James Lent (Nova Scotia politician)

Transcription

[pause] Speaker 1: Thanks very much for coming. It's I look forward to spending the evening with you. I'm going to introduce our two guests and then we're going to embark on our discussion. So Paul Holdengraber, I think has maybe the best job in North America. I thought I had the best job in North America. He is... He curates Public Conversations of the New York Public Library. He's responsible for events, much like this, in fact we were just talking about the fact that he is a very able moderator and he's worried that he might get taken up in the business of asking questions himself which I've encouraged him to do. S1: He meets with many cultural luminaries, this is one reason his job is so great. He gets to meet with people like Werner Herzog, everyone from Werner Herzog to Harry Belafonte and everyone in between. He's described his job at the New York Public Library as being the curator of public curiosity. You can see why I might be a little envious. So his job in a sense is sort of antithetical to the traditional idea of what a library is. We think of reading as being a sort of solitary act but he gathers people together for public conversations and this is all to bring some new form of life to what the library is doing. One of the things I hope we'll talk about tonight is not only the future of the book which is our subject and also the future of the library. And he has a terrific interview program on Youtube, I encourage you all to check out. S1: Hugh McGuire here from Montreal was actually trained as a mechanical engineer. He is here tonight as a book futurist. So he concerns himself with constantly imagining what the book can be and challenging us to think about books differently. In many of his projects, he takes the spirit of open source information to the literary arena. So one of the things he does, he's the founder of LibriVox which publishes free audio books. It's a very, very cool thing. I also encourage you to check that out on the Internet. What does it say about the future of the book, that I'm just a few moments into a discussion, I've already advocated Youtube. So what LibriVox does is invite members of the public to read books that they love, and share them as audio books. I believe this came from recognizing that the audio book... What's available on audio books, I have certainly found is quite limited. And so he's opened that up to people recording books that they love and then downloading them on podcasts. It is really the coolest damn thing. S1: He also launched Press Books which is an open source book publishing tool where authors can create print books, e-books, web books all from the site's templates. He is the author of Book: A Futurist's Manifesto, and I hope he will tell us a little bit about that during the course of the evening, which is also available for you online. His most radical idea and one that I hope we'll explore tonight is that books should be online with great public access to allow for web sharing. So I've sort of highlighted some of the things I hope we can talk about things tonight, books, libraries, what the book is in the 21st century. And I thought that was as good a place as any to start with some form of definition since this is our subject, what exactly is a book. What is the traditional definition, what is the definition today? Paul, do you wanna start? Paul Holdengraber: I think... Thank you first of all very, very much for inviting me and I'm honoured and extremely pleased to be here. I think a book is what happens between the covers. S1: So it is a binding issue. [laughter] PH: No, it's what happens between the covers meaning world of the imagination. S1: That's... But that could be anything. PH: No. I think it's something that you hold on to in some form or fashion. You might hold on to it virtually, you might hold on to it tactilely. I'm particularly, as I told you earlier on I'm very interested in the notion of tactility. So for me, a book is something that... Is something that I can touch and smell and enjoy privately. S1: Wow, I think we're just going to spend the whole night on that definition. When I said a binding issue, I meant it in a... PH: I know, yeah. S1: Go ahead. PH: No, I understand. You see, it's already happening. [laughter] PH: I'm sorry. I'll try to avoid this, but you meant binding in the sense something that is binded between two covers. S1: Yeah. PH: Not on a... S1: Tablet. PH: Tablet. You see, I didn't quite know the word. S1: How is your definition different? Or is it not? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think my definition is very different, although it's not exclusively different. I think that as we move into a world where books... Where this issue of binding becomes no longer a tool that we can use to describe exactly what a book is, that the notion of creation, authorship continues to be very important. So, a book compared to let's say a Facebook stream or Youtube or blogs is a discrete collection of thoughts or ideas that are brought together by an author or group of editors who believe that this set of knowledge or set of emotions ought to be presented to the world. So I think that that to me is the starting point from the book, is that sense of discrete authorship around ideas or emotions. And that once we have that, then the book opens up and what happens between the covers, metaphorically, is the most interesting part is what happens next. PH: You've already both completely contradicted my assumptions about you because you spoke about public openness and collaboration and you spoke about authorship, and I had completely the false assumptions. PH: So what do we do now? S1: Are you over... [laughter] S1: Well, I suspect you're over compensating to avoid being pigeon holed. PH: You know, I've always loved a line of Robert Frost. He said that, "A liberal is someone who can never take his own side in an argument." [laughter] PH: And to some extent about this issue of the future of the book when I accepted this so gracious invitation, whenever I hear the word "future of" I get worried, badly because I think it's extremely hard to predict what the future of the book will be. Since I'm a man filled with quotations, another line that comes to mind when I think about the word "future" is a line of Paul Valery who said that, "The future isn't what it used to be." [laughter] PH: So I'm just... I'm wondering what this object will become and indeed if it will be an object and I would say that, for me at least, it's not an either/or a situation we live under the sign of en passant. And in some way there'll be books that are virtual and they'll still be books that are objects that have lasted and continue to last in the most glorious, beautiful way. When you go to the New York Public Library and I'm sure the same is true here, and before I interview people, I take them on a Special Collection's tour. And it's fantastic. Partly, many of the guests I invited who are very famous, are extremely nervous before speaking to people. They sometimes perform in front of 20,000 people like Jay Z or Patti Smith or Pete Townshend or Harry Belafonte. But to talk in front of people makes them very nervous. PH: I want to locate the conversation in a specific place. And I take them to see extraordinary manuscripts we have of Dickens or Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass or the pen that Charles Dickens used to write his work or the extraordinary illustrations of William Blake. And what is so amazing about these objects, or the letter that Christopher Columbus wrote upon discovering a country he'd had no name for quite yet, what is so amazing is that these very fragile objects are... For instance the images of William