Plasma Pool

In a totally fabulous interview over at the Chicago Tribune, Cory Doctorow discusses technology triumphalism, the surveillance state, and the so-called “death of the book.” It’s brilliant, it’s cutting, and it’s about damned time:

The book audience is both contracting and graying. We on an industry basis need to find ways to go where nonreaders who are potential readers are: Put books in their way and not hope that they will come into the stores. This is one of the reasons I think the American Association of Publishers has got its head so far up its own ass it can taste its own fillings on the subject of Google book search. You know, if books aren’t in search results, then they are invisible to people who get all their information starting with a search result.

The publishing industry and academia should shut the hell up about the death of print and realize (or “remember”; I shouldn’t be too patronizing) that those who don’t innovate die. I’m sure there were people who thought that Gutenberg had ruined the fine art of the book—and I’ll bet they were emphatically shushed by scribes with the 15th-century equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome. Oh, yeah, and all of those people who could suddenly afford books.

Because the way to get people to read isn’t through scarcity. Academics are trained to believe (and we’re not the only ones) that scarcity is the truest measure of worth: the idea that no one else has had; the archival source that no one else has seen; the crucial article that no one else knew had been written—with the goal being that you will then go on to write the next crucial article, and the cycle goes on. Well, that’s too damned bad. (I’m in academia myself.) If you want people to read and think for themselves, you need to bring the book to them. Or, rather, make it so that they can actually go out and find what they want as close to instantaneously as possible.

We’re used to our rip/mix/burn culture, now. Interactivity is a huge part of how we create; it’s wired into our imaginations. Our intellectual hub is no longer the archive but the internet. We search; we aggregate; we find forums where we can argue and learn about what we read. And Doctorow’s right: if we can’t get it online, chances are good that we’re not going to get it at all. I have access to a top-of-the-line university archive; but that doesn’t mean it’s okay for me to sit by while these resources go largely unused—unavailable, on account of their stacks-bound scarcity, to nearly everyone else.

I do work in the 18th century. Most valuable resource in my line of work? 18th-century Collections Online. Like pretty much every other member of my generation, my search-fu is strong. I’m a dab with an index, sure; but why traipse around the stacks when I could look it up online—and when looking it up online might even teach me something in the process, dump me into some unexpectedly brilliant channel of tangential search? Then I go into the archive (and oh, it is wonderful, and digital repro doesn’t begin to cover it).

But look. We hear constant bitching about how people aren’t reading as much as they used to. Fair enough; but keeping books off of the internet—making them more scarce—isn’t going to make them more valuable: it’s going to make them obsolete. Welcome to Irony. Now stop blindly opposing tech and people like Doctorow who are trying to help, and start thinking about what strange and wonderful things could happen to the book if we’ll aid & abet it. You could start by reading the whole interview, or read up at creativecommons.org, or go play with Google Books.

And remember: “The future is always weirder than you imagine.”