Paperback Books_Obsolete!
by Sheila Straus
As writers we cringe to think such a thought. How in the world will we present our stories, poems, and ideas to others if paperback books become obsolete?
The answer is simple, but sometimes simple answers are hard to accept. So let’s do a brief history review and sort of sneak up on the what I hope by then will be obvious.
The first recorded communications between human beings were in the form of cave paintings created about 17,000 years ago, an amount of time it’s difficult for me to fathom. About 9800 years later humans developed cuneiform (markings in wet clay tablets) and hieroglyphics. The next development, papyrus, came a relatively quick leap later, only 700 years.
After papyrus development in communications materials slowed down again. Parchment (made from animal skins) wasn’t used in Europe until 190 BC, some two and a third centuries after papyrus. Surely, you have a mental image of a monk spending his life transcribing and illuminating a Bible, but did you know it took the skins of 300 sheep to create that one Bible? Animal rights folks would have had fits.
The Chinese started developing paper from fibrous matter 3-4000 years ago, but westerners didn’t start using it until the early 1400s as a cheaper alternative to animal skins. By then the demand for manuscripts was growing, and responding to that demand, Johannes Gutenberg put together his first printing press using moveable type, appropriate ink, and paper. The year was 1450.
You have probably glommed onto one of my points by now, that these changes came slowly at first, often over thousands of years. As time goes by, however, changes seem to accelerate. Watch how quickly events happen toward the end of this article.
Gutenberg’s press didn’t instantly revolutionize printing. For one thing, people hate change. For another, his Bibles were a major investment, comparable to buying a house today. All the same, print publishing grew at the rate of about 20 million books in the first forty years after the introduction of his press. That’s jet speed compared to earlier times.
In the years since Gutenberg we’ve developed off-set lithography, letterpress, flexography, and gravure. But all of these systems still involve a physical ink-transfer mechanism. They are refinements on Gutenberg’s concept, but not revolutionarily different. Photocopiers got started in 1950 with the commercial development of xerography, and now we even have ink jet printers. While electronic printers eliminate the need for printing plates, they are too costly and slow for mass reproductions of popular fiction.
The real revolution, the change as momentous as cuneiform and Gutenberg’s moveable type, involves limitless reproduction requiring neither paper nor ink. Books that move from one computer screen to thousands of others without the need to cut down a single tree.
Electronic publishing is the natural outcome of the Internet, but again, a little history is in order. To keep things brief, let’s start out with Samuel Morse’s telegraph, the first use of electricity to convey messages. The progression of events from Morse’s first telegraphic message, sent in 1836, to the Internet we know today boggles the mind. Because the telegraph conveyed messages so simply and effectively, telegraph wires spread like star thistle across the country and even under the ocean. The first transatlantic cables were laid in 1858-66. Bell’s telephone came along in 1876, connecting more and more people together worldwide.
Now jump forward to 1957 and Sputnik, important for two reasons. First, as a satellite, Sputnik leads us to the hundreds of communications satellites now in orbit around the earth, bouncing electrical signals where cables can’t go. But Sputnik also shook us out of our late 1950s complacency and isolation. Because of Sputnik, some of our brightest scientists began talking about linking huge, cumbersome mainframe computers together so we could make greater progress more quickly—in other words, keep up with the Russians. As a result, the first four nodes (hosts) of the ARPAnet went online in 1970. This connection between computers at UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Nevada at Salt Lake City started the Internet.
Internet growth numbers have far exceeded early predictions. Those four hosts in 1970 multiplied to 100,000 in 1989 and over 56,000,000 in 1999. Hosts are servers with an IP address, such as colleges, the military and governments as well as commercial servers like Compuserv and AOL. Each of those 56 million hosts has lots of subscribers like you and me attached to them. The numbers are huge. AC Nielson Netwatch estimates there will be 55 million internet users in the US alone by the end of the year. Remember what I said about change speeding up? The Internet revolution is happening at lightning speeds.
Already novels like mine (Keegan Murphy available at FictionWorks.com) are being published on this vast and still growing electronic web. From one computer to any number of others with no typesetting, no paper mills, no warehouses, distribution centers or eighteen-wheeled trucks. Even the landfills will get some relief when the approximately 60% of paperbacks that are printed but not sold no longer have to be dumped. People already read books on computer and laptop screens and on small, battery operated electronic readers. Their numbers are growing.
Sure, we’ll still have books, lots of them for years to come. But how will mass paperbacks, printed on crummy paper and badly bound, compete with clean crisp electronic books with adjustable prints sizes and lower prices? One last thought: I imagine there were lots of folks back in 2500 BC who insisted papyrus would never replace cuneiform tablets—such flimsy stuff anyway, that papyrus. And what about all those monks who stated flatly that press-printed Bibles would never supplant their hand-scribed, illuminated masterpieces?
Take heart, ye skeptics. It’s fun to be on the cutting edge of a revolution.