The Death of the Book

‘Out with the old, in with the new.’ Innovation might be exciting, but it also makes us nervous. The Industrial Revolution replaced man with the machine; the Digital Age has not been short on victims either. Last year the digital revolution took a firm hold of the book world. Sales in eBook fiction sky-rocketed by 149% in 2012. Is the book being pushed into the past? 

Digital sales killed the CD. As this year opened, music shops closed. HMV went into administration. Buskers are probably the highest earning musicians on the high-street now. The digital book saves money, saves space, saves paper. It suits our ‘on-demand’ lifestyles; it is so very “now”. We can see where this is going. The book is doomed…Or is it? Sales figures might trumpet the success of digitalisation, but not at the necessary cost to material books. Despite last year’s eBook revolution, sales in their paper predecessors only fell by 1%, and some areas, like children’s books, saw an increase. CEO of the Publisher’s Association, Richard Mollett, is optimistic: ‘I don’t think we’re looking at a world where physical books disappear. We’re probably heading to a world where it’s more like 50/50; that sort of ratio between the physical and the electronic.’

How is it, then, that the book might succeed where others have fallen? Publishers now speak of their paper publications as ‘physical books;’ herein lies a clue to their unique selling point. Our history with the book has been as much a courtship with the object itself as it has been with the words.  ‘I like the way it feels,’ say the defenders of the physical book. Our relationship with the book isn’t purely intellectual, it’s sensual too. Buying a CD in a shop was always a mute, abstract experience. Being able to see the CDs was little substitute for actually hearing them. But buying online – where you can “try before you buy” makes much more sense. Most logically, we seem to have exchanged the CD for the actual music. But the digitalisation of the book doesn’t give, it takes away. Gone are the pages to leaf through, the covers to entice, the smell of new glue, the mustiness of foxing. Bookshelves will be barren; libraries, lost; bookshops, bust. The pleasure of giving, sharing, borrowing a book will disappear too; you can’t wrap-up and pass around something that doesn’t materially exist. To read is not just to experience the words, it is to experience the material object itself. It’s hard to imagine a world of literature without books, but I think, perhaps, we won’t have to.