Blake are so vivid. They haven't aged. And I think that they are something extraordinary to think about in terms of the book being an object that isn't as transitory as you might think and therefore will endure. S3: So I think to answer the question that you alluded to earlier, I perhaps sounded conservative in what I think of a book to be. Where I'm radical is thinking about what it is that people want to be doing with books. And you mentioned LibriVox, which is a project I started way back now in ancient history of 2005, which does seem like a lifetime ago, in the world of e-books at least. LibriVox gets volunteers like all of you to sit in front of a microphone in their homes and record audio versions of classic texts. We have one infamous version of Ulysses on LibriVox, which had specific rules which were... That you didn't have to stick exactly to the text and you were encouraged to record in a pub with strangers for extra points. [laughter] S3: And it is, if you were expecting an audio book version of Ulysses, a completely unlistenable mangle of all sorts of things. But for me, the interesting thing about LibriVox was always, not that the world gets access to a free library of audio books but that the people who're making the recordings of the text could engage with those books in a way that was important to them and there was this wonderful byproduct of this activity that the world could access that audio book if they wanted to. So when I think about books and the problems that we're having right now thinking about books in the future, and digital being a big part of that, is that we're spending a lot of time figuring out how to let people do less things with books than some of those people like me think we ought to be able to do. S1: So, I want to get back to something, what Paul talked about the future and your book about a future's manifesto. And it seems to me like we are at this very moment living in the future and everyone must share this feeling of having access to things that even 10 years ago seemed... When I go on G-Chat and talk to my mother-in-law in Nova Scotia, I'm absolutely playing out a scenario that I could only have dreamt of as an 11-year-old. So, are we in... I think... My question is, is this where we are... Are we where we're going? Is this a transitional moment? And where are we now where books... Where the digital space... I mean, where the digital world has affected books, are we at our end point or we at the beginning of something? Or what stage in the future are we? PH: You start. S3: I guess we're always, by definition, at the very beginning. I think, so, again, my area that I'm most interested in professionally is what happens as books start to become digital. So we've gone a tiny step, you could call it paper under glass. We now... Lots of people read e-books. But all that's done, is done a little bit of format shifting from pages of paper to pages... Digital pages in e-books. I think there is a whole world of things that are going to happen which are difficult to predict certainly, but I think there is... We're at the very earliest stage where all we've done is converted the atoms to bits, but we haven't let those bits start flying around yet properly as e-books. S1: And why do we want them to fly around? And what is flying around in an ideal sense mean? S3: I think that's what... That the human condition is the desire to share information and to do things with information and emotions. And that, books are these idealized nodes of knowledge, or nodes of understanding, or nodes of emotion that we've decided to lock up a little bit in their digital format. S1: And by lock up, what you mean is in an e-book format, rather than linked on the web where things would be freer? S3: It's not necessarily freer in terms of dollars necessarily, but freer in terms of how books can cross-pollinate with each other and how people can use the bits and pieces that are in books to do other things. S1: So, Paul, do you agree that the human condition is to share? [pause] [laughter] PH: You can't tickle yourself. [laughter] PH: I mean you can try, I mean of course you can. But it doesn't really work well. We need others. We need to be in the company of others. A gathering such as this one, where all of you have come out tonight to hear this, whatever the 'this' may be, is a testimony to the fact that we need to be together and we need to share, and we... And one of the worrisome aspect I think, of where we're going to some extent to my mind, maybe not to yours, I don't know, is that we spend an enormous amount of time alone in front of screens, when, in fact, a conversation with someone might be a much better way of exchanging ideas. What comes to my mind though, when you were speaking about these bits floating around and pollinating and Ulysses read in pubs, my big worry is, what about Ulysses? What about knowing really, deeply the tradition from which James Joyce wrote that extraordinary book? And understanding it in very a long context, rather than just riffing off it. S3: So this... Ireland just issued a coin with James Joyce on the front and a quotation from Ulysses on the back and they made a typo. They inserted a "that" that wasn't there. And this caused great consternation among some people. And I'm sitting beside a master of quotation, and I'm going to get this not quite right, but I'll try. [laughter] S3: And a commentary by the, I believe the head of the James Joyce Museum, was that James Joyce had said, and let me see if I can get this, that "A genius never makes a mistake, it was done by intention." Something along those lines. So, the idea that Ulysses in particular is a text, is a single text, I think, that exists only as it is in some sort of conditions. Let's say, an English literature class or an Irish literature class at University of Toronto, I think, is a false notion of what that... PH: Agreed. S3: Piece of work is. And that the fact that it becomes riffed on in certain circumstances does not mean that it cannot be read in-depth in other circumstances. And I think that... I think that notion that literature can only be this or that, I think is a false choice. PH: You mind my pursuing this just a little bit? S1: Go ahead. [laughter] PH: I'm really interested by this notion of reading in-depth, and what the conditions, preconditions of reading in-depth necessitate. To inspire myself a little bit before coming here tonight. I reread a magnificent essay I encourage everybody to read. The Toronto Library may have it, by George Steiner, called the Uncommon Reader, where he analyses one painting of Chardin of a man or woman, we're not quite sure, reading. And in great garb with a hat and an hourglass and sheer and utter concentration on whatever folio he might be reading or she may be reading, it's not sure. And it made me think about not only the future of the book but also the future of reading and what it means to be attentive. Why, as Simone Weil once said, "Attention is connected to the notion of prayer", being really focused, immersed, forgetting yourself in. And do the tools that we have now permit us quite that form of immersion? S3: So the tools include paper and printed books. So I think that for different technologies, there are different uses. I can tell you that the first book, e-book, that I read was on my... In fact, it was an iPod Touch, so before iPhone, was War and Peace. PH: Yeah, I read that. I think... S3: And... PH: My goodness, I want you to tell us about that. [laughter] S3: And the experience of it was not... PH: A lot of this. [laughter] S3: It was a lot of this. PH: An enormous amount of this. S3: And it in fact, it's exactly my attention span is the size of an iPhone screen, so right when I'm about to lose