By Dean Unger.
One of my most profound recollections of childhood happened during the fall of 1975, when my two brothers and I learned, while playing a raucous game of table-top hockey, that the world was about to end.
The game in question, featured miniature tin facsimiles of the 1957/58 Toronto Maple Leafs, and the Montreal Canadians. It was game-seven of the play-offs, sudden-death overtime. In the background, a young Tony Parsons was anchoring the six o’clock news, and announced the impending demise of life on earth as we know it. The game was put on hold while we watched the countdown to the end of the world with rapt attention: five, four, three, two, one…. Then, nothing. We all looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders and got back to the serious business of table top hockey.
Much later in life, in a moment of idle curiosity, I learned that the Watchtower Society, had more or less arbitrarily chosen 1975 as its most likely end-of-the-world, because, according to Biblical chronology, Adam was created in the autumn of 4026 BC. As it was, the 6,000th anniversary of his inception seemed a promising date to forecast the end of the world.
A little more than a decade ago, a disdainful cry – a cry that had not been heard in earnest for several decades: “The death of book publishing is nigh…” was uttered. It was, according to conjecture, a tocsin perpetrated by technology boosters in a bid to instill hope for the E-book.
In 2008, with fingers pointing at the horizon, most major book publishers made drastic cuts and underwent liberal downsizing to trim budgets in the face of declining sales. Finally, after seven or so years of trying to find stable ground, purveyors of the E-Book saw their opportunity to storm the castle walls. They launched an ambitious marketing campaign equivalent to the throngs of Sauran descending upon Middle Earth, by the likes of Apple (Ipad), Sony (E-Book Reader), Amazon’s Kindle, and so on. As a last line of offence, they even decided to make their publisher’s list, equalling millions of titles, free, in a futile attempt to infiltrate the den of the insatiable E-book consumer that, in theory, was presumably chomping at the bit, in need of an alternative to the odious and cumbersome trade paperback, and, God-forbid, the onerous hard-cover.
For a while it even seemed as though the major traditional publishers were buying into the propaganda, launching E-book imprints of their own, to try and get a jump on the marketing Leviathan said to be churning inevitably shore-ward.
The irony here, is that after the smoke cleared, the innovators realized they had been scrambling to get onto a horse that, in the end, was more a mule than a thoroughbred. The book – unlike computers, software, and standard Windows operating systems – may never fall prey to forced obsoletion. Reading is an intimate experience: although there are those that champion the digital book, the screen has traditionally been for fleeting bits of information: for utility not intimacy (IMHO).
A computer screen is about as intimate as a cow-tongue sandwich. Imagine you’re cherished notion of cuddling up in your jammies, with a hot tea and, or slipping into a hot bath with glass of wine; of flaking on a sunny beach somewhere exotic, with…. a gleaming white, LCD monitor. However, that is not to say the E-book does not have its place. That it does, in fact is obvious, to some degree.
With the advantage of posterity, it’s not hard to see that, in fact, E-book technology had it right in the early days , it was being produced for special interest applications, technology manuals, manufacturing techniques and the like. And what the E-book people did back then, they did well. The trouble started when someone had the bright idea to try and capture some of the great wealth of pleasure readership market share – the white elephant of the corporate publishing boardroom.
Despite all of this, the E-book campaign is not solely to blame for the troubled waters the publishing industry is feeling at the moment. Sure, they plunged their picadors in where they could, but there are other, more sinister doorsteps to lay blame upon.
If there are grubby fingers pressing into the soft, fleshy skin of the proverbial throat of the book publishing industry, it is a joint assassination perpetrated by the increasingly dyspeptic, pseudo-illiterate generations of youth we are collectively raising, who would much rather play a video game or watch an episode of The Hills, Wife Swap, or Cheaters. Our youth opt for immediate gratification via satellite broadcast signal, or internet, and pretty much can’t see the forest for the LCD screen.
If you’ve got something to say, you’d better find a way to say it in 150 characters or less, otherwise your words are as good as space garbage floating aimlessly in the gravity-zero darkness of cyber-space. The printed word seems all but lost on the minds of the new contemporaries.
Don Juan is Alive and Well
Alas, it is not the beginning of the end, but merely a call to restructure the industry, the same way music has had to reinvent itself after the incessant sting of MP2/MP3 technology. Technology evolves incredibly fast, and publishers need to find the placid safe-zone inside the volatile and shark-infested currents of the ocean of intellectual game space.
There are already bright spots. Part of the solution may lie in getting the readers back from the clutches of cyber-reality. Serial novels, such as Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series; the resurgence of Tolkien’s, the Lord of the Rings; the Harry Potter epic, all have cast out into the unfamiliar landscape of binary code and graphic architecture, and returned with many new and rehabilitated readers.
Alas, it is not the beginning of the end, but merely a call to restructure the industry; the same way music has had to reinvent itself after the incessant sting of MP2 technology. Technology evolves incredibly fast and publishers need to find the placid safe-zone inside the volatile and shark-infested currents of the ocean of intellectual game space.
There are already bright spots. Part of the solution may lie in getting the readers back from the clutches of cyber reality. Serial novels like Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, the resurgence of Tolkien’s, the Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter epic, all have cast out into the unfamiliar landscape of binary code and graphic architecture, and returned with many new and rehabilitated readers.
In Summary…
One could ask “Did the Watchtower people really believe that the earth would stop turning on that potentially fateful day in 1975? It’s open to conjecture. What is certain is that they garnered an incredible amount of publicity from the uber-countdown. Only this was a prime example that not all publicity is good publicity. For the five year period immediately following the “end-of-the-world” event in 1975, the number of Jehovah’s Witness publishers (members) actually fell into negative growth for the first time in modern history.
Truth is, it’s a question of wants vs. needs. We have everything we want. It is a crap shoot whether consumers can be convinced that we NEED it. The E-book is a perfect example of 21st century marketing at its finest.