish more people shopped for books and the items that we sell here, but I love interacting with customers here in the stores. I wouldn’t see myself doing other types of retail if I wasn’t doing this job. This is the only retail I could do because I love the product that we’re selling. I love interacting with customers who are coming in here looking for the types of items we sell here.”

CK: Would you consider yourself an avid reader?

Alberto Garcia: “Yeah. I probably average about 1-2 books a week.

CK: Do you prefer printed books or e-readers?

Alberto Garcia: “I still prefer the printed book, but I probably do about half and half now because a lot of items I’ll get in e-book format, so I’ll have to read it on my Nook. But I still buy books in printed format when I’m buying things from our store here. Most of the time I still prefer to buy it in a printed format, and if you could see the library in my house, you would know that I spend probably way too much money on printed books.”

CK: When was the change for you from printed to e-book?

Alberto Garcia: “It’s been kind of a slow transition. The great thing about e-readers is their portability. Where my e-reader has about 700 books on it. I can’t carry 700 books around with me, so it’s great for when I don’t really know what I want to read, but I want to have the choices if I’m going on vacation somewhere or going out of town, somewhere where I just need something for a quick read, or I don’t want to know  what I want to have with me, I’ll take the e-reader because it has so much on it that I can always find something to keep me busy reading.”

CK: Anything else?

Alberto Garcia: “Even though I’m an avid reader and I know a lot about books after being in the business for so long, I don’t know everything about every single book we have on the shelf. If somebody asks me what my favorite romance title is, I don’t have a favorite romance title because I’ve never read a romance book, but I could tell you what the bestsellers are and what the most popular books are. I can tell you which ones other customers are coming in for, asking for, and recommending to us. What a lot of us here will do is we’ll read book news sources, like The New York Times book review [and] different papers and magazines that offer quick little book reviews, so you may not have had time before to read that book, but you can find out what people are saying about it, whether they say it’s a great book, a bad book, or whatever the case may be."

My side with Chip Stewart:

Author interview: Daxton "Chip" Stewart

CK: Who or what inspires you as an author?

Chip Stewart: “As an academic author, as one who’s doing scholarship – that’s the kind of writing I’ve been doing – it’s really my colleagues in the field. So other academics, other scholars. My goal as a writer, particularly when I’m doing legal scholarship, media law scholarship, it’s to some day have a judge put one of my articles in an opinion practically. I want to be a help. I want to answer questions other people haven’t asked or haven’t answered yet. So that’s really the goal of my scholarship. So when I’m writing, I’m always trying to get there. That said, that’s kind of the practical aspect of who I write for. When I write, I like to tell a good story. It’s always cut through all the writing I’ve done. It’s drilled into me from my undergraduate journalism degree that every bit of good writing has some sort of story element to it. I like to have fun. I like to start with a lead or a lead section or set a scene or something like that, even if it’s a legal memo or some work of scholarship or magazine article or whatever. I like to have fun with it.”

CK: What authors and/or books have influenced you as an author and writer?

Chip Stewart: “In my professional work, my academic writing, you can just turn over my bookshelf here. I like Anthony Lewis. Anthony Lewis won a couple of Pulitzer Prizes. He’s a New York Times columnist who wrote about the development of the First Amendment and free speech as it came out in the Times v. Sullivan case. I read this as an undergraduate, latched on to it. I actually got to meet him a few years ago, really enjoyed it. So Anthony Lewis, at least professionally, is one that I admire. He tells a great story about the development of First Amendment law and libel and that sort of thing. Writing good stuff, important stuff in a very accessible way, a narrative way, is admirable. So I like him a lot. There’s a couple of judges I like to read who are terrific writers. Frank Easterbrook is one of them. He just has a good flair with words. He’s got a dash of humor. He’s not all dry and dull. The Supreme Court judges are all dry and dull. I’ve always enjoyed the way with words, the pacing, the phrasing Ernest Hemingway used. When it comes to writing dark bits of journalism, Hunter S. Thomson I like a lot. And I just love kid’s books. I think it’s because I have children. But I’ve done some scholarship on Harry Potter. I think J.K. Rowling tremendous. Sometimes I think she could have used a stronger editing hand than what she had. Neil Gaiman, who wrote Coraline, which might be the scariest book I’ve ever read, he’s just a tremendous writer and storyteller.”

