The Essence of Things

Is a cellphone novel still a novel? Does a book have to be made out of paper, cloth and glue to be considered a book? These are the sorts of questions I ponder as the digital shift changes the rules in book publishing from day to day.

First it was the music industry. Then the film industry. And soon, it will be book publishing’s turn to get hit by the digital wave. If Amazon or some other innovative company can come up with the gadget that does to book distribution what the iPod did to music distribution, the change will come like a tidal wave, leaving many an established publisher all wet.

But of course, the change doesn’t come all at once. Before the iPod we had Napster (the trouble-making version) and peer-to-peer music sharing. In the publishing industry, for various reasons, the big changes still seem distant, and large publishers still feel comfortable. Ian McEwan and Norman Mailer aren’t bemoaning a loss of royalties because of illicit trade in electronic versions of their novels, for example, and independent bookstores are more afraid of the big Barnes & Noble down the street than digital distribution.

But it seems to me that huge changes are inevitable and only as far away as the next great innovation. The book publishing industry could change on a dime if the perfect electronic reading device is created.

In Japan, publishers are eyeing the small screen. Cellphone novels have become pretty big business, and at least one has sold more than a million copies. Publishers also offer electronic versions of books to people who buy the hardback versions. There seems to be more of a willingness among Japanese publishers to dive into this uncharted territory, perhaps because of the way text-messaging and web-surfing via the cellphone has taken off since the 1999 introduction of i-mode.

Another less obvious avenue that has opened up in the digital shift is a market for well-made books that hearken back to the 19th Century, when books were sturdy and solid and smelled of pulp and leather. My company, Chin Music Press, has had fun exploring this market. Several booksellers have responded viscerally to our books, expressing their devotion to them before they have read a word. I think that’s because we’ve come to a point in our lives where we’re eager to get back to the essence of things, whether it’s through the slow food movement, or farmers’ markets or smaller, more aesthetically pleasing houses, or simpler, more sustainable modes of transportation.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t see this as a mass movement sweeping the US. But I do see some of us otaku (obsessive collectors and fans) beginning to take different avenues than our parents to find happiness and satisfaction. For me, exploring the essence of storytelling and the book — a form that was perfected more than a century ago — never gets old.

Photographs by Craig Mod