bookbook blog

I recently started reading In The Beginning – The Story Of The King James Bible by Alister E. McGrath. I got it out of my local library to do a bit of background reading on a book I’m thinking of writing. (I’ve never actually written a book; it’s a combination of an aspiration, a pipe dream and a pet project). I was only going to read one chapter but I found I enjoyed that chapter so much that I decided to start it from the beginning.

Given that the author is a Professor of Theology at Oxford University I was surprised at the style of the writing. It’s almost colloquial and not at all academic. It has me gripped at the moment, which is more than can be said for Pulitzer prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay which is going straight back to the charity shop where I got it.

Just as an aside from the actual topic of this post, here is a great quote from Saint Thomas More about Martin Luther who he said was:

“a mad friar-let and privy-minded rascal with his ragings and ravings, with his filth and dung, shitting and beshitted, [preoccupied with] privies, filth and dung.”

I wonder if they included that in the case for his beatification? I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.

Anyway, I’ve just read about William Tyndale who was the first person to translate the bible (or nearly all the bible) into English from the original Greek and Hebrew. Although it was not the first time parts of the bible had been translated into English it was the first translation to be printed and as a result was widely distributed.

Tyndale acted illegally when he translated the bible. The Constitutions of Oxford, which had been authorised in 1409, forbade the translation of the bible into English. Tyndale completed his translation in Hamburg in 1526 with the assistance of William Roy. It was printed in Antwerp and the first copies were available in London by February 1526.

The religious authorities had a number of reasons for not wanting the bible translated into English. Foremost among them however was the very real concern that it gave the laity unprecedented power to challenge the authority of the church who up until then had been able to restrict access to the bible by keeping it in Latin.  They didn’t actually have a leg to stand on however as the Latin Bible had itself been translated from the original Hebrew and Greek. Events in England took place against the wider backdrop of the Reformation in Europe which was well underway by this time.

In a move which echoes down the ages to the parallel imports debate in Australia today the printers in England around this time began campaigning for restrictions on book imports. The economic interests of the nascent English printing industry fell coveniently in line with the more sinister interests of the English church and the authorities obligingly drew up a list of banned works to which Tyndale’s bible was added. As has always been the case with efforts to deny English people the things they want our innate disposition towards piracy rose to the occassion and the flow of bibles into England continued virtually uninterrupted.

Tyndale’s bible had a huge and lasting impact not just on religion in England but also on English society and the English language. For many people, Tyndale’s bible was the first book that they had ever seen in English. Before Tyndale the English speaking people lived by-and-large in a world without books. It helped start a surge in literacy. For those of us who have had the bible rammed down our throats we often forget that it’s a book packed full of simple, fun stories; stories which had been kept hidden from the laity in a shroud of Latin and elitism. It was a huge incentive to ordinary people to learn to read. You can imagine the buzz which went round when the stories of the wedding at Cana or the feeding of the five thousand or Jonah and the whale came out for the first time. I can picture it now. A couple of peasants out in a field engaged in some typically pythonesque toil like collecting mud. One peasant says to the other,

“And then he got eaten by the whale and spent three days in its belly before being vomitted out onto a beach”.

“No waaaaaaaay!”.

It was also a huge vote of confidence in the English language which up until then many had argued was simply incapable of conveying the complexity of the Bible. In fact it was, which is why Tyndale had to be so innovative creating new words and and coining new phrases. This willingness to steal or make up new words when we feel our language is lacking has continued down the ages and has played no small part in the preeminence of the English language today. Tyndale took a language from the fields and brought it into the church.

As is traditional in the case of banned books Tyndale’s bible found its way into many a book burning. Cardinal Wolsey himself ordered that all “untrue translations” should be burned. To burn a book someone obviously has to have bought it first which increased demand for Tyndale’s bible which in turn allowed him to reinvest the proceeds in further translations including the Pentateuch (having only translated the New Testament previously).

