The holiday book season has definitely begun. You know how I know? Not because the tables at my local independent are loading up with titles like Cooking for the Holidays and not even because the chains around town have already brought out the decorations, the holiday-themed gift cards and the piles of board games at the front of the stores.
No, I know it’s the biggest book-buying season of the year because suddenly, books and reading are all over the news.
Last week, the NEA study called To Read or Not to Read made it clear that reading really is at risk. This week, the media, perhaps inadvertently, offered a solution: it’s the delivery system, stupid.
Consider: within hours of its official release, the new Amazon Kindle e-book reader—“only” $399 and available through Amazon—racked up over 600 news articles discussing it. (We know. We Googled.) According to a long and adulatory piece in Newsweek, we should expect that success will turn out to be more iPod than iPublish.
Consider: in one weekend, millions of people went to see a computer-animated version of Beowulf, surely one of the most difficult books in history; sales of the classic Old English poem (in the Seamus Heaney paperback translation) nearly doubled, from some 11,000 the week before the film’s release to 20,000 after just the first weekend, according to Nielsen BookScan.
To Read or Not to Read? Apparently, pace NEA and Shakespeare, that is not the question. The question is: in what form and why?
To those of us who’ve been around the book business for a while, any hoopla about e-reading can seem startlingly and painfully familiar. We’ve seen the Rocket eBook and the Sony Reader come and, if not go, at least idle. Likewise, the spate of news stories heralding how popularizing literature through mass media is good for books. It is good, especially for the specific book (think Into Thin Air, Mystic River and anything picked by Oprah), but whether such media touting creates and nurtures new, regular readers is unclear. But when Newsweek practically proclaims the Amazon Kindle the sexiest device around—and, speaking of sexy, when a digitally enhanced Angelina Jolie gets 13-year-old boys thinking even vaguely of first-millennium lit—I wonder if there isn’t some cause for at least cautious celebration. We keep saying, after all, that the future of the book business hinges on our ability to bring narrative to where our readers live: like it or not, many of them live on computer screens and at the movies.
This news probably doesn’t sit so well with purists like Nobelist Heaney, the most recent illustrious translator of Beowulf, who has declined all requests for comment on the film. “I have no desire to involve myself,” he said. And surely, thankfully, there are plenty of readers who like the old-fashioned non-ebook delivery system just fine. Still, I get the feeling that when we look back a few years from now, Christmas 2007 will be a turning point. It may not quite be the book equivalent of the iPod Christmas of 2001, but, hey, it’s a start.
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