From Octave Uzanne’s essay “The End of Books,” published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1894:

What is my view of the destiny of books, my dear friends? The question is interesting, and fires me all the more because in good faith I never put it to myself before this hour.

If by books you are to be understood as referring to our innumerable collections of paper, printed, sewed, and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work, I own to you frankly that I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude as a means of current interpretation of our mental products.

Printing, which Rivarol so judiciously called the artillery of thought, and of which Luther said that it is the last and best gift by which God advances the things of the Gospel — printing, which has changed the destiny of Europe, and which, especially during the last two centuries, has governed opinion through the book, the pamphlet, and the newspaper — printing, which since 1436 has reigned despotically over the mind of man, is, in my opinion, threatened with death by the various devices for registering sound which have lately been invented, and which little by little will go on to perfection.

Notwithstanding the enormous progress which has gradually been made in the printing-press, in spite of the already existing composing-machines, easy to run, and furnishing new characters freshly moulded in movable matrices, it still appears to me that the art in which Fust and Scheffer, Estienne and Vascosa, Aldus Manutius and Nicholas Jenson successively excelled, has attained its acme of perfection, and that our grand-children will no longer trust their works to this somewhat antiquated process, now become very easy to replace by phonography, which is yet in its initial stage, and of which we have much to hope. …

I take my stand, therefore, upon this incontestable fact, that the man of leisure becomes daily more reluctant to undergo fatigue, that he eagerly seeks for what he calls the comfortable, that is to say for every means of sparing himself the play and the waste of the organs. You will surely agree with me that reading, as we practise it today, soon brings on great weariness; for not only does it require of the brain a sustained attention which consumes a large proportion of the cerebral phosphates, but it also forces our bodies into various fatiguing attitudes. If we are reading one of our great newspapers it constrains us to acquire a certain dexterity in the art of turning and folding the sheets; if we hold the paper wide open it is not long before the muscles of tension are overtaxed, and finally, if we address ourselves to the book, the necessity of cutting the leaves and turning them one after another, ends by producing an enervated condition very distressing in the long run.

The art of being moved by the wit, the gayety, and the thought of others must soon demand greater facilities. I believe, then, in the success of everything which will favor and encourage the indolence and selfishness of men; the elevator has done away with the toilsome climbing of stairs; phonography will probably be the destruction of printing. Our eyes are made to see and reflect the beauties of nature, and not to wear themselves out in the reading of texts; they have been too long abused, and I like to fancy that some one will soon discover the need there is that they should be relieved by laying a greater burden upon our ears. This will be to establish an equitable compensation in our general physical economy. …

As for the book, or let us rather say, for by that time books ‘will have lived,’ as for the novel, or the storyograph, the author will become his own publisher. To avoid imitations and counterfeits he will be obliged, first of all, to go to the Patent–Office, there to deposit his voice, and register its lowest and highest notes, giving all the counter-hearings necessary for the recognition of any imitation of his deposit. The Government will realize great profits by these patents. Having thus made himself right with the law, the author will talk his work, fixing it upon registering cylinders. He will himself put these patented cylinders on sale; they will be delivered in cases for the consumption of hearers. …

At home, walking, sightseeing, these fortunate hearers will experience the ineffable delight of reconciling hygiene with instruction; of nourishing their minds while exercising their muscles for there will be pocket phono-operagraphs, for use during excursions among Alpine mountains or in the cafions of the Colorado. … Nothing will be lacking for them on this head; they may intoxicate themselves on literature as on pure water, and as cheaply, too, for there will then be fountains of literature in the streets as there are now hydrants. …

At every open place in the city little buildings will be erected, with hearing tubes corresponding to certain works hung all around for the benefit of the studious passer-by. They will be easily worked by the mere pressure of a button. On the other side, a sort of automatic book-dealer, set in motion by a nickel in the slot, will for this trifling sum give the works of Dickens, Dumaspére, or Longfellow, on long rolls all prepared for home consumption.

I go even farther: the author who desires personally to bring his work to the public knowledge after the fashion of the trouvéres of the Middle Ages, carrying them about from house to house, may draw a modest but always remunerative profit by renting to all the inmates of the same apartment-house a sort of portable organ, which may be slung over the shoulder, composed of an infinite number of small tubes connected with his auditory shop, by means of which his works may be wafted through the open windows to the ears of such lodgers as may desire amusement in a moment of leisure, or cheer in an hour of solitude.

People of small means will not be ruined, you must admit, by a tax of four or five cents for an hour’s ‘hearing,’ and the fees of the wandering author will be relatively important by the multiplicity of hearings furnished to each house in the same quarter.