attention, I just switch to the next page, and I continue on. But that was the moment where I thought I was already involved in e-books but I had never actually read one. And this would have been, I guess this would have been September of 2009, I think. And what happened was I just started reading it and I couldn't stop. And I'd read it over the course of the couple of weeks and at the time, I was travelling by bus to work and I regularly would miss my stop on the bus because I was so immersed in the text itself, on my iPhone. S3: And to me that was the moment where I thought that the distinction that is made, it may be that some people prefer to read paper and some people prefer to read on other devices. But the fact that I was so immersed in this text, the words themselves, as I was riding on the bus that I missed... Again it was multi... It must have happened six or seven times I missed bus stops over the course of the couple of weeks. And that just made me realize that the things that mattered most about this book was not the mechanism by which it was being transmitted to me, but the words themselves and my engagement with the words and that there was no loss of engagement that I had by reading in this way. So I think that in general, paper is better for deep immersive reading, but that doesn't mean that digital cannot be used for the same purposes. S1: Well let me ask you. The e-reader, which is the primary way people take in books now in the digital space, to my mind it's quite flawed. It has many good things going for it, but it's a highly imperfect business. Maybe you could, Hugh, you talk a little bit about what you dislike about them, and what limits you think they have and why you think this is sort of a temporary moment in the future? S3: So, I think that a lot of the things we don't like about e-readers are things that we miss from the technology of the book. There's a lot... You were talking earlier about, tactility, and there's a lot about, a lot of knowledge or information gets transmitted to you when you know, "I have this much left, and I have read this book this much". You can flip back and when you get slightly distracted to look at the bio of the author, or these other kinds of conventions that are part of the experience of reading that are very important, that we lose to a certain degree in e-books. So I think that, if you think... I think of 2007 when Kindle came out and the iPhone at the same time, as the start of the new e-readers. They were around for a decade before that, but... PH: Can I ask you quickly... S3: I think there's a lot of design that hasn't yet gone in. PH: Why was the word... Why did they choose the word Kindle? Do you know? S3: I don't know the answer. PH: I've just wondered, because I mean, the notion of burning books seems... [laughter] PH: Fascinating. I just was wondering if there was... You would know. S3: I think it's sparks of ideas. That's what I think. Yeah. So, kindling ideas. So, I think there's an awful lot of design that will continue to go into e-reading to improve it. So that we find different ways to convey these small bits of information that are important to us when we're reading long texts. Because it's a very different... You know, it's a very different thing to read War and Peace as a physical experience than it is to read an article from the Global Mail, for instance. S1: My biggest gripe with the e-reader is they break sometimes, which is a flaw of all technology, except the book's pretty reliable. They sometimes break too. So, here at the Toronto Public Library, a million e-books are lent out a year. And the Toronto Public Library, like all libraries in the world, are evolving very quickly because the primary function of a library, which is to lend out physical books, is shrinking to some extent. But many other functions of a library are growing. Maybe one of the things that the book... The evolution of the book now is... Asking us is, what is a library? Do you have thoughts on that, Paul? PH: Yeah, my goodness, I do. I work in a very, very large library. A very large library system. We have 85 or 86 branches. For research libraries, 52 million items in the mothership where I work on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue between the two lions that have names, you should know them, Patience and Fortitude. Fortitude is closer to 42nd Street. [laughter] PH: So it's something to impress tourists with. Library... I mean, what is a library for? Is a very big and important question. Who comes to libraries? Who uses our reading room? You know, I... When I speak to people about the fact that I work in a library, everybody is very moved. I usually ask them, when was the last time they came to do research at the New York Public Library? And mostly not. Very often not. They just... The library, there's a sentimental attachment, nearly a nostalgic attachment, which maybe some of the nostalgic attachment that I myself have when I talk about the book as a waning, the physical book as a waning object, or seemingly waning object. I think it will endure and it will prevail in one form or another. But the library itself is changing greatly. PH: The New York Public Library, I can't speak in its name, but I can say, and you probably have all read, it is changing physically, too. We have a new architect that is going to reconfigure, let's say, the way the reading spaces will exist. Many of the books that are now at the library will be elsewhere, and you'll have to call them up and wait for them to arrive, maybe a day or two, people are quite uncertain about this. There will be more places for people to convene, which I think is a very good thing. I think places for people to convene is an excellent thing indeed. This is one such place. It's wonderful to have a place where people can safely congregate. And then, the business of reading in the library has changed so much. When you go into the great reading room of the New York Public Library, I would say that, at least two-thirds of the people are there to have a place to be, not necessarily a place to check out the books that they would find at the library. PH: My function of the library is a very particular one. I was brought in to create a department. The former President of the library hired me and wanted me to "oxygenate the library", these were his words, right, I liked them. I said that my goal at the library was to make the lions roar. It's another way of speaking about it. So what I do is I bring people together in a room much like this one, five, six, seven hundred people together, and often speak with writers. And the goal, the real mission of it, is to encourage people, to excite people, to inflame people, to kindle their imagination in one form or another, that upon hearing Gunter Grass and Norman Mailer together, or hearing next week William Gibson, or whoever it may be, they will desire, either metaphorically or really, to go up into the reading room and read all the works by that writer. That is my goal. My goal is to make books irresistible. S1: So you're not advocating getting rid of the books and just having discussions? PH: Discuss... What was your question? [laughter] PH: Ah, say it again. S1: You're not advocating to get rid of the books and just have discussions. PH: No, God forbid, no. I think it's a moment of the dialectic. One of the moments is if when you read a book, you have an uncontrolled desire to talk about it with friends. And whether the friends are real or they are on Goodreads, it comes to the same, in a sense you want to share. You want to make a recommendation. That's where I think the collaboration also exists. You want to tell people. I... If we speak more after this, I will recommend to you 50 books and you will probably do