Imagine That

Over on Sarah Sheard’s blog, Writers’ Roundup, she asks us to imagine our neighborhood bookshop. It’s a modest little space lined with bookshelves, a coffee bar, tables, and so on, but here the bookshelves display the covers of the books only, like dvds at your neighborhood movie rental place, and …

in one corner of this bookshop is an ATM-like gizmo with a computer display screen. You head over to it, tap the glass to wake up its online catalogue and proceed to search for a book by subject, title, author or from a list of new releases in your preferred genre and language. Titles with thumbnail displays pop onto the screen, ready for downloading and/or printing. You make your selections, charge the cost of your downloads to your account, press the button and the machine begins to burp and whirr. In perhaps 12 minutes, a newly bound, still-warm, perfect-bound paperback book slides into your hands — or the proprietor’s hands if you’d prefer to sit and finish your coffee.

Please go read the rest – it’s delightful! The idea of being able to afford both print and digital copies of any book I could ever want was, well, knee-buckling. But then I got to thinking about the details—it is my nature to worry about things several years in advance, things over which I exert zero control, things which are highly unlikely to ever happen to me or anyone, ever, etc—and of course, I got worried.

These print-on-demand books, will they all look and feel the same aside from size? Will there still be such a thing as cover art and page design (just more of it, really, in a range of sizes)? I wonder this as the page designer for TNQ — I give a lot of thought to how the work is presented; it matters to me and, I believe, to the writers, as well–but also as a reader. Part of what I love about print as it exists now is how gorgeous it can be — some books are as lovely to look at as they are to hold, or read, for that matter.

Any printed book — no matter its level of aesthetic delight — has certain well-documented advantages over the e-reader devices. You can take a book in the tub. You can write in the margins. Reading a ‘real’ book in public attracts members of the opposite sex (who share your taste in literature). A print-on-demand book would satisfy these conditions in the same way a traditionally printed book would. And it would satisfy many other concerns, too — less waste, for example, in that fewer would be printed, and there’d be no shipping, so fewer emissions…and an e-book has even more advantages in this arena. Both technologies make a lot of sense. But the problem is this: my relationship with print is anything but sensible.

It’s physical, for one. In my capacity as Fiction Editor here at TNQ, I read a lot of stories in manuscript format — that is, on 8 1/2 by 11 pages, double-spaced in the author’s choice of font which is often Times (snore) or Courier (blech). And it’s odd — though my feelings about the work usually don’t change, I find the experience of reading a story in the print edition of TNQ differs from reading the very same story on a fistful of plain paper. I don’t mean the glow of accomplishment, of seeing a project I worked on for several weeks come to fruition, though that’s there, too — I mean, the mag is simply more enjoyable to read, physically. Perhaps our contributors out there share my feeling on this: when you get that print copy in the mail, do you re-read your own work and if yes, does it feel different from reading the pages fresh from your own printer?

No? How about reading Hamlet on the tissue-thin pages of the Complete Works versus reading the really cheap paperback version ordered by the prof. The cheap paperback is actually easier to read, physically-speaking. It’s lighter in the hand and the type is at a readable size. So maybe a sensible reader would prefer that experience. Maybe only neurotic bibliophiles like me want their Shakespeare in tiny, migraine-inducing font, smelling like old dust, weighing ten pounds. I want to pass on my copy of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn to the daughter I’ve yet to have, to read the very same copy of Charlotte’s Web to my grandkids that my mom read to me. Of course, I’m not pregnant nor am I planning on becoming so in the immediate future. We’ve yet to reach that point in life when you hire a moving company rather than a UHaul and yes, we — but mostly my husband and others brawnier than me — lugged my boxes of books between several apartments before bringing them to our current house. We’ll likely continue to do so for the next thirty years or so. It makes no sense, I know.

It’s silly, even. There are so many logical advantages to these other modes for reading, environmental ones to boot, also close to my heart–and I like to consider myself a practical person. I truly do appreciate the benefits of these technologies, and if the bookstore Ms. Sheard asks us to imagine does materialize, I’ll probably be a regular. But I will be bringing my e-books home to read in a room full of real, dusty, dog-eared print. Who’s with me?