After all, this is where the Web 3.0 movement itself is going. Your clothes will be computational devices. Your e-reader will talk to your smartphone and your scale and your coffee machine, and they’ll all keep tabs on you, sense your mood, and recommend things for you to do or read or buy. Who would have thought that this dream of infusing the inanimate with the animate, of matter with soul, would ultimately benefit advertisers the most?
Bookmark: Altered Books
There were once so many passenger pigeons in America that their flocks darkened the skies for hours at a time as millions flew overhead. Ranging from the East Coast to the Rockies, they were a highly successful species of bird. Their fossils have been found as far back in time as the Pleistocene period, the same era that saw saber-toothed tigers ranging through what’s now Los Angeles, or wooly mammoths roaming through Chicago, or giant ground sloths, ten feet tall, loping through what would become Las Vegas.
That we had giant sloths in America surprises me. That all the passenger pigeons died out stuns me simply because of the reason for their extinction. They were killed for their meat, and generations of Americans knew no other meat than pigeon meat. Tiny pigeon sausages. Pigeon pies. In the span of about a hundred years, one of the most common American birds was gradually exterminated.
Likewise, books once had a glorious range. Books roamed the world. They traveled in luggage on the Pan-Am flights of the 1950s, were carried in purses and satchels on trans-Atlantic schooners, were carried by the Pony Express across the continent, and were often an important part of dowries of noblewomen. But now the range of books has shrunk, like the range of passenger pigeons, although not yet as terminally.
You can still find books on dusty ornamental bookshelves in some hotel lobbies. You can find them in the lost-and-found bins of large train stations and on sun-bleached shelves at beach resorts. You can still find thriving populations of books at college bookstores and libraries. Somewhat surprisingly, you can also find books in prison libraries, which boast higher circulation rates than almost any other kind of library.
But like passenger pigeons, like coyotes, like black bears, and like ancient coelacanths—dinosaur fish from millions of years ago that only live off two islands in the Indian Ocean—books inhabit a restricted range when compared to how prolific they were in their former glory days.
In ecological terms, books are threatened with extinction.
Books aren’t capable of reproducing in the wild or in captivity, although more and more book titles are published every year. But fewer physical books are being sold with every passing year, even if there are more titles to choose from. Book sales overall are tipping toward digital now.
Books are threatened with extinction, but like the smartest of animals in the wild, they’re adapting. They’re evolving instead into ebooks.
It’s almost contradictory for me to be a futurist of books. It’s like being a futurist of telegraphs or a futurist of rotary phones, because the death knell for print books has, in my opinion, sounded. As printed artifacts, books share a sacred reliquary along with eight-track tapes, gramophones, and LaserDiscs. But print books haven’t died yet, and they’re not going to go gently into the night.
In the upscale home décor stores of the future—and by future, I mean ten years from now—tucked in among the rugs and tapestries and oversized urns and stuffed animal heads, you’ll start to find books sold as decorative items. They might be artistically bound with strips of copper. They might have keyholes from doors installed onto their spines. They might be artfully aged and lacquered. Perhaps they’ll be set up on pedestals, or a small ceramic pigeon will be perched on the book. But you’ll start to see books altered, turned into art objects.
In a trip today to my local art town, I saw three stores that sold these types of altered books. Some of the books were turned into pulp and molded into trees, with smaller books hanging from them as fruits would. I saw pages from a book carefully razor-bladed out with an X-Acto knife and painted to show scenes of children playing in a field.
What does it say about us as a culture that we’re turning books into art?
To me, it says we’re aware of the passing of books, and we’re mournful. We feel pent-up nostalgia for books. We’re aware of a genuine loss, one that we can only express with X-Acto knives and spray cans of lacquer and glitter. We’re altering books, making them into art and ennobling them with ideas that are too hard to put into words. We’re transforming humdrum leather-bound books that were formerly commodities into artistic statements.
We’re aware somehow that art will last longer than commodities, and our artists are salvaging some books in a repurposed form, in the hope that some of them will last through the ages. Because let’s be honest: do you really think the major libraries are going to hold on to all of their print books in an age of cheap terabyte hard drives? Do you really think the Library of Congress is going to digitize its book collection and then keep all the print books once they’re digitized? They won’t, and how can they? There’s simply too much material to store.
So there’s going to be a massive die-off of print books. They’re not emigrating, flying overseas with the sound of pigeon flutter as their pages loft them through the sky. Books are dying. Future archaeologists will speak of the Gutenberg Era and the sharp discontinuity of our time, characterized by a major extinction event that has left no print books in the fossil records.
The artwork of Georgia O’Keefe often depicts bleached skulls on a desert landscape. When artists get around to painting the end of the Gutenberg Era, they’ll perhaps paint the bleached books left behind on the literary landscape.
I think highly of printed books, but I already think of them as bone-white, bleached, inert, and dead—unlike ebooks, which seem to sparkle with electricity and wonder. I look at my walls of printed and bound books like they’re all polished skulls in a curio cabinet. Just as I’m achingly sad to see them go, I’m also excited at moving onward into the future, into the digital.
But what about you? Have you come to terms with the death of printed books? Have you grieved, in your way? Care to share your thoughts or help others through the mourning process?
Reading: A Dying Art?
I can’t appreciate fiddle music. No matter how good it is, fiddle music sounds to me like someone plucking the guts of a sick cat. But I know, rationally, that there must be truly great fiddle players. My mind understands this, even if it can’t appreciate that kind of music.
Some things are simply matters of taste. Cilantro. Sushi. Cuban cigars. Krautrock. Spiders. There are no doubt items in this list that you find distasteful. And perhaps some that you appreciate, as a connoisseur might. Your taste for these is partly learned. In our country, we have developed an appreciation for sushi, for example, which is essentially raw fish. Spiders, by contrast, rarely make it onto the haute cuisine menus of our restaurants.
Culture is shifty, and as anyone who has traveled outside his or her home country knows, it can vary widely. And yet, some parts of culture are universal.
We all have an innate sense of storytelling, for example.