the same. I'm often asked how I make decisions at the library and I always tell people they assume too much. A lot of it comes simply because I talk to people and I'm porous to their ideas. What I'm very interested is the solitary act of reading. A great English psychoanalyst named Winnicott once said that... Wrote an essay called, "The Contribution of Mothers to Society." Great title, "Contributions of Mothers to Society." And he said that the goal is for the child to be alone in the presence of the mother. And I've always thought that that was the single best definition of reading. He didn't intend it that way. To be alone with a book and yet in some way with the comfort and possibility of being nurtured by the presence of the mother. Long digression. [laughter] S1: Go ahead, Hugh. S3: Well, I was gonna ask what do you think is going to happen with libraries and what should happen with libraries? PH: I hope they remain. I hope they... There's a difference also between the large libraries and the research libraries. Such as the one I worked in which has specific function which is different from our branches. Many of our branch libraries, places which offer incredible services. They help people find jobs. They shelter people who need a place to go. They teach people how to learn a foreign language. They bring together teens in discussion groups. The library where I work is still, foremost, a research library. And it competes obviously with other research libraries, university libraries. But it is also in some way, I have often described it as the Ellis Island of New York. It is also a point of entry, a great point of entry for New York. And I imagine that this library has somewhat of that function as well. S1: And what is it that a library in that sense is doing that the web alone couldn't do? Maybe, I don't know, Hugh, have you any thoughts on that? S3: I think there's something very important about a place. The place that a library is and that it's a place where people are congregating and for a particular kind of purpose which is the exchange or acquiring of information in an ideal sense. Even though, there are all these other kinds of things that libraries are doing now rather than just lending out books, that that public space where people can come and what they're doing is, as they're passing in the halls even if they are not talking to each other, but everyone is there to get or give information in some kind of way. There's something fundamentally important about that in the world, I think. PH: And librarians. Now what is a library is one thing, but what are librarians for? And in some way they are there to make sense of the mess the web has created. S3: Yeah, I mean, we live in this time where the flood of information is so completely overwhelming that in a sense you think of these traditional roles that, some might say are going out the door, but the role of the editor, the role of the librarian, these perhaps become ever more important as this flood just... And access is everywhere. I mean, on my phone right now, I have probably 250 e-books sitting there ready to be read and, the decisions we make about what we read and how we access information and sorting through all this has become ever more important, absolutely. PH: You know, I'm interested also, what you said about space. The library is a space. And I don't only think about libraries in those ways, I think about places such as bookstores, which are obviously deeply connected to libraries and how much we... And do we value them when we go into a bookstore and look at the shelves of the bookstore and scan the bar codes, and order all of those books cheaper online. What kind of a society... I mean the moral implications of this. If a good city, if a valuable city is a city that has a neighbourhood bookstore, what are we doing when we repeatedly make those gestures? S1: Or is a good city a city that has free wireless? PH: Again, not either/or. S1: Right. S3: But, certainly, in my life, I have a used bookstore that opened around the corner from where I live. And I used to go into a used bookstore probably once a week. I didn't always buy a book but just went in and I'd... Personally, I do it less and less, absolutely. And I certainly find that while I agree with you that sitting down and talking to someone is more important and more valuable, when I think about the discussions I have about books and ideas and things like that, a lot of that is migrated elsewhere in my life nd I'm having that fulfilled... That need fulfilled from those virtual bits of people that float around elsewhere. S1: And yet, Hugh, one of your more radical ideas is that we aren't doing enough web exchanging when it comes to books. S3: Yeah. I think that the big shift that I expect to see is books... The content of books becoming the fabric of this tool we have to share information that we set books off apart and elsewhere outside of this network that was built explicitly to share information. And it's a very odd sort of thing to... I mean, I understand why it's happened and there are very good reasons that have to do with... S1: Why do you think it's happened? S3: Well, it's... We have a known business model to pay for all the people to write and produce these books. And if you say, "Well, everything is going to be on the Internet now," we just don't know what that looks like and we don't know how you pay people to do this kind of stuff. S1: Didn't work out so well for the music industry. S3: Depends what you mean. If you mean it didn't work out so well for the companies that ran the music industry or the people get paid to do music, I agree. If the question is do we have less music now or more, we have far more than ever? Do we have more people listening to and making music? Yes, a wider range of it. So, it didn't work out very well for the music industry. Did it work out well for music and listeners and creators of music? That's a question that's open. But I don't think it's clear that things are worse now. They're just very different. S1: And do you think the publishing of books, and the acquisition of books, the reading of books is at 10 years behind where the music industry is now? S3: Yes. Yeah. So, I think that a lot of that chaos that we saw in the music business, very interesting to see what happened in the book business, that this transition to e-books has been very orderly and very... As much as futurists like me might complain from time to time, it's been a very orderly and well managed shift with... There has been disruption, but it hasn't been anything on the scale of what we saw in the music business, and I guess, I would say dot dot dot yet. I think we will see that kind of disruption coming. S1: Well, does that make you nervous? 