Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

in texture and color; the inalterability of the printed page; the sense that it was there and although it might vanish in fire or flood, it would not vanish because of a lightning strike half a mile away, excessive humidity, a magnet, or a malfunction in one of a million lines of computer code. That is, what was, although peripheral to the substance of the text, the independent nature of a book in which the writing does not simply vanish into thin air.

That was what was missing, and, therefore, the industry would stay fundamentally the same for time unspecified. I was discouraged, but he was right on the mark. The thesis would prevail because the antithesis was insufficiently compelling or developed. But, as in historical processes and other forms of the dialectic, the existence of even an insufficiently compelling antithesis is often a nagging pressure that presages the movement of mountains. It is something that can be neither forgotten nor ignored as it glows persistently in the mind. For at every weakening of the dominant trend, every setback, every pause, it will be there as a ready alternative.

With the advances of the last quarter of a century, the powers of this particular antithesis have grown. It is like an army in former times that has approached a walled city and begins its siege, filling the plain, its campfires burning like fireflies, its pots boiling, its ranks swelling. The two forces are very strong, and the pressure is great. This has produced, in compromise, a synthesis of the two currents, now present like a tiny trickle that becomes a spectacular flood. It has an interesting but in some ways unfortunate name. It is called the Espresso Book Machine.

Unfortunately the name of the book machine is reminiscent of the espresso bar, without which, evidently, the modern bookstore cannot exist, which doesn’t say much for the naked appeal of books. The name is, however, perfectly appropriate in view of the machine’s attribute of making up an individual order.

Although in its initial stages it is probably as immature as a late-nineteenth-century typewriter, it is nonetheless a synthesis of the slow, unwieldy, and inflexible book; and the complicated, vulnerable, and off-putting devices that have failed to replace the book. About half the size of a small Fiat, it takes digitized books from the internet or elsewhere and prints, binds, and covers them automatically. According to various press reports, it can turn out a three-hundred-page book with the characteristics of a trade paperback, including a four-color cover, at a cost of three dollars and in less than five minutes.

Invented by Jeff Marsh and developed, with the help of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, by a team under the leadership of former Random House chief Jason Epstein, it has printed thousands of books at test locations including the World Bank in Washington, the New York Public Library, and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt. Blackwell, in England, plans to put them in each of its sixty bookshops. Scores of thousands of books in the public domain are available in digitized form, primarily from university libraries, and hundreds of thousands of more recently published works are easily convertible from the publishers’ and printers’ electronic databases to a uniform format suitable for the machine.

Once it is shaken out, this extraordinary device will relieve the publisher of the need to deal with or pay for printing, warehousing, shipping, order processing, remaindering, and, most significantly, returns. Returns—worse than mere excess inventory, because they require shipping, receiving, and refunding before settling down as dead weight—are the great sorrow of publishing. Whether they are the vast numbers of unsold copies of a “big” book upon which a publisher has gambled unsuccessfully, or the cumulative lesser returns of books from which less is expected and of which fewer are printed, they are an immense, suffocating, incapacitating burden on the industry.

Were publishers to switch to distribution via the Espresso Book Machine or its like, they could increase their profitability almost unimaginably. They would still be indispensable for screening, editing, layout, design, advertising, and publicity—a combination of validation and presentation that has always been their chief role and will remain so despite the hopes and dreams of many in regard to self-publishing. Publishers will still come under the murderous assault of authors accusing them of insufficiently promoting their books, and, as always, the levels of advertising and publicity will function primarily as protection for the advance—the fullness of one a direct variable of the fullness of the other. Sales forces will remain, as books will still fight for display space in bookstores and college professors will still require flattery and romance as if they were doctors in the sights and pay of drug companies.

The bookstores, however, needing to display only a single copy of each work, will either be much smaller (due to shallower shelving) or have many times the number of titles for inspection than they would otherwise be able to carry. They will no longer need to invest in or handle inventory, their major expense. Some titles in high demand, or at least expected high demand, would have to be stacked as always, having come from traditional presses or via the Espresso Book Machine churning them out during closing hours. The machine would have very little inefficient downtime, for bookstores would run it, or, more likely, them, all night long.

With no need to invest in inventory, a bookstore would be able to afford improved machines that will inevitably be able to produce books indistinguishable from books as they are now—in all sizes, with hard covers, with every type of paper, full-color illustrations, and whatever else may be required. The distance between this and what the first machine can already do is short and only a matter of accretion and rearrangement rather than adaptation to elemental changes. Not so many years from now, you will be able to go into a bookstore (or order online, as is now common) and have any kind of book printed