Book Stories - Foreword

A series of thoughts and considerations, stories and predictions about books

Photo by Simon Daoudi on Unsplash

Since Gutenberg, we have had printed books around. In the beginning, these were mostly bibles, then came other types, and during the Age of Enlightenment, publishing went up to speed with lots of both scientific and fictional books.

That was the rise. 

And then it became hype: we saw the period of the great writers, still being read today, and there was a good balance between books written and people who wanted to read. It became a golden age of publishing, and several big publishing houses were established during those years.

When we entered into the modern industrialization and internationalization period after WWII, things escalated, like they always do, as it became cheaper to arrange for the printing and distribution of books. Book stores across the world had a surge, but soon the storm increased in strength and book clubs were established that spew out huge amounts of books at low prices. These were called clubs, but they were businesses with subscribing customers. Many of the books published by the book clubs were the classics, now available without royalties, or they were massive sellers that publishers saw a chance to give another boost by allowing for these low-cost productions by the book clubs.

The hype was an indication of the world of publishing coming to an end. It is said that every technology is reaching its high just before it disappears from the marked, being replaced by a new technology. I think that this can extend to business ideas as well, not just technologies.

And in this case, things clashed, as the personal computers and home computers came along, and then the Internet, followed by a mobile phone concept that quickly became that of the smartphone. Combined, these made up a technological platform portfolio that was designed to smash every other information spreading mechanism. Including the traditional publishing.

The hype of printed books boiled over and declined while the e-books came along, and then audio books. Bot not only did the technology rip off books from their traditional paper, it also gave books the competition of several other attention thieves such as TV and movies through first simple antennas, then satellites and cables, video cassettes, DVDs/Blu-rays, moving through various schemes of planned distribution to ownership, rental and streaming on-demand.

Of course, the ease and low cost of printing books would lead to excessive production, and of course new technologies and business ideas would lead to competing concepts.

Bookstores began closing. This phenomenon is seen to different extent in different parts of the world, and I suspect that some people have not noticed it - as they live in places that still have physical bookstores around. But for others, physical books have vanished almost completely from the market. 

When books were new as a concept, it was considered special and good style to have books visibly present at the office and in the home. Now, books have become an embarrassment to many, and after the book club years with a bookshelf in every home, even the home of a worker family without any academic or literary background, that is now a thing of the past. Instead, people have big screen TVs and smartphones, supplemented with tablets and laptop computers.

Books are still being published, and perhaps even more than ever, because it has become possible to do so easily and without first going through a tedious process of applying and then being rejected from publisher after publisher. With a few clicks on the mouse, writers can now self-publish.

There are several platforms for these e-book self-publications, and even though one of them has become the biggest there are still alternatives - or supplements - for the adventurous writers to explore.

Writing and preparing the books are also easier than ever. Tools like word processors made it possible to edit a book without writing it again on new paper, as it was necessary in the typewriter days, and spell checkers, grammar checkers, various project management tools and similar have entered the scene, and most recently also generative artificial intelligence tools are taking off some of the workload from the writer’s shoulders, and every task related to graphics design can be handled by a bunch of tools with various degrees of automation, some requiring very little knowledge from the user. All of these tools make it possible to do everything without the assistance or, indeed, the approval of others.

Writers are, as a result, producing extreme amounts of books. It is not unusual to find writers who send out five or ten books per year, having 50 or more books on the market. Even people who cannot write or who have nothing to say are capable of producing books, for instance in the shape of “low contents book” that can be anything like, for instance, a copybook with a few added notes and guides, or something else that count as books in the overall scenario without requiring an authoring process. Anything that needs printing can be done so by print-on-demand services, still arranged by the writers themselves and made available through online bookstores. Audio book versions can be made just as easily, just by pushing a few buttons on a publishing platform.

Books are now there in huge amounts. Old books from the time where a writer needed to put in a lot of work on the writing itself and then being lucky to find an interested publisher, after which they had to go through a lot of work together around editing and planning. Newer books from the book club period, printed in extreme amounts, are now being inherited by the children of the original buyers - children who grew up with electronic entertainment and no bookshelves. And all the e-books, of course, plus all the audio books.

When paper books are inherited, the heirs are often not interested in them. They see no value whatsoever in paper books, so they want to dispose of them. After many years of antiquarians as important secondhand stores of valuable old books, it looks like even these have hard times. A book club book never had any second hand (economical) value, but now all the other books have lost their value as well. So the heirs throw away the books.

The physical book disposals have reached a grotesque level in some places, where the recycling stations or garbage disposal sites, whatever they are called locally, have special dumping areas for books, special containers. Once there were containers for newspapers, but these have been replaced by containers for books.

The society by large is doing what Ray Bradbury wrote about in Fahrenheit 451: even though the books are not being burned in front of people, including the houses where the books were found, the books are still being burned - now in power plants, becoming electricity or district heating. And the books are now only remembered, not by people, like in Fahrenheit 451, but by computers. 

There are many topics in this! There is a big world of book stories. Many stories to tell. As a strange irony of life, it may be difficult to reach any readers with these and other stories, because of the almost complete decline of paper books as a concept, and the current extreme publication level of e-books. A book about book stories could easily be dragged down by the maelstrom, never meeting the eyes of any readers.

Most e-books are given away of sold very cheaply, and most copies are never being read. 

Newspapers and magazines have undergone a similar development, apart from the volume - there isn’t a similar motivation among writers to create news outlets as there is to create books, and whatever still exists in this segment has few buyers and even fewer readers. Blogging platforms, social media and similar compensate a bit for all this, but there is a strong focus in these places to produce lightweight texts that, according to the advice of most coaches and influencers in the field, “shouldn’t be taken too seriously”.  

Any serious attempt to uncover the stories of the books will not really fit in anywhere today. It will have severe problems finding an audience. Or that is…:

Book Stories, a series of articles of which you are now reading the introduction, is an attempt to gather stories about books and publishing, about the hopes and dreams, the values, the trouble and fears, and the different uses, the different positions and roles of books in the mental model that people in different societies have had over time.

And about the future. 

Do books have a future? Yes, that is the magic of it all. Waves are going high - and equally low - that is what makes them waves. But the ocean continues being there. Out there, deep into the open sea, you’ll find a future for the books. And I am not talking about a hidden island or a sunken ship - I am talking about the true minds of people. Those minds that are not being dragged along by social media’s short and unserious texts and the news media’s quick blows of silly or fake news but are seeking something genuine.

If you follow along, you will find stories about books. Thoughts about publishing. Inspiration and considerations showing that books and the book world, whatever it may look like in the future, still exist.