0:40:06 PH: I'm wondering what will happen to dating, and what will happen when you want to say to somebody, "Come over and look at my... " [laughter] PH: What will people come over and look at? So, do you have... Well, in your case, let's take the fictional case of you propositioning someone and you would say, "I have 250 books on my device and I am... " I'm giving you lines here. "And I'm slightly confused as to what to choose. Can you help me?" [laughter] S3: And then we could just sit and... S1: But Paul... [laughter] S3: This one, this one... PH: And then you can go and stroke the screen together. I mean in the subway, all you see is people going like that, sort of tapping on each other. But I'm just... S1: Surely, this is all happening on a dating website anyway. So what... S3: So what's the difference? S1: What's the difference? PH: I just... I also wonder. I mean, maybe you have an answer to this but I also wonder what our homes will look like. S3: Yeah. PH: And I have to... S3: So, just, after I finished reading War and Peace, I bought the paper copy 'cause I said, "I'd be damned that I've read this goddamn thing and I won't display it as a trophy on my shelves." [laughter] [applause] PH: Yeah. Exactly, exactly. S3: So I have a big... And every time I look at it, I think, "Thank God I read that as an e-book 'cause I don't think I could have handle the strain on my wrist to read the paper version." PH: But you know, this is interesting. Somebody I interviewed in November, and I highly recommend you read him if you haven't, is Andrew Solomon. He wrote a book called Far From The Tree. You know, we say that children don't fall far from the tree. In his case, he wrote a book in 12 chapters which amount to 900 pages, on children, extraordinary children -- children who are schizophrenic, children who are autistic, parents who have children who are dwarfs, children who are... Parents who have children who are criminals, as in the Columbine case; geniuses, prodigies. The book is 900 pages long. I highly, highly recommend it, but not necessarily in the way in which I read it, mainly in book form. And not necessarily with the kind of intensity I had to read it for because I was interviewing him a week later. So 900 pages was tough but, thankfully, I suffer from insomnia and keep the night company, so it wasn't difficult. But I spoke to the publisher of the book and the editor and they told me that the book sold three times more in e-book form. For that very reason, I think it's a book you cannot go to bed with. It's just too heavy. [laughter] S1: One of the interesting things that's happened to books in the digital age is many people are recog... Publishers, and authors, and creators, and illustrators are recognizing that print should be exploited for all its great attributes. And so, I think, among the anxiety of the publishing industry around books, perhaps there's no anxiety among readers and consumers of literature, but there is this kind of cool thing happening which is people are taking advantage of print in a new and interesting way. S3: There's a great designer named Frank Chimero who wrote a book you should read, called The Shape of Design. And he has a great phrase, that I think of all the time, and he says, "I look forward to the time when things have to earn the right to be objects." And he was talking particularly about books in this case. And I think, if you look at the book business now, in 1990 there was something like 25,000 books published in the United States by traditional publishing means. Last year there was 275,000 books published by traditional publishers and then another 750,000 or more published by self-publishers and all the other outside of the mainstream book publishers. So, this idea that all these books that are getting published like crazy are all great sacred objects that need to be revered, I think, is not the case at all. And so, I wonder whether we get to a point where we have digital digital everywhere and then those moments of those books that you read, the 5, or 10, or 20, or 50 books that you read in your life that you read and make such a difference to you that those are the books that earn the right to be an object in your life. So that maybe one direction. S1: Maybe that's what you show your date when you're courting. S3: That's right. Here are my five books. [chuckle] PH: I have a quote here to read to you... Let me see if I can find it. It will be hard with the microphone. Excuse me one second. A while back, I had the pleasure of speaking with Malcolm Gladwell who said the following, I thought it was relevant for tonight. He said, "Suppose we reversed things and all we had were computers and iPods and we didn't have paper and I came along and said, 'I've got this really great idea, which is we're going to print this stuff on the thing called paper. And you've never heard about it, but it has some real advantages. It's incredibly cheap, it's really light, you can stick it in your bag, you can take it with you, it doesn't need any electricity, it's pretty permanent, you can manipulate it, it's tactile, you can fold it. You can do all these amazing things.' What would people say? They would say, 'Oh my goodness. What an extraordinary breakthrough!'" [laughter] PH: "And there would be this whole industry that would develop overnight. Masses of funding from venture capitalists on the West Coast. Actually there would be venture capitalists from the East Coast, who would suddenly be enthused with this extraordinary thing called paper. And we realize, 'You know what? Oh my goodness, we can send it through the mail really quickly and cheaply.' [laughter] PH: "'It doesn't cost much, like 17в.' When I hear about these increasingly complex ways of a tablet that will weigh 7.8 pounds, that you can plug into a wall in the bathroom so I can read it on the john, why? I can get a newspaper." I wonder what you think about that? [laughter] [applause] S3: So, I think we can have both. And maybe an illustrated point of that is that we have these other things now. And so again, when I think of how I see books going, I don't see it as either/or although it's an open question. I don't want it to be either/or. I just think that there are advantages to one that you don't get with the other. And paper is extraordinary and books are extraordinary for the particular kinds of benefits that they provide to readers. But there are other benefits to having 250 books in your pocket at every moment. S1: So on that very harmonious and optimistic note about what the future might look like, I think I'm going to end this part of the evening. We would love to... There are now two moderators up here. I'm moderating this evening. Paul moderates a lot of the time. And so we'd invite there to be other moderators, other people that ask questions. If you have any, there are some microphones and we invite you to come up and ask your question about the future of the book. S?: I have three observations. I'm a retired librarian and I do prefer paper although I read e-books on computer, not having an e-book reader. There are three issues that are of seminal importance to me in terms of what's happening with the industry and with the Internet with regard to books. One is the destruction of professional authors just as with writers of music, because of the model of everything being for free and sharing. The other is the issue of who owns the book. Because when you buy an e-book, you really or at least from Amazon you really only lease it, you do not own it. When you buy a book at Indigo, a paper book, you own it. You take it away, you can rip it up, you can loan it, you can sell it, and e-book you only have transitory possession of. Certainly that's from Amazon. I won't speak to other owners of online bookshops. S?: And finally there's a whole issue of e-books in libraries because in many cases libraries cannot buy e-books. They are embargoed by the publishers. And I know this because I've been involved with a fight on that particular issue for the last three years. I'm on the American Library Association Council and it's been an ongoing fight of freedom of access for libraries. And the publishing industry is fighting with the whole model of e-books and libraries currently are the losers. Reactions please. S1: Okay. So, there are some incredibly complicated and interesting ideas there. Why don't we address one of them about the author because we touched on that a little bit earlier. The unleashing of the book is exciting for the consumer in certain ways but ominous for the writer. Paul, what do you think? PH: I think it's a very big problem. I mean, I know that authors... I mean some authors are extremely pleased because they get read much more. But they don't get the