Loud

I figure I should post the comment I made over at zo’s on ebooks for all of you to see.

You can find zo’s post here:

humorlessbitch - Sense and My Sensibility

(Scroll down for the discussion.)

This reminds me of something that happened to me and my sister a while back. One of the peculiarities of Icelandic culture is that we publish an enormous number of original Icelandic books per capita, biographies, novels, political polemics, poetry, etc.. The flip side of that is that books go extremely quickly and easily out o print¹. With a community of that size and the economics of print being the way they are, only exceptional circumstances warrant the effort to keep books in print. Even some of the books by our late Nobel laureate, Halldór Laxnes, occasionally go out of print.

Which is the reason why, when me and my sister wanted to give our mother some boks by one of our maternal great-grandfathers (Séra Sigurður Einarsson from Holt, a poet, playwright, priest and academic, the Séra is one of those priestly honorifics like ‘father’), we had to go looking among the used book stores of Reykjavík.

My sister found a copy of one of Séra Sigurður’s books in a used book store on Hverfisgata². It was an odd copy, bound in a non-descript paper cover and most of its leafs/pages were uncut. My sister wondered whether it was a flawed copy or some such, but the dealer said that that was the way it had been made and sold.

Books in Iceland, at least, were sold with simple covers and uncut. The readers read it with a paperknife in hand and cut their way through the book. If they liked it, they brought it to their local binder and had it bound to their liking.

So instead of having a dud copy, what she had was the nearest thing to a mint, as new, copy of that era she could get.

A little bit of research confirmed what the dealer said, it was news to me and my sister, perhaps not to you, and to my surprise we found out that this had been, and still is in some areas, standard practice in the publishing industry. That the industry had been rife with all sorts of customisations and local work. That books had been customised, bound, re-bound and cut or made to fit.

To wit, the print market that ebooks are competing with today is not a medium at the peak of its variety and innovation but a particularly dreary incarnation of the form.

There are few things I would like more than to see both ebooks and print thrive, because I see them as the two legs of longform writing, a beast that is weakened already by an onslaught of the insectoid micromedia.

The sleazy marketdroid in me (yay for the dayjob!) sees nothing but rich potential in using ebooks for customer development and print for profit and revenue.

The writer in me sees nothing but potential for freedom and flexibility in having a variety of forms and venues for publishing.

But, the pessimist in me worries that ebooks will be used to cannibalise print, because it’s easier than addressing the systemic problems of the publishing industry infrastructure.

That I, as a interactive media dude and designer, should have to lose capabilities and options going from the web to epub is nothing short of a fantastic victory for the worst, suicidal tendencies of an already beleaguered industry.

We did, in the end, find several books by our great-grandfather, all of them found by the proprietor of the Hverfisgata bookstore. Two books of poetry and one of his plays, which were well received.

All my sister’s idea, of course, she’s got a knack for coming up with clever things.