A Reader’s Rumination

Michael Jensen | 02/22/2010

I had the pleasure of staying with my in-laws over the recent Christmas holidays. My father-in-law’s house abounds in books. After 35 years as the minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in Lincoln, Nebraska, he “retired”— and hosts a weekly book review show on the public television station, writes book reviews for the local paper, and still reads as if he’s studying for his profession of thoughtful observer of the human condition.

Consequently every coffee table and settee had some kind of recent intellectual apparatus: The New York Review of Books, the New York Times sections in all their literate forms, clippings from papers and magazines, and small stacks of intelligent, thoughtful journals.

I reveled in all that paper.

The printed matter allowed a kind of browsing I’ve done too little of, of late. I’ve been shifting gradually toward the digital-only for more than two decades, and now do virtually all of my professional browsing online.

But among that printed material, I was able to enter the world of letters again. Of literate bon mots, and pithy quotes. Of implicitly demonstrating how well-read one is, not how well one can Google. Of thoughtful, researched conclusions; of thoughtful, deep expertise in matters literary and philosophical.

It’s something I realized I’d been missing, online. Sure, there are marvels of analysis available digitally—and most of what was on that paper at my father-in-law’s is also available in digital form. But I’ve had no online hours that provided anything as distilled as the material I could randomly pick up around his house to read. I could delve, and browse, and read in-depth, and skim, and discover—and almost *everything* I picked up was interesting. It had been pre-distilled, pre-limited… it was only the good stuff. Even the ads were interesting—reminders of quality intellectual content from publishers of quality.

That whole ecosystem is something we may be losing,  because competition for online eyeballs doesn’t encourage textual constraints. And economic constraints make buying ads in the NYRB, or the NYT Book Review, or Harper’s, increasingly difficult to justify. And fewer people are willing to subscribe to paper artifacts every year. And book review sections are disappearing throughout the country, and literary reviews are in decline, and independent bookstores, like the main one in Lincoln, are closing nationwide.

My father-in-law often resold books he chose not to review to the community’s secondhand and independent bookstores, much to my chagrin as a publisher. But that’s part of the ecosystem too—and a way of giving books a longer life. Without that segment of the ecosystem, there’s less of an incentive for him to write reviews, since such writing pays piddling amounts….

The entire publishing ecosystem is tattering, because the new ecosystem of glibness, volume, repetition, search engine optimization, element-based monetization, transitory reputation, personal brand, virus-of-the-moment, and utter surfeit of raw material changes the nature of the competition. In that ecosystem, I must judge whether an article is worth reading… by reading it. In the old paper-based one, I could almost be sure an article was at least worthwhile.

I hope the best of what I experienced in my father-in-law’s literary space can be part of the human experience, as we shift to a mostly-digital intellectual ecosystem—characteristics such as assured quality, concentrated value, and distilled expertise. That runs counter to today’s Web rhythms, even as it runs parallel to what many people want.

However, the Web’s rhythms wax and wane, and it may be that—not unlike the decline of blogging (because there’s too much out there already)—curated content will make a resurgence in response to overabundance of information and underabundance of time.

As the flood of barely curated content becomes overbearing, we may shift back to where editorial oversight is valued again. If so, the products will still be increasingly electronic—but people will be more willing to pay for the value of curation. And we as publishers will still be able to pay our salaries.

My father-in-law’s children all went in together to get him a new Mac Cube to replace the clunker he’d been experiencing the Web through. So who knows—perhaps next Christmas there won’t be so much paper clutter around the house. But for him, I doubt it.

Comments 0

RSS Feed