kind of authorship that they benefited before or the kind of revenue from the books as they did before. So I mean, I don't know, I don't have a very formulated answer to this. Maybe you do more. I mean, the notion of the author has changed. S3: Yeah. So I think the fundamental problem with professional authorship is not one of digital or publishers or readers. It's simply supply and demand and that the ability to create books is now available to anyone in the universe and the supply of books is growing which I think in general is a very good thing. But that changes the economics of the business and we don't know what it's gonna look like just as we don't know what the newspaper business is going to look like or the music business. But there are more writers than ever writing books and in the end I think that's a good thing. S1: How about another question? S?: Yes. Unlike the previous speaker, I'm not a retired librarian. [chuckle] S?: But I am a, shall I say, forever activist. So I'm sort of still scratching my head and negotiating with the publisher which has... There are always some problems about format and all that. But have you dealt with these kinds of situations and how would you, how shall I say... S3: I think that. S?: Address these... S3: That all books should be in every format. That's my... S?: I beg your pardon. S3: I think that all books should be in every format. So print, e-book, send them out to the world. S1: And Hugh, would you also say that you should, in a situation like this cut out the publisher? I mean you provide a format for... I mean, do you need even to have a publisher involved in this? S3: I think publishers that are good publishers are good at doing what they've always been good at doing, which is connecting readers with writing, and that's the role of publishers. So if they are good at doing that and better than you doing it, then it's probably a good deal. If you think you can do it as well then that's what you should do. The problem again in the business model of publishing right now is that publishers are having increasingly less time to spend with authors that are not doing extraordinarily well. So the marketing backing that you get from a traditional publisher is, I don't know if it was ever great, but certainly now most mid-list or lower end authors who don't sell as much as Twilight have an awful lot of trouble getting support from their publishers to market their books, so that's... PH: Hugh, you wrote a famous tweet... [laughter] PH: And the tweet was, "The distinction between the "Internet", and "books" is totally arbitrary and will disappear in five years." You wrote that in 2011, you still have a little bit of time. And then you said... S3: I keep shifting my time frame. PH: And then you said... 2011? S3: That sounds about right. PH: Yeah, so, the distinction between the Internet and books is totally arbitrary and will disappear in five years. Start adjusting now. And so when you were... When you mentioned book publishers were good at book publishing will continue, but they will continue only if they start adjusting now. S3: Yeah. PH: Right? S3: Yes. S1: And how should they adjust? PH: Yeah, that's... S3: If I had the exact answer to that, I'd be a much richer man than I am. I think that... So that the... That moment came as I was, I had a book in my hand, and my laptop was open, and I just had this moment where I thought, "It's very strange that I can't do a bunch of things that I expect to be able to do with information I find on the Internet with this information in the book, and why is this not in here also?" S1: And is Google Books fixing that? S3: I don't quite think so, but that's in the direction. S1: Another question? S?: Thank you. So, Hugh, you mentioned that you had 250 books on your phone, and that is impressive, but it does raise the question, are you going to read all of them? Are you going to read any of them? I mean, Nicholas Carr rather famously pointed out that one of the side effects of the web, which is essentially the free flowing sort of bookish thing that you were talking about, where all the information is being passed around and transitory, is that nobody can focus on anything for any length of time. You can't even read a long article anymore, let alone a long book. So, I guess my question is, if we are moving in the direction of e-books, if the line is being blurred between books and the web and whatever, are we actually going to be reading any long form anymore? Are we going to be reading books? Or will we be so distracted by all the other things on the multifunction devices that we're reading on, by Twitter, by Facebook, by LinkedIn, by Pinterest, Tumblr, by email and text messaging and everything else, that we won't actually get to read any of our books, and you won't actually get to read any of your books. S3: So. So I... S1: Very well put. [applause] S3: I've read some of them, not all of them. [laughter] S3: It's a stat I'm interested in for print books as well, is what is the percentage of purchased print books which actually get read by their purchasers, which I guess is probably not 100% and probably higher than 0%. I would make an observation that if you look at the biggest selling books of the last decade or so, there's... These aren't necessarily great works of literary highfalutin-ness, but anyway, it's Twilight, it's Harry Potter, it's The Hunger Games, it's... There's one other that I'm forgetting there. 50 Shades of Grey. Now, you can say what you want about the writing. You either like it or you don't, but one thing that is the case of all these books is they're bloody long, so there seems... And, at least in the case of Twilight and Harry Potter, and Hunger Games, those books are targeted towards young people, so it seems to me that the evidence suggests that people still want long form narrative and are still reading it. PH: Yeah, yeah. [laughter] 0:58:55 PH: But you know, it's... Using a word like hifalutin, and... I mean, quality matters. 0:59:02 S3: Sure. 0:59:06 PH: And the length of the journey taken is not what matters, but where the journey is taking you, and what you are seeing, and what you are discovering. The fact that people can read long books, you know, congratulations. [laughter] PH: Fabulous. But I think this gentleman was asking a question which demands that we think more deeply about issues pertaining to concentration and the importance and value of difficulty. S?: Focus. PH: Knowing things by heart. Knowing how to recall things. Knowing the difference between information and knowledge. Understanding that books don't really need that much enhancement. They are already doing pretty well on their own when they're good books, if you read them carefully and re-read them carefully. And spend a long, long, long time analyzing and thinking about them and discussing them with people who have done the same as you. So, I mean this, these issues are really important. You know, the how do we remain focused in an era of distraction? I myself, I have this new object of torture, you all have it, the iPhone. I used to have a Blackberry. My children no longer think that a blackberry is a fruit but now I have this thing. [laughter] PH: And I'm writing messages and it's constantly correcting me. And it's constantly correct... Because I write in many different languages, it's correcting me according to God knows what formula... What word it thinks I am using. And I think all of this has created a culture where we are writing e-mails, reading a little bit, listening to music at the same time. And the notion of isolating ourselves to do one thing. You know know that wonderful line of Kierkegaard where he says that, "purity of heart is to will one thing." I haven't arrived at that at