When will we start burning books (for real)?
The punchline: the Third World, or more appropriately, countries on the United Nations List of Least Developed Countries (UN LDCs) no longer want our books. Even the American Library Association sees the need to offer some cautions.
As an aside, UN, a word please: marketing! Your assigned name has ‘list’ and ‘least’ almost back-to-back.
But back to our program… It’s not that they do not need our books. The idea of books is welcome, but as traditional books go, there are some serious obstacles.?
First, there’s Wikipedia. It David-ed the Goliaths called Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica in a Battle Encyclopedia Royale over 20 years ago and now reigns supreme. Despite its warts and flaws—for which it deserves a lot of forgiveness—it is an overwhelming and widely-embraced plus.
Wikipedia is multilingual, globally representative, readily accessible, and free. That’s a hard combination to beat. It is not a literature be-all and end-all but is substantially comprehensive. Except there is no guarantee that it will always be there.
Another aside… I donate to it, do you? Not a bad thing to do and you could do a lot worse with your money.
Next there is the cost of infrastructure. Books reside in libraries. Libraries need real estate and fixtures. The real estate and fixtures must be paid for upfront and maintained over their lives. And let’s not forget the human wonders of knowledge: librarians. As Developing countries struggle with budgets in a competitive global environment, a legacy library begins to look like a luxury. Throw in their historical weakness in building durable institutions and we have an even more serious problem.
Thirdly, getting books from here (Developed West) to there (Developing South) requires caretakers, operations, and money. I have been part of a community effort that has shipped books a couple of times. Shipping large collections is the most cost-efficient. That typically means a container shipment. A basic prerequisite is coming up with funds to pay container costs that can easily top $5,000.?The chase for sponsors can be arduous and fund-raising efforts even more so. Sponsor and donor exhaustion are real! Then there are all the volunteer handlers to coordinate the work, here and over there, and who almost-always go unpaid.
The former ‘book and paper people’—(large) publishers, magazines, and bookstores are struggling to remake themselves in the digital world. Just ask their many laid-off staff. Those companies may pay lip service to traditional Helping to Read efforts, but theirs is an existential survival challenge. Their priorities are elsewhere.
Fourth, in many ways, the Developing world that never had legacy services and systems of the West simply leapfrogged them. Our rich networks of personal land-line phones died within our shores. Some of us remember the fancy PBX phone systems that our employers once used. Those systems too curled up at our feet in a brutal VOIP-induced death. Mobile payments, not countrywide ATM networks, rule the Developing world. No surprise since smartphones have made a laptop, or even worse, a desktop,?anachronistic for most of their populations. Underground subway systems are inordinately expensive and will likely never show up in many large cities of the South.
As the climate challenge forces change globally, a lot of Western methods that are wasteful and/or expensive will be dismissed, out of hand, in the Developing World. Will book-laden libraries fall into that category? Might we even see a contraction or elimination of the relatively limited traditional library services that exist there today?
So, here we are with our personal stocks of books—most of which we no longer read, be honest. Collectively, we have a lot! They became the ‘go-to’ backdrop for the non-stop online meetings and interviews during Covid-19 isolation. Some of that ‘books-background’ posturing persists.
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Meanwhile, we in the Developed world too have grown an insatiable appetite for devices—phones, tablets, laptops, and smart TVs—with our reading on them. Where do you think Apple and Samsung make the most of their money? Many of us will be more inclined to spend $1,500 or more on a phone that opens into a tablet over refurbishing or reorganizing our paper libraries. That’s if we have not already tossed our books into bins and parked them in a dark corner.
Which brings us back to the heading. Well, maybe recycling the paper make more sense. It’s more dignified than book burning. We’ll leave that to the ignoramuses and drama queens.
But the ongoing transition won’t be like trading horse-drawn buggies for trains or steamships for planes. Giving up notebooks and writing pads for desktop software was a breeze. None of these had the intrinsic emotional, personal, and formative connection that books have had. And those other transitions all made us more productive.
But books! Having 50 of them in an 8” tablet will certainly help stave off luggage fees—despite the advice of the Washington Post—but does that make us any smarter or more productive? College students would stick a third thumb up if they could, but is that it? At least the trees won’t mind.
Books embody wisdom and enlightenment. Books are how we have documented culture. Books are where we go when we need answers to our most pressing issues. So much of what shapes who we are today is canonized in literature. How can we dispose of such things?
Books do not require a small-country sized farm of carbon-emitting energy to remain readable. Books, collectively, are a reliable and unchanging record and remain easy to absorb with our basic human faculties, even over centuries. And as the reality of Surveillance Capitalism sets in, however reluctantly for some of us—me included—paper provides one last refuge from the digital fingerprinting swamp.
Can we really trust such an enduring and all-encompassing capability, something that important, that timeless, to digital libraries? Editable, revisable, crash-able, wipe-able, fee-prone, increasingly membership-restricted, and inherently unreliable digital memory? Oh, gasp!
The bottom line is we are nearing one of those dramatic transitions in civilization without a clue.
A closing thought… wonder if the guy who took books by mail, books on tablet, and book on audio global has any ideas.
Are you there #jeffbezos?