CK: How do you think technology is changing print culture with authors and readers?

Chip Stewart: “It’s hard to read on [Smartphones]. I still do. I read news on them. It’s frustrating to read long form on a Smartphone. I have an e-reader. I got a Kindle for Christmas. It’s OK. I actually downloaded a book on it that I wanted to read and jumped around in it a bit, and then I saw it at Half Price Books and went and bought the book. I’m just more comfortable with the book in hand. I like the way books feel. I like the way they smell. I like the way I can just pull them around, and if I drop it in a body of water, it only costs me a few bucks to replace. It’s just kind of how I am. I think we’re always going to have a print culture, it’s just going to be a matter of how we consume that print. I know some people do better on e-readers, and that’s fine. We’re headed that way anyway. But in terms of the technology itself, from a writer’s perspective. I know you can write differently for the web, but when I write it’s not really for web consumption. I write long form for journal articles – 20 to 40 to 50 pages long – or I’m writing books that kind of thing that may not translate as easily to an e-reader. So I haven’t had to do as much writing for web audiences yet. If I am writing for the web, it’s usually on Twitter, and you’re already forced to write short on there. I stay within the 140 character limits.

CK: How do you think the technology is changing the audience?

Chip Stewart: If I wrote an academic article before, it was going to go into a print journal like these – printed version goes into libraries, most likely to law libraries, where to find it you have to go to a law library to look it up. One of the reasons I chose this journal was because it’s also open access online. There’s a print version, but there’s also a PDF version you can download and the whole world can see it. All of a sudden, you’re able to write for a broader audience. Maybe it’s still legal scholars and academics, but when I get involved in a conversation on Twitter, for example, on copyright or photographs I can say, ‘Hey I wrote an article on that,’ and link to the website, and all of a sudden, it’s professionals able to read through. I try not to be too dense on jargon and that stuff. Legal stuff can get there. Because it’s accessible to the general public – and I think it should be, the idea of open access. When we write, anybody should be able to see our scholarship. It doesn’t do any good to put research and learning and that sort of thing behind a paywall where the general public can’t get it. Besides I like the idea of people reading it. The web makes all of this accessible in one way or another to everybody, and I think that’s a good thing. It does change up a bit of understanding who your audience is.”

CK: How did you find a publisher and how long did it take to find one?

Chip Stewart: “I started by asking my friends. I went to my mentor, my Ph.D. adviser. He gave me some contacts and a couple different publishers. And I started looking around some in my office and seeing who does communication law and gave them a call. And I knew a couple just from going around to conferences and seeing their booths. Then I was going to a conference in Chicago. I met with four different publishers in Chicago. Had breakfast with them, grabbed coffee with them, just pulled them aside, and talked with them for 15, 30 minutes or an hour. And I gauged their interest in my book and my proposal. Some wanted to move things around a bit, some had a bit longer review process. One said, ‘You know, this is really interesting, but not the sort of thing that we do. We’re looking more for kind of regular manuals for professionals, not as much student guides and texts.’ And then the one I started going with just came to me and was just really enthusiastic, and said, ‘We’re very interested. This is an area we are trying to build up. How quickly can you have a full proposal or draft chapter to us?’ Overall, it took a couple months to find a publisher. Got them book proposals in July, met with them in August. Had a deal by the end of August. Had it reviewed and accepted by their editorial board by around December, and had a contract in hand and a manuscript done by June, so we moved pretty fast.”

Why laps are important

While looking for the picture of my local library that I used in my previous blog post, I found this bookmark. I though it was very cute and represents something that will always be present in society.

"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents." - Emilie Buchwald

Children learn by listening, by repeating, by copying. The only way they are to learn to read is to listen, repeat and copy their parents. And the way to do this is by sitting on their laps. No matter if the reading is from an e-reader or from a physical book, the reading is still happening and so is the learning.