all. Far from it. But there have been those moments, and I think in a way that moment happened to you, Hugh, when you were reading War and Peace on your little device, where you missed your station, but it happens... PH: I think what you were saying is it happens rarely. And I think it happens in part rarely, because the impulse to... The impulse and also the fact that we like things that are easier and... You know, when my father who now is 95 years old told me many, many decades ago, "Look it up." He always would say to me, "Look it up." It meant something which was quite profound. It meant quite often as I've discovered that he didn't know. [laughter] PH: Which I didn't know at that time. But it also meant look it up because by looking it up you don't get lost in all kinds of other things and you're going to stay with it. You're not... You're going to look it up, at that point it was only in an encyclopedia and you're going to look up Mussolini, and you're going to discover what led to Mussolini's reign and power and fascism in Italy, and it might lead you to something else. Now, you might say that the web does the same thing, I'm wondering. And... S3: No, so I think that there's a very legitimate worry there. I think Nicholas Carr, if exaggerate is the right word... PH: The Shallow, The Shallows. S3: Yeah. I think that part of the answer is that we'll get better if indeed depth is important for human existence, which I think it probably is. We'll get better at designing... If you think of the book, it started out as clay tablets and then long scrolls, and what we know of as the book, there's a good number of thousands of years of thinking in design and certainly hundreds of years of honing and fine tuning a design that went into the creation of the book as we know it. And that design knowledge is, and design result, is an object whose job really is to encourage depth. And so I don't think... I think it's true that our digital devices are not built for that but we're starting to see interesting things. For instance, in web design and writing on the web, we're starting to find that it turns out that the longest most in-depth articles are actually the ones that people read the most and share the most, so... PH: There's hope. S3: Yes, so there is hope. So, I think that part of these problems are a problem of immaturity of design in how we do digital in general and not just with books... But I think you're right, and you're right to call me out on it, that it's not something that can be dismissed as a problem and it's something that I think that I would like to see more technologists thinking about how to solve. And indeed, when I think about what I'm doing professionally in Press Books, part of it is trying to think about how the object of the book can live on the web in a way that is not quite as deep as paper but gets rid of all the junk that you see on websites and you have a piece of text that you can read without distraction. So, I think that part of the answer is design and part might be we just have to get more disciplined about not answering those e-mails. S1: Go ahead. S?: A quick aside, by the way, I miss the clanking of the drawers, the catalogue drawers at the 42nd Street Library, so things change. PH: What did you say? S?: I miss the clanking of the drawers, the catalogue drawers in the 42nd Street Library, so things do change. PH: Yeah. And, you know, those drawers are gone now. S?: I know, that's what I'm saying, I miss it. PH: They're gone. You can see some of them in our basement if you ever come on tour. S?: I have to come and do that. PH: I don't know if you've read Nicholson Baker's extraordinary piece on card catalogues called Discarding, it's worthwhile. S3: And after you're done with that you should read his piece on Wikipedia which is... PH: The Charms of Wikipedia... [laughter] S?: That was just an aside. I was going to ask something else, but the point I wanna make now is that the Internet, computers enables one to do far more research in-depth than you could do in any library because there's so much more information that is accessible to you. I find I will get on a computer sometimes at 10 o'clock at night and then it's 2 o'clock in the morning and I've been reading what I meant to read plus a whole lot of other stuff, and the amount of material you can learn on the Internet... I mean there's also a lot of garbage I realize that but you can learn a heck of a lot on the Internet that you'd never see in a library. I mean the amount of time and energy to go to a library, find the book, look it up, go to another book, when you could do all that much, much quicker on the Internet, that's an argument that... PH: I would say very quickly though that the energy and difficulty of looking for the book and all the things you seem to think are perhaps a waste of time are not. In other words, the need to browse through shelves to find books, all of that is part of a learning process that is also perhaps diminished by not having to do it. You wouldn't agree? S?: I disagree. PH: Okay. [applause] S?: Because you do browsing on the Internet. PH: But another thing I would say very quickly which we haven't addressed is, yes, you learn a lot, yes, can get lost, yes, I also suffer from the same malady and I'm up until 4:00 in the morning often online looking up things. But there's another side of it, which is that I have discovered and maybe it's just a function of the fact that I'm no longer a spring chicken, but I don't think it's only that. I have discovered that when I don't know something, I don't make the effort of trying to remember. I'll go online and get the answer immediately. And that I think is worrisome for the quality of our brains. The possibility of... I can't remember name, it's on the tip of my tongue. On the tip of my tongue ten years ago, somehow from my tongue it went up to my brain. Now, I don't let it stay on the tip of my tongue, it goes immediately in my fingers. I go on Google and I get the answer. I think what that does is it makes... It's sort of an atrophy of memory is occurring because of that. S3: Which was the great risk that Socrates thought about the move from oral culture to literary. PH: He was wrong. [laughter] He was wrong. He was wrong, man, he was wrong. I stand corrected. No, no, he was wrong. S1: So, I think we'll take two more questions and then wrap things up. Go ahead, please. S?: Yes. Thank you. I am enjoying the discussion, it's provocative. Each in your own way... [applause] S?: But I think maybe there are some exaggerated fears here. If we think back, literature and the printing of books, it's tripled, as Hugh said, gave some statistics about 20 minutes ago. I don't think literature is going to go away. Stories are not going to go away. Philosophy, mathematics, history, whatever is not going to go away. What is really argued here is the format in which these things... So what we're really arguing about is the printed book, the future of the printed book not of ideas, not of knowledge. You made the proper distinction, information and knowledge are not the same thing and that's often confused. Definitely they require labour for knowledge. S?: So we're not... This is really a little bit exaggerated, I think, the fears. I think that what... I have other questions, though, and I think when you think when knowledge was conveyed orally for thousands of years, two, three thousand years maybe, by teachers, by poetry, by bards, that's the way it was done. And then we had scripts, and you had manuscripts, handwritten scripts literally. And then we had the printed book, from movable type, a revolution. And it had a more -- Marshall McLanahan pointed out, it -- had a greater revolution that anything that could be imagined. S?: