With the invasion of e-readers, could the future of the book as a physical object made of paper and ink be as tentative and bleak as that of the tiger.
A few months ago, I suffered the trauma of having to move out of my apartment. It wasn’t so much the ignominy of shuffling back to the parental home, it was more the state of limbo — packing up all my belongings into cardboard boxes until such a time when I could resituate myself. Most of these boxes (16, to be exact) were filled with books. Some of these books have travelled with me for over a decade before finally making it back across the ocean to Madras. These books have been used to periods of interment in various storerooms, so when I set off to launch my own novel (a thing eight years in the making), I didn’t feel overly negligent relegating them to cardboard claustrophobia.
Eight years is a while to be underground working on a thing, which may or may not exist in the future. Terrifying then, to step out into a changed world where the future of the book, in its current form — as a physical object made of paper and ink — is as tentative and bleak as the future of the tiger. Everywhere I went in Europe and North America, the mood in the publishing world was distinctly deflated. Editors, translators, writers, publishers (especially publishers, poor sods) all fretting about the economic downturn and how the e-reader was going to demolish a certain way of life.
It’s been coming for a while, of course. Amazon reminds us consistently how more and more people are buying e-versions over real versions. Steve Jobs continues to make products we’re not really sure we need, but are so cool we must have. Self-publishing, that previously dirty word, hovers over the newly democratised cyber world, and titters. All of it really took some of the mojo out of that first novel rush.
I guess I just hadn’t been ready for it. I mean, the level of lament. I knew not to expect launch parties or extensive reading tours. In fact, I was happy to make do with a book blog tour and a virtual party on Facebook. But when my UK publisher, stroking the beautifully embossed face of my novel, said, “Enjoy this, it could be your first and last hardback,” I felt — I don’t know — cheated. This isn’t what I signed up for! I’m not ready for books to exit the world: not now, not ever.
In Hay-on-Wye I listened to Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer talk about her induction to reading. At the age of six she was allowed into the “adult” library in her house, an event so momentous she described it as being like “a pig in clover”. She talked about how literature could be a window to the world; the thrill of discovering Balzac, E M Forster and Dr Doolittle in her small mining town in apartheid South Africa. “Writers are greedy to be everybody and experience everything,” she said. And surely libraries allow us that bliss? To get lost in worlds we didn’t even know we wanted to get lost in.
In Italy, at the Salone del Libro in Turin, where India was the guest country, I saw the entire old Fiat factory filled with books — 51,000 sq mt, filled with books. Real books, which you could pick up and touch, smell and browse through. It was a strong affirmation of the beauty of the book, that charge of excitement that a space dedicated entirely to books can bring, all those chance encounters and discoveries and beginnings.
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In Venice I heard the most compelling argument against the e-reader by the English writer Jeanette Winterson. “We don’t read books for information,” she said. Literature is not hypertext or dross data. In the best books, the ones we revisit, the eye is free to travel backwards and forwards, in circles if it wants to.
As for me, I have little experience with Kindles, Nooks and iPads. I’m not sure exactly how wonderful it is to take my whole library with me on vacation, or how wonderful it is not to have to balance A Suitable Boy on my thighs. I understand that e-books are here to stay, and that we have to incorporate them into our lives. And I am all for saving forests. So, by all means, let dictionaries, encyclopaedias, business manuals and all manner of self-help books switch over to the Other Side. But when it comes to the books we commune with — poetry and fiction, science and philosophy — give me the physicality of paper. The weight, smell and sacredness of it.
The first thing I did when I returned to Madras was to open those 16 boxes of books. The emancipating process was arduous, and admittedly, I succumbed to nostalgia in the company of my old friends. Between their pages I found post cards from long ago, half-written poems, to-do lists on paper napkins. I could have been doing something useful, sure, but oh, what a lovely distraction it was! So much of knowing involves not knowing until you actually see it. Yes, I need Rilke, I need Ramanujan, I need all of Roth. The real magic of books for me is that they are my constant companions. When they’re with me, I know I’m home, wherever in the world that is. n
Tishani Doshi’s first novel, The Pleasure Seekers, published by Bloomsbury, releases in August in India