The Death of the ISBN?

It’s news to just about no one at all that digital publishing has taken a heavy toll on many aspects of traditional publishing, but here’s one we hadn’t thought of before. The Economist looks at what may be a death knell for the ISBN:

Look inside any book published since 1970 and you will find a number. But perhaps not for much longer. The International Standard Book Number (ISBN), invented in Britain in 1965, took off rapidly as an international system for classifying books, with 150 agencies (one per country, with two for bilingual Canada) now issuing the codes. Set up by retailers to ease their distribution and sales, it increasingly hampers new, small and individual publishers. Yet digital publishing is weakening its monopoly.

The full piece is here.

Who Needs Novels?

Though he says it really well and has a dead cool name, it’s difficult for me to swallow very much author and essayist Garth Risk Hallberg posits in a recent New York Times piece. This is especially true after doing some thinking about all that was said and implied in a piece January ran last week on how reading impacts our neural pathways. From Risk Hallberg’s piece, “Why Write Novels at All?”

The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer “How should novels be?” but “Why write novels at all?”

The roots of this question, in its contemporary incarnation, can be traced back to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who at the dawn of the ’80s promulgated the notion of “cultural capital”: the idea that aesthetic choices are an artifact of socioeconomic position. Bourdieu documented a correlation between taste and class position: The scarcer or more difficult to access an aesthetic experience is — the novel very much included — the greater its ability to set us apart from those further down the social ladder. This kind of value is, in his analysis, the only real value that “refined” tastes have.

Risk Hallberg’s idea is that we’re on the cusp of a whole new deal:

Even as you read this, engineers in Silicon Valley are hard at work on new ways to delight you -- gathering the entire field of aesthetic experience onto a single screen you’ll be able to roll up like a paperback and stick in your back pocket. It’s safe to say that delight won’t be in short supply, and as long as there’s juice in the battery, we won’t have to feel alone.

Pretty much every new wrinkle in the evolution of culture has brought fearmongers out of hiding, promising the end of something beloved. The wide acceptance of photography towards the end of the 19th century, for instance, had skeptics threatening the end of painting as an artform. The invention of moveable type brought out those who predicted it would mean the end of storytelling and -- same horse, different paddock -- that democratization through mass production of books (read that pulp fiction) would spell the end of “proper” literature.

History is filled with many such dire predictions at times of change. But should we really concern ourselves with disconnected possibilities? And, maybe more to the point, is the artform that so recently gave us The Pale King, 11/22/63, and The Tiger’s Wife actually under threat? From what we’re seeing -- and from what our neural pathways are telling us -- no. It is not.

When Books Turn Into Pumpkins

The last couple of years, it seems like everyone keeps talking about the death of the book. What no one warned us about, though: how a book might turn into a pumpkin.

Seriously, though: there’s a part of me that is appalled at this desecration. And another part can’t help but admire the innovation.

Long story short, someone else might want to use this information to turn some of their unwanted books into pumpkins, but you’d best leave my books the hell alone.

Art & Culture: The Art of McSweeney’s

There’s a great deal to like about The Art of McSweeney’s (Chronicle Books). It is dense with ideas, stuffed with creativity and practically choked by talent. But the thing to like best, at least from where I’m standing, is that The Art of McSweeney’s is like a single volume celebration of the book and a thumb of the nose at the sky-is-falling crowd. Did you say the book has no future? Well The Art of McSweeney’s? It says something else.

This book is being published at a time when there are some rumblings about the dire future of the book, and of the printed book in particular.

There are various rumors that people read less now, and that people will read still less in the future. And that, even if they do read at all, it will be on screens, and not on paper....McSweeney's is a small company dedicated to these physical books that purportedly have no future. We spend a good deal of time editing books, and producing books of the highest quality we’re capable of, in the hopes that in doing so, we’ll keep people mindful of the pleasures of the book-as-object.

And, in a way, those pleasures have all been bound into The Art of McSweeney’s, a coffee-table-style book that takes us through McSweeney’s various publications since -- and including -- the company was hatched out of then bookish wunderkind Dave Egger’s super creative noggin. Included here are art and comments from David Byrne, Sarah Vowell, Michael Chabon, Chris Ware and many others. It’s a fantastic book: a celebration between two covers, one that should mature to become a gorgeous momento from one of publishing’s strangest hours.

Is Publishing Broken?

Though a lot of people have been forecasting doom and gloom for the publishing industry, some of us have remained confident that not all change is bad. As we remarked in our Best Books of 2008 feature back in December:

The sky is falling. And it has been for some time. The past 12 months have produced the sorts of calamities that can start panics. And it seems that, as delighted with the economy as everyone seemed to be 12 and certainly 24 months ago, they are now willing to believe it’s all coming apart. The reality is this: you must have downs. If you did not, how would you even recognize the ups? It’s all physics. There’s change ahead? Sure. But there’s always change. That’s just how we humans roll.

In the new issue of Time Magazine, on sale today, Lev Grossman offers up a sharp assessment of publishing as we find it at the earliest part of the 21st century. As Grossman points out:

A lot of headlines and blogs to the contrary, publishing isn’t dying. But it is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it’s done. Literature interprets the world, but it’s also shaped by that world, and we’re living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since -- well, since the early 18th century. The novel won’t stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It’s about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

But what, exactly, does that look like? As Grossman points out, there are many possibilities. It’s enjoyable to look over his shoulder at his crystal ball. While he’s about it, he considers some of the things that aren’t right with the industry:

What’s the Matter with Publishing?

It isn’t the audience. People are still reading. According to a National Endowment for the Arts study released on Jan. 12, literary reading by adults has actually increased 3.5% since 2002, the first such increase in 26 years. So that's not the problem. What is?

Grossman’s piece is lengthy, well considered and it’s here.

The Sky Is Falling!

From the Orange County Register:

Cavemen used charcoal to write on walls. Ancient Egyptians scrawled hieroglyphics on papyrus scrolls. Medieval monks penned illuminated manuscripts on parchment. Then Johannes Gutenberg changed the world with movable type, making writing available to all.

Now a revolution is under way that is rapidly making ink on paper obsolete. Books as we know them are dead, many experts say.

The Register piece is here.