I love the feel, smell, and touch of a traditional
book. However, is there pending danger
for us bibliophiles and book traditionalists?
Is our precious hobby about to fall victim of the electronic age? I have typed Clive Thompson’s “The Paper
Chase” from this month’s Smithsonian for your consideration.
Bobby
Thompson, Clive, “The
Paper Chase,” Smithsonian, May 2013, p. 14
The iPhone became the world’s best-selling smart-phone
partly because Steve Jobs was obsessed with the ergonomics of everyday
life. If you want people to carry a
computer, it had to hit the “sweet spot” where it was big enough do display “detailed,
legible graphics, but small enough to fit comfortably in the hand and Pocket.”
Seventy-five years ago, another American innovator had the
same epiphany: Robert Fair de Graff realized he could change the way people
read by making books radically smaller.
Back then, it was surprisingly hard for ordinary Americans to get good
novels and nonfiction. The country only
had about 500 bookstores, all clustered in the biggest 12 cities, and
hardcovers cost $2.50 (about $40 in today’s currency).
De Graff revolutionized that market when h got backing from
Simon & Schuster to launch Pocket Books in May 1939. A petite 4 by 6 inches and priced at a mere
25 cents, the Pocket Book changed everything about who could read and
where. Suddenly people read all the
time, much as we now peek at e-mail and Twitter on our phones. And by working with the often
gangster-riddled magazine-distribution industry, De Graff sold books where they
had never been available before—grocery stores, drugstores and airport terminals. With two years he’d sold 17 million.
“They literally couldn’t keep up with demand,” says
historian Kenneth C. Davis, who documented De Graff’s triumph in his book Two-Bit Culture. “They tapped into a huge reservoir of
Americans who nobody realized wanted to read.”
Other publishers rushed into the business. And, like all
forms of new media, pocket-size books panicked the elites. Sure, some books were quality literature, but
the biggest sellers were mysteries, westerns, thinly veiled smut—a potential “flood
of trash” that threatened to “debase farther the popular taste,” as the social
critic Harvey Swados worried. But the
tumult also gave birth to new and distinctly American literary genres, from
Mickey Spillane’s gritty detective stories to Ray Bradbury’s cerebral science
fiction.
The financial success of the paperback became its cultural
downfall. Media conglomerates bought the
upstart pocket-book firms and began hiking prices and chasing after quick-money
best-sellers, including jokey fare like 101 Uses
for a Dead Cat. And while paperbacks
remain commonplace, they’re no longer dizzingly cheaper than hardcovers.
Instead, there’s a new reading format that’s shifting the terrain. Min-tablets and e-readers not only fit in
your pocket; they allow your entire library to fit in your pocket. And, as with De Graff’s invention, e-readers
are producing new forms, prices and publishers.
The upshot, says Mike Shatzkin—CEO of the Idea Logical
Company, a consultancy for publishes—is that “more reading is taking place,” as
we tuck it into ever more stray moments.
But he also worries that as e-book consumers shift more to
multifunctional tablets, reading might take a back seat to other portable
entertainment: more “Angry Birds,” less
Jennifer Egan. Still, whatever the
outcome, the true revolution in portable publishing began not with e-books but
the De Graff, whose paperback made reading into an activity that ravels
everywhere.