Is this all? By no means. The phonography of the future will be at the service of our grandchildren on all the occasions of life. Every restaurant-table will be provided with its phonographic collection; the public carriages, the waiting-rooms, the state — rooms of steamers, the halls and chambers of hotels will contain phonographotecks for the use of travellers. The railways will replace the parlor car by a sort of Pullman Circulating Library, which will cause travellers to forget the weariness of the way while leaving their eyes free to admire the landscapes through which they are passing.

I shall not undertake to enter into the technical details of the methods of operating these new interpreters of human thought, these multiplicators of human speech; but rest assured that books will be forsaken by all the dwellers upon this globe, and printing will absolutely pass out of use except for the service it may still be able to render to commerce and private relations; and even there the writing-machine, by that time fully developed, will probably suffice for all needs.

In a post on the first day of this year, I noted the surprisingly rapid decline in e-book sales growth over the course of 2012. The trend appears to be continuing this year. The Association of American Publishers reports that in the first quarter of 2013, overall e-book sales in the U.S. trade market grew by just 5 percent over where they were in the same period in 2012. The explosive growth of the last few years has basically petered out, according to the AAP numbers*:

Looking at the major segments of the trade market, e-book sales were up 13.6 percent in the adult segment, down  30.1 percent in the children’s segment, and down 0.6 percent in the religious segment. The children’s segment accounted for a big part of e-book growth last year, thanks in large measure to the Hunger Games franchise, but that boost has proved temporary.

E-books are still taking share from printed books, as overall trade sales declined by 4.7 percent in the quarter, but the anemic growth of the electronic market calls into question the strength of the so-called “digital revolution” in the book business. E-books now represent a bit less than 25 percent of total book sales. That’s an impressive share, but it’s still a long way from dominance. Other big e-book markets also show signs of maturing. A new Nielsen Research report indicates that UK e-book sales actually declined slightly in April from year-earlier levels.

I speculated in my January post about some reasons why e-books may fall short of expectations:

1. We may be discovering that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction)  but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction) and are well suited to certain reading situations (plane trips) but less well suited to others (lying on the couch at home). The e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been, rather than an outright substitute.

2. The early adopters, who tend also to be the enthusiastic adopters, have already made their move to e-books. Further converts will be harder to come by, particularly given the fact that 59 percent of American book readers say they have “no interest” in e-books, according to the Bowker report.

3. The advantages of printed books have been underrated, while the advantages of e-books have been overrated.

4. The early buyers of e-readers quickly filled them with lots of books, most of which have not been read. The motivation to buy more e-books may be dissipating as a result. Novelty fades.

5. The shift from e-readers to tablets is putting a damper on e-book sales. With dedicated readers, pretty much the only thing you can do is buy and read books. With tablets, you have a whole lot of other options. (To put it another way: On an e-reader, the e-reading app is always running. On a tablet, it isn’t.)

6. E-book prices have not fallen the way many expected. There’s not a big price difference between an e-book and a paperback. (It’s possible, suggests one industry analyst, that Amazon is seeing a plateau in e-book sales and so is less motivated to take a loss on them for strategic reasons.)

Those still seem reasonable. Most intriguing, to me, is the possible link between the decline in dedicated e-readers (as multitasking tablets take over) and the softening of e-book sales. Are tablets less conducive to book buying and reading than e-readers were?

UPDATE: A little more confirming data: A recent report on the Canadian market, from BookNet Canada, indicates that the market share of e-books peaked in the first quarter of 2012 at 17.6% and then started falling, dropping to 12.9% in the fourth quarter of 2012. BookNet sees evidence that e-books may be “plateauing” at about 15% of the Canadian market: “‘The research suggests that the ebook market in Canada may have reached a plateau,’ says BookNet Canada President and CEO Noah Genner. ‘Early 2013 data backs this up. So far, we’re seeing the same pattern repeating itself.'”

And this from a March 2013 report on the “stalling” of e-books in the UK market: “Yet even as book sales continue to move online, ebooks are making notably slow gains, and likely slowing down the etailing book market overall. Bowker found that ebooks’ share of the UK market reached a high of 13% in July 2012, driven upward by ebook purchases of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey.’ But by November the share had fallen back down to 9%.” (Even without “Fifty Shades,” the current ebook bestseller list in the UK is “filled with erotic fiction,” reports The Guardian.)

UPDATE 2: The original version of this post described the Nielsen data as being worldwide; it actually reflects only the UK market.

*Sources of AAP data in chart: 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013. The AAP doesn’t seem to release its sales reports directly to the public, so collecting the data, from secondary sources, is a bit of a trial. In general, good information on book sales is hard to come by.