It does not matter how far we evolve, reading to children still happens on parents' laps. Or big brother or big sisters' laps. Shoot it can even happen in aunts, uncles, and grandparents' laps. But sitting down watching the pages turn and seeing the pictures and hearing the words come out of the reader's mouth right next to the child's ear all happens sitting in someone's lap.

And below are just a few cute pictures I found on Google of parents reading to their children.

What will become of libraries?

Seeing the rise of  I wonder what the future might be for libraries. And not just public libraries, but the museum libraries, like Thomas Jefferson's Library at the Library of Congress.

Thomas Jefferson's library,
Library of Congress

Now, libraries house books, magazines, movies and the occasional video game. But what about 30 years from now? Will books be replaced by e-books? Will the libraries just be a bunch of computers? Will the paper books even still have a place on the shelves?

And what about places like Jefferson's Library? Will someone from the early 21st century have a recreation of their library somewhere one day? And will it be half books with the other half being e-books displayed on fake iPads or another type of e-reader?

George Memorial Library, Richmond, TX

It's all changing so quickly that libraries might even just cease to exist and it could all just go online. I still have my card for all Fort Bend County libraries, but it might not be worth anything in a few years.

It's strange to think about how far its come and how quickly it's changing now. There was a day when I would go up to the library to search for something on the Internet because the computer at our house was still using dial-up on our phone line. And now, almost everyone has a laptop and a cell phone and Apple seems to rule the world. And the future might be moving too fast for libraries to keep pace. They might be left in the dust with a huge building no longer needing to be used.

I have great memories from my local library, especially from when I was younger, so I hope libraries never get to that point. I would love to see physical, paper books there always.

Books in 1940 and now

Jonathan Carroll's Facebook

I saw the picture above this morning. The caption of this picture on Facebook reads: "A boy reading in a ruined bookshop in London, after a night of heavy bombing. October 1940." At first it shocked me because of everything that has happened this week with Boston and West. I think this shows well what books represent. And it does so with one fleeting picture.

The front of the shop is in shambles, as the back of the store seems to be undisturbed. Whether this is a boy or a girl does not truly matter because the point still stands that the subject is nonetheless reading in the midst of destruction.

It makes me wonder what was happening at that very moment and what was going through the subject's mind while this picture was taken. From this point onward, I will go with what the caption says and refer to the subject as a boy.

Maybe the threat of bombing had just ended. After spending all night hunkered down in his London home, while air raid sirens blare, he ventures out with the afternoon sun making its way through the dust and smoke after the bombing.

And after the bombing scare the night before that kept him and his family in a constant state of stress and a heightened awareness that I'm sure could only come from fearing for his life, he wanted to spend his time out of the house in a place where he one time found solace.

Google

The book he is reading could be anything from Treasure Island to a collection of William Shakespeare's works. There is any number of things he could be reading - besides, of course, a history of WWII. The book, no matter what it is, provides the boy with an escape from a world that must feel like hell. 

This is what books brought in the past - an escape and solace. To some people, that is still what books represent. They provide an escape to the world and what is going on around them. It makes me wonder if it still does this. 

In Boston, and across the country, truly, did those affected by the bombings read? If nothing else, the news was simply a reminder of what had happened. Videos, sound bytes, interviews and pictures of the carnage and the devastation at the finish line. A book could have acted and might still serve as an escape into a world that is not filled with the injuries and death seen last week. 

Those in West might also be thinking the same thing, turning to books to escape instead of watching their town be on national news for such a disaster.

Google

And the books they might have turned to could have been Treasure Island or a collection of Shakespeare's works. Books are one thing that can connect centuries together, not just decades.

"Classic" books from the 18th century were read during that time by some people, then by someone in the 1940s, and now by someone in the 21st century. That is something that movies and music cannot do, at least not to the same extent. Renaissance festivals across the country, of course, have traditional music from that time, but I would venture to guess that most of the people at Renaissance festivals do not listen to music from that era on a regular basis.

Books do not change, though. Even if they are being read on e-readers, the content of the books do not change. And the places the books take you to and the escape they provide do not and have not changed.