The Death of Books — Beervana

Do We Need Books Anymore?

People have been telling stories as long as they’ve had the speech to do so, but the narrative form has never been stable. Poetry and opera, to take two examples, were once popular and important forms. Both still exist, but almost no one reads poems or goes to opera performances. Poetry, to take a written form, was for millennia the written medium. It was high art, low art, closely connected to music, seemingly the indivisible essence of language. Now fewer than ten percent of people have read a poem in the past year. People who read a book look healthy by comparison at nearly half (same link), but reading is down 8% in a decade, and the benchmark “read any book,” could hardly be lower. Read a Dr Seuss to the kids, a cookbook, or a book on training your dog? You’re a reader.

Poetry didn’t just start dying in the 21st century. Its status changed irrevocably during the Renaissance, with the rise of the novel. In those days there wasn’t a great difference between fiction and nonfiction—Shakespeare is the quintessential writer of the time—but people were drawn to the spectacle of the novel, its grandeur and scope. Of course, it was considered lowbrow at the time—I mean, just sentences, no meter or rhyme? A monkey could compose this stuff. Eventually it pushed poetry to the margins as it became the default medium. This has been the way of things as new technologies arrived (the printing press was key in the novel’s success), and fashions and trends changed. Old art forms mostly don’t vanish, but they become attenuated, twee pursuits of the weird, nerdy, or wealthy.

A couple hundred years ago, books took on a new status, as repositories of knowledge for an increasingly educated population. (Novels followed a different track and I’ll leave them aside for now.) Short-form pieces were disposable. People might clip an article from a newspaper or magazine, but their function was more like dialogue, temporary and passing. Books were more serious matters, and in them we found the kind of information that was meant to persist. We catalogued human knowledge book by book, and saved it in libraries. It was a bother to retrieve the knowledge, but it was there if we ever cared to.

I don’t think we’ve appreciated how profoundly the internet has changed that calculus. Human knowledge has moved online, and thanks to the little pocket computers we carry around, we can access it in seconds. Wikipedia now contains enough information that when you, say travel to Budapest, you can adequately get up to snuff on Hungarian history in a half hour’s time. Names, dates, and events are all catalogued for our consultation. Some scholarly and technical information still requires a library, but this is a tiny fraction of the world’s information. Almost anything we need is online.

Finally, and this is the biggest reason books are going to go the way of poetry, is that we’ve rewired our brains so that the experience of long-form reading is no longer pleasurable. Books, fiction and non-, require sustained attention and an appreciation of the slow boil. If you look at your own reading habits and are a typical reader, I’ll bet you relate to my experience. I read far fewer books than I did a decade ago, almost no fiction (I’ve switched to audiobooks), and when I read a book, my mind immediately wants to start scanning. I’m looking for the essence of the information, the nut of the argument. I can settle into reading the deliberative structure of a book, but it takes effort. And I would describe myself as a huge reader—I mean, I write books.

If we’re being brutally honest, we don’t really need books any more than 17th century readers needed poetry. Some percentage of people will continue to read them and enjoy them. It will still be important to create book-length arguments or put serious research in between the covers of a book. But the vast, vast majority of the books written every year are inessential. They exist to amuse, entertain, or reward the reader. If the readers have gone, the book has no function. That process is already underway, and Elle Griffin’s article captures all the ways it is playing out now. In twenty more years, books will still be around, but people will read them infrequently. They were once an important, an essential, form of information. They no longer are, and as a consequence, they’re slowly fading away.