I know little about Sean Parker’s  fairyland wedding and care less. If a couple, seeking an experience that is “spiritual, though not overtly religious,” decides to tie the knot in an ersatz “Lothlórien,” that’s cool with me. But I do care about trout, so one paragraph in Parker’s recent longform defense of his nuptials stuck like a fishbone in my craw:

Then there was this question of a certain fish, the “steelhead trout,” that was purportedly threatened by our wedding preparation. The media reported that this fish was an “endangered” species whose spawning ground was a creek near our wedding site. Yet a simple Google query of “steelhead trout” reveals that this fish is not, as the media had reported, a truly “endangered” species, but rather a fancy variant of the common “rainbow trout” that is abundant across North America — so abundant, in fact, that it is sometimes considered a pest species. (The steelhead, like salmon, travels upstream and spends its life in the ocean. This variant of the rainbow trout has seen its populations fall in some areas of California where it is protected, but it’s hardly the endangered species the press made it out to be. In fact, the National Wildlife Federation reports that rainbow trout is “not at risk of extinction.”)

Here we see a perfect example of the dangers of constructing one’s worldview from snippets of factual material googled out of the web. Parker’s argument proceeds something like this:

Steelhead trout are variants of rainbow trout.

Rainbow trout are in some settings considered invasive.

Steelhead aren’t worth worrying about.

The logic’s fishy, and the conclusion’s dead wrong. Most rainbow trout live their lives in freshwater streams or lakes. Steelhead are distinguished by their oceangoing nature. They hatch in fresh water and then — traveling downstream, not upstream — they head out to sea, where they can swim great distances before eventually returning back to their freshwater spawning grounds. This distinctive habit gives them different behavioral and physical characteristics from their more common freshwater brethren. (It’s what makes them “fancy,” in Parker’s terminology.) Under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, the steelhead of the central California coast is considered a “distinct population segment” and “qualifies for protection as a separate species.”

Rainbow trout are vigorous fish and, due to their value as game, they’re often bred in hatcheries and stocked in waters where they’re not native. They’ve become invasive in some areas, crowding out other, native trout species. This says absolutely nothing about the steelhead variant. Steelhead are wild fish, and they are not pests. And the fact that rainbows are generally plentiful — though, it’s important to note, the cold, clean waters that can support trout are in long-term decline — also says absolutely nothing about the steelhead variant.  The habitat of steelhead, like that of the salmon whose oceangoing behavior they share, has long been threatened.

Parker quotes the National Wildlife Federation as saying that rainbow trout are “not at risk of extinction.” He leaves out the NWF’s important caveat: “Native populations, though, are threatened by disease, habitat degradation, and fishing.” That’s particularly true of steelhead, which the NWF, together with other conservation organizations, has been working hard to protect for many years. Steelhead are a fish in peril, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s  Marine Fisheries Service recognizes:

I wish Sean Parker a long and happy marriage. I only ask that, in the future, he keep his scare quotes away from steelhead trout. Steelhead may be plentiful and invasive in Lothlórien, but in the real world they’re neither.

Earlier this month, in a piece for Dezeen, Sam Jacob offered a thoughtful and provocative take on the NSA’s Prism program of internet surveillance. In an argument reminiscent of Evgeny Morozov’s critique of solutionism, though from an architect’s perspective, Jacob portrays Prism as a manifestation of the idea that society is a logical system that can be engineered  to function in an optimally efficient manner or to otherwise fulfill a set of explicit specifications. Society is, in other words, a design project:

Prism tells us something about design in the twenty-first century. And it’s certainly not its logo [which] recalls that Mitchell and Webb sketch featuring two SS officers wondering if the skull logo on their caps might suggest that they are actually the baddies. It tells us that design is increasingly about systems, increasingly about processes and the way these interface with the real world. Prism is part, I would suggest, of the realm of design thinking. …

Design thinking is marked by the scale and scope of its operations. Rather than isolating particular problems, it attempts to survey the whole scenario. It conceives the field of operation as the system rather than the object. And in this, it transforms the designed world into an ecosystem. Design thinking treats this synthetic ecosystem as its project, attempting to redesign it according to particular goals, to achieve its desired outcomes.

