The Future of Books

A recent collection of essays, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, grapples with what will become of books and reading and writing and storytelling in the age of the Kindle. It’s all quite good and timely, but the contributions on a whole seem to lack focus: some address the question of novels, others the question of books, and others the question of storytelling—all very different questions. As more than a few contributors point out, storytelling has been a feature of human culture since before the printed page or the novel, and it will endure as an art form and adapt to all our gadgets. The novel, too, as the epitome of story, will also likely survive our technology.

What seems to be more uncertain is the fate of actual books, pages with words printed on them and held together with a spine and a front and back cover: weighty, pulpy things you haul around with you and keep on shelves at home; physical items you collect and imbue with memories and give to friends and arrange in ways that interpret and explain the history of your life. The fate of actual books. This, more than stories or novels or novellas or even contemporary poetry, is the thing in peril and the question that we’re really asking when we talk about the future of books. And it’s not an insignificant question because aesthetics matter—and in an image-saturated digital age they matter more than ever.

The physicality of books, it seems to me, is inseparable from the act of reading them. The book itself is part of the experience of reading. An easy example is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a mammoth tome of more than 1,000 pages that is not easy to read, physically, because of its size and weight. Reading it while sitting or lying in bed is even more difficult because after 30 minutes or so your arms get tired of holding the thing up and you have to adjust and reconfigure your grip and find a way of balancing it upright on your chest just so, in a way that requires minimal effort to keep in place so you can keep reading. You also have to find a way to flip back to the footnotes every so often without 1,000 pages crashing down on you. It can get pretty complicated.

But here’s the thing: you want to flip back to the footnotes and you don’t care that your arms are tired and that you’re staying up later than you should, uncomfortably, with this book, this gigantic novel, because it has won you over and so wholly captured your imagination that you only stop reading when your arms are too tired to hold it up and finally it collapses in a heap on the floor, or on your head. When you finish reading a novel like that, the physicality of the book becomes an indelible part of the story and of your experience of that story; the hugeness of the book somehow comes to represent, even incarnate, the hugeness of Wallace’s artistic vision and achievement,so much so that I would submit that anyone who reads Infinite Jest —or any great work of literature—on a Kindle, has not completely entered into the world that’s been created. They might have read the words but they did not fully experience the book, and so they were cheated, as future generations will be, if books do not survive.