Joe Queenan has written an essay in the Wall Street Journal (based on his new book, [amazon_link id=”0670025828″ target=”_blank” ]One For The Books[/amazon_link]) about how he became addicted to books.

[amazon_image id=”0670025828″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]One for the Books[/amazon_image]

Books, books, books. I love them too. I always read books about books: Susan Hill’s [amazon_link id=”1846682665″ target=”_blank” ]Howard’s End is On The Landing[/amazon_link]; Francis Spufford’s [amazon_link id=”0571214673″ target=”_blank” ]The Child That Books Built[/amazon_link]; Ann Fadiman’s[amazon_link id=”0140283706″ target=”_blank” ] Ex Libris[/amazon_link], and so on.

The best bit of Queenan’s very funny essay is his defence of the need for books, the physical objects. He writes:

“Books as physical objects matter to me, because they evoke the past. A Métro ticket falls out of a book I bought 40 years ago, and I am transported back to the Rue Saint-Jacques on Sept. 12, 1972, where I am waiting for someone named Annie LeCombe. A telephone message from a friend who died too young falls out of a book, and I find myself back in the Chateau Marmont on a balmy September day in 1995. ….

None of this will work with a Kindle. People who need to possess the physical copy of a book, not merely an electronic version, believe that the objects themselves are sacred. Some people may find this attitude baffling, arguing that books are merely objects that take up space. This is true, but so are Prague and your kids and the Sistine Chapel. Think it through, bozos. …. There is no e-reader or Kindle in my future.”

I read this inwardly shouting, ‘Yes! Yes!” I too use travel tickets as bookmarks and leave them in the book, the better to remember reading them the cafe in Verona or on the flight to Belfast.

Flying back from Belfast

The part Queenan misses out it the joy of second hand books and bookshops. On my flight back from Belfast I finished reading a beaten-up old Leo Malet story about his detective Nestor Burma, [amazon_link id=”B003BPT2L4″ target=”_blank” ]L’homme au sang bleu[/amazon_link].

L’homme au sang bleu

I bought it on our summer holiday in Brittany in this marvellous warren-like bookstore, open only in the afternoons, seducing tourists as they drive past towards Cap Frehel.

Bouquinerie

I have many objections to e-readers, but perhaps the biggest is that they prevent the sharing of books. I can’t read the same books as my husband, who has a dreadful e-book habit, so I can’t talk to him about them. I couldn’t put e-thrillers I’ve read on the book-swap shelf at the local station. I wouldn’t be able to take them to the charity shop or sell them to a second hand bookstore. But what kind of civilisation would we be without second hand bookstores?

Google and the Association of American Publishers have settled their long-standing lawsuit over Google’s digitization of out-of-print but in-copyright books, but the case between Google and the Authors’ Guild remains open.Here is the New York Times report, here is the FT’s, and here is Timothy Lee on Ars Technica, highlighting the separation of interest between publishers and their food course, authors.

The settlement in effect means publishers are contracting out to Google the preparation of e-book versions of their back catalogues – they will pay a fee and get an electronic text they can readily publish. Publishing is a concentrated industry – although there is a competitive fringe, newly enabled by technology-driven reductions in cost, most books are sold by a small number of very large firms. These titans are engaged in a commercial wrestling match with some other very large businesses who are gatekeepers between them and their customers – Google, Amazon, Apple. The economies of scale in the marketing of books, in gaining readers’ attention, are large indeed. So are the network economies in providing a sales platform and suitable reading devices.

Small publishers and authors are minnows in this competition for access to readers. Yet of course some manage to use the technologies to break through, like the famous (notorious?) 50 Shades phenomenon. Let’s hope the fact the authors are hanging on in the US courts means the anti-trust issues get a thorough exploration. As Tim Wu’s excellent book [amazon_link id=”1848879865″ target=”_blank” ]The Master Switch[/amazon_link] demonstrates, there are inherent cycles of concentration in media and communication businesses, punctuated by periodic technological upheavals.

[amazon_image id=”1848879865″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires[/amazon_image]

Last night I started reading [amazon_link id=”0099552450″ target=”_blank” ]This is not the end of the book[/amazon_link], by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière – a very Euro-intellectual offering (a ‘curated conversation’) sponsored by the French Ministry of Culture. I’m loving it, as one of those Anglo-Saxons who wishes we were allowed to have intellectuals here in the UK. One of Eco’s early points is that it doesn’t do to get worked up about formats:

“The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon.” (p4)

And he goes on to point out that no formats last. Papyri have crumbled. Books printed on wood pulp that are 50 years old are crumbling too. Computer discs are obsolete. Online is insecure – as the saga of 3am magazine’s recent disappearance dramatically reveals. (Its rescue came about thanks to the magazine’s Twitter followers tracking down the former owner of the server to a Missouri tattoo parlour.)

[amazon_image id=”0099552450″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]This is Not the End of the Book: A conversation curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac[/amazon_image]

Serendipitously, this morning’s FT reports Bloomsbury’s latest results, which reveal a 70% year on year increase in e-book sales in the first quarter, offsetting a 2% decline in revenues from physical books. But CEO Nigel Newton dismissed the idea that e-books are killing real books:

“It will be a mixed market. Just as it has been for 40 years for hardback and paperback formats – it’s just another new format.”

Eco and Carrière in fact conclude that in the age of the computer, words have become more important than ever. We are communicating more than ever, and in words not pictures. In books, e-pamphlets, blogs, public lectures and debates, tweets… As we seem to need to rediscover every time a new communication technology happens along, modes of communication are complements, not substitutes.

As a footnote, the FT has also been running a very good series on Amazon all week. In another happy coincidence, today’s feature is about its mixed success with digital formats – a strong performance in e-books, not so great in music and video. This is consistent with my view that publishing and bookselling have been relatively successful in innovating with the new technologies, in contrast to the music industry.