Jacob sees design thinking as an outgrowth of what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, in a 1995 paper, called the Californian Ideology, a utopian philosophy born of “a bizarre mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism” and reflecting “a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.” The Californian Ideology, Barbrook and Cameron argued, is rife with contradictions. Jacob speculates that the disclosure of Prism — by a disillusioned libertarian technologist, no less — may mark the moment when the contradictions become unmistakable and unsustainable.* Prism is the “black mirror” of the Californian Ideology’s self-congratulatory pursuit of “an open-access, digital democracy”:

If design thinking is part of the triumph of The Californian Ideology, part of the way that digital culture is remaking the world, is Prism its Waterloo? Perhaps it is the moment Californian digital culture turned inside out, the point when these apparently pro-libertarian entities melded to become one with the state, a strange new version of the military-digital-industrial complex cooked up out of acid-soaked West Coast radicalism and frictionless global capitalism.

It may well be the moment digital culture turned inside out, but it’s not shaping up to be any sort of Waterloo. The emerging Snowden narrative—disgruntled “hacker” steals information from a store of government data that was itself essentially “hacked” from the servers of innocent internet firms—actually serves to mask over the contradictions inherent in the Californian Ideology. The government comes off as incompetent, particularly when it comes to the sacred art of handling data, and the internet firms, their chastity belts only slightly askew, seem like the victims of clumsy governmental overreach. The fact that the narrative may be more or less accurate certainly doesn’t detract from its credibility.

Rather than being undermined, the idea that the social ecosystem needs to be designed and programmed by benevolent corporations (with friendly logos) acting in an open marketplace without government interference may end up gaining more traction. And of course accomplishing that social programming will require more data, which means even more surveillance, of one sort or another.

_________

*A revised version of Jacob’s article, stripped of all mention of the Californian Ideology, has  been published by Wired. Of historical interest is Wired founder Louis Rossetto’s response to Barbrook and Cameron’s paper.

Photo by citymaus.

They’re social. They’re mobile. They’re the future.

via

The human sensorium perpetually replenishes its abundance. Life is much of a muchness, as the Dormouse said. If you want to drive someone crazy, literally, close the windows and draw the blinds on his senses. Starved, the brain eats itself.

To be replenished, experience must be disposable. The cup must be emptied to be refilled. Most of what we see and hear and smell and touch and taste, most of what we say and do, is quickly forgotten. Experience evaporates, leaving at most a smudged trace in memory. What matters is what happens, not what happened.

The evanescence of experience is joy. Beauty is pied and fleeting, fickle and freckled. Vitality is motion. But in that unceasing cycle of disposal and replenishment lies melancholy, too, a foretaste of our final leave-taking. There’s a part of the mind that rebels, that wants to save everything, to pile up experience’s goods as a kind of barricade against mortality. It doesn’t work. The record of experience becomes a record of loss and of decay. Every memento turns into a memento mori. Around the hoarder sadness thickens.

Our newfound ability to turn everyday experience into stored data gives another turn to the old screw. It ratchets up the tension between the natural and necessary disposability of experience and the vain but understandable desire to make experience permanent, to never let it go. The egoist and the solipsist outfit themselves with cameras and microphones and scanners, spend their days recording everything. By definition, their experiences are invaluable. Like bars of gold, each one must be kept in a vault.

Only oddballs go to such extremes. Life-logging is the trend that never happened. Most of us are happy that experience is disposable. We want the next experience, not the last one. Even for those who are always pulling out their phones to snap pictures or shoot videos, to text or tweet or tumble or otherwise share the moments of their being, the pleasure lies mainly in the recording, not in the record. The act of recording is itself a disposable experience. The tools for recording and sharing are disposable as well. They get old.

This is a problem for those who operate social networks or otherwise have a financial stake in our record-keeping. They want nothing more than to turn us all into sad hoarders, to have us care as much about the record of the experience as about the experience itself. They want us to live retrospectively, to think about our lives as a Timeline. But we frustrate them. We get bored with the record. We flock to the new experience, the new tool, and the more disposable the better: IM, blog, text, tweet, gif, pin, instagram, snap, vine. Words and sounds and images on the wind. Here and gone.

You can’t catch us, no matter how hard you try. Your schemes are joyless, and they’re doomed.

Meditation and mindfulness are all the rage in Silicon Valley. Which is a good thing, I guess. Wired‘s Noah Shactman reports on how the tech elite are, during breaks in the work day, unfolding their yoga pads and, in emulation of Steve Jobs, pursuing the Eastern path to nirvana, often with instruction from Buddhist monks. It’s an odd sort of enlightenment they’re after, though. Explains Google mindfulness coach Chade-Meng Tan, who helps the techies gain “emotional intelligence” through meditation, “Everybody knows this EI thing is good for their career. And every company knows that if their people have EI, they’re gonna make a shitload of money.”

That’s so Zen.

Photo by Edward Dalmulder.