And I look at this room and the way we have set this room up, line after line of print, all the way to the end of the page here and then the other page. We've opened the book and there we have the chapter heading right up there. We haven't got out of this, and I think that in future, we should open this up and so people can see each other's faces and put them facing each other. That'd be a breakthrough. So we could have. But apart from that, my concern is about bookstores, affection and libraries. Here the University of Toronto now puts many books out in the warehouse. And so does your library, Hugh. And you have to retrieve them, it takes... And other libraries are doing that. Copyright libraries are required by law to keep a copy of every printed book. 297,000 in the United States, last year was it, Hugh? S3: That's just traditionally published and... S?: Okay, but there's a real problem of logistics. So what are the libraries going to be? The libraries, right? And what do librarians do? What is... The discussion, the ideas and the discussion of the ideas is really vital. The forum, the place where we can meet. And we can't meet very well, sitting silently in front of a monitor. Downstairs, when you come in, there are maybe 100 people, very few of them have books on the table in front of them. They are working with monitors in fact, and they are learning and they are studying, right? The library has already become the... What we... It's the thing, it's no longer the place of printed books. S1: So is your question... S?: And this is all over the 99 libraries in Toronto. S1: Your question is about the function... The future function of the libraries? S?: Yes, the future of libraries. Bookstores, I have a in my... In Roncesvalles village, there's a man who had so many books at home, his wife said, "Go and rent a store." Which he did. And he doesn't mind if nobody buys the books. They are all his books. So I don't know, whether the used bookstores are going to go that way. It is a kind of hobby. But anyway, libraries. I think the question about libraries, librarians, and all of that role, that's the key question. Not whether they're going to be things to read. There's lots to read. Just a format. S1: So earlier in the evening, we talked about the library. We redefined... The definition that struck me is very interesting because it became so... It's so many things. It's a Ellis Island, it's a newcomer. It's a place to welcome newcomers, It's a congregation place. Just the book function, is it completely moved away from the centre of the purpose of the library? S3: I think it remains the core. And I think that books, no matter what happens, they remain the nodes of ideas that hold our idea of the world together. And I don't think that's disappearing. If you think of the ways in which we create our understanding of the universe, so much of it has to do with these key books that have passed through our lives. And I think that, that notion is going to remain central in libraries. Exactly what it looks like, whether they're printed or not, I don't know. PH: Can't talk about the future but, I think I can talk about the present and the past. And in the present tense, what keeps us here together at this moment, and probably our shared past, is the fact that we have been, in one form or another, readers of books. And that, they have enlarged our lives in extraordinary ways. I'll give you an example of ways in which you wouldn't suspect the reading of books would be important to a professional... To a profession. I had occasion once, to meet and then interview with one of the Supreme Court Justices in the United States, Stephen Breyer. And within about five minutes of meeting him, I discovered that he loves French literature. Now, I will get to the point, I promise you. He loves French literature and within about 10 minutes, he loved speaking French to me. PH: Within in about 12 minutes of that, we were talking about the fact that he loves Victor Hugo, that he loves Camus. And that, when he was a child, his mother told him that, the only way he could expand his horizon, the only way he could ever be uncomfortably in somebody else's shoes was if he read novels and literature. The only way he could expand and understand the world imaginatively differently, was through the reading of books, which he then went on to say was, one of the reasons perhaps that he was sitting where he was sitting, and he was able to understand, he was one of the nine Supreme Court Justices who could understand stories that were... No end to story telling as a gentleman was saying earlier, but he could understand other stories that were so at odds with the way he was brought up, with what he understood was his own experience. PH: So I think that in that way, the reading of literature expands our world in such a tremendous way. And it gives us the ability to understand people who are totally foreign. That's why identity politics simply doesn't work in the world of literature. We read in order to discover how we are not. Who we are not. And by discovering who we are not, we discover a whole other side to ourselves. And librarians, in my view, I treasure our librarians at the library. As a matter of fact, I think they are the true special collection at the library. [applause] PH: They are extraordinary, exquisite human beings with a knowledge which is so tremendous and what they need to do now, what the next group of librarians need to do more than ever is to sift through all the stuff! [laughter] PH: The chaos, the entropy, the abundance, the beauty, the glory and the distraction that this world has created. [applause] S1: Our final question for the evening. S?: I know everybody wants to go party, so I'll try to keep it short. [chuckle] I would like to just hear more a bit about the decline of the quality of authorship because of sort of the e-book phenomenon and the fact that it's so easy to get published now because of the Internet. I was wondering if you think that will sort of impact our own education that because of all these books who, like really do not have that high of a quality of writing, that if you were to compare them to certain other novels, I guess, some of whom you guys have mentioned, whether or not that makes us expect less from a book and the implications of that on sort of our own education. S3: So, I answer this with the question about kid's soccer and whether you think a lot of children playing soccer at a very low level compared to Real Madrid, whether that has an impact on lowering the level of soccer playing generally or whether it's a positive thing. So the idea that lots and lots of people writing bad novels is going to mean that novel writing is bad, I think is not a good postulation, the more people writing, the more interesting writing will be happening, that's my view on things. But I think the question that is more complex is one about whether people are going to get paid well to write deeper novels that people don't necessarily... Well, no. That whether that the payment structure for certain kinds of novelists will continue, that's a different question. PH: Fifty years before you wrote your tweet, [laughter] Marshall McLuhan in 1962 had this prediction "The book is dead." That is to say, sometime before the end of the present century, the last printed book will roll off the presses. S?: He graduated from my college. [laughter] So thank you for that, thank you for that. 1:21:33 S?: Now, is the time that we have a few thank yous, and then like the last questioner said, we continue the conversation at the bar. So, please, join me in thanking our wonderful, wonderful speakers and moderator this evening. [applause] Future of the Book - Apr 11, 2013 - Appel Salon 04/20/13 Page 1 of 22