Tyndale met an ugly death when in 1536 he was betrayed to the authorities in Antwerp and executed, possibly at the insistence, but almost certainly to the cheers, of the religious hierarchy in England. In an act of bountiful Christian kindness he was strangled before he was burned at the stake. Does God’s mercy know no boundaries?

As I’ve already mentioned, one of the interesting things about Tyndale’s bible is that he coined many new phrases in the English language which are still in everyday use today. Phrases like let there be light, the powers that be, the salt of the earth, a law unto themselves and filthy lucre. He also invented many new words mos notably atonement and scapegoat.

Nearly 500 years after a rope found its way round Tyndale’s neck one of his phrases has fittingly found its way around the neck of Bra Boy Koby Abberton. No doubt Koby was aware of the significance when he instructed the tattoo artist to put it around his neck. Amen.

Last week I read The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book) by Sherman Young. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Just on a stylistic point it’s a wonderfully concise and clearly laid out work.  It’s a pleasure to read.

All the eight chapters really resonated with me but I think Chapter 3 titled Nobody Reads was the one that has really been nagging me ever since I read it. The vitality of our reading culture is something that I’d never really thought about before. My interest in ebooks has always been primarily about accessibility. This chapter suggests to me that accessibility is not the primary issue; lack of reading is. The chapter opens with a quote from Philip Roth which paints a fascinating but bleak picture:

“I don’t think there’s a decline of the novel so much as the decline of the readership. There’s been a drastic decline, even a disappearance, of a serious readership. That’s inescapable. We can’t fail to see it. It’s also inescapable, given the pressures in the society. That’s a tragedy. By readers, I don’t mean people who pick up a book, once in a while. By readers, I mean people who when they are at work during the day think that after dinner tonight and after the kids are in bed, I’m going to read for two hours. That’s what I mean. No. 2, these people do it three or four nights a week for two and half, three hours, and while they do it they don’t watch television or answer the phone.

“So if that’s what readers are, how many of them are there? We are down to a gulag archipelago of readers. Of the sort of readers I’ve described, there are 176 of them in Nashville, 432 in Atlanta, 4,011 in Chicago, 3,017 in Los Angeles and 7,000 in New York. It adds up to 60,000 people. I assure you there are no more. We would be foolish to add a zero. Maybe there are 120,000. But that’s it, and that is bizarre.”

The argument that nobody reads seems so counterintuitive and yet the more I think I about it the more I think it’s true. The reason it seems counterintuitive is that we are surrounded by more reading material than ever before in our history. Books, journals, magazines, newspapers, comics, manuals, pamphlets and most recently the internet are more ubiquitous now than they ever have been before. The internet in particular, which seems to be commanding more and more of our attention (largely at the expense of television), is a medium dominated by the written word. I spend a few hours everyday reading on the internet alone. Despite all this I can’t help feeling drawn to Young’s argument that very few people really read.

So what is “real” reading? For me, it’s about ideas. What I get from newspapers, magazines and the internet are facts and opinions. If I want rich ideas I have to read books. Ideas are complex. They are made up of facts and opinions but they are so much more than the sum of their parts. It takes time to convey an idea. You can’t convey an idea in a thousand word article. You need to give the reader context and background and characters and setting and narrative and conclusion and counter-argument and all the other elements of a compelling narrative. All this holds true as much for fiction as for non-fiction. I love non-fiction. It sits side by side with fiction in my top ten books of all time. Great non-fiction isn’t just about laying down facts. It’s about bringing the reader as close to the action as is possible through words. That is why anecdotal history telling supported by a focussed narrative in the style of Cornelius Ryan is so compelling to read.

Real reading is about the reader making a conscious decision that they want to fill their head with rich ideas. When they start they don’t know what those ideas may be. That’s what makes it so exciting. Real reading isn’t about fawning over David Beckham’s life or learning how to bake a cake. These are examples of what Young calls anti-books and functional books; books whose main purpose is to sell in large volumes and contribute to the publisher’s bottom line. These books can’t really be counted as part of reading culture. It’s only when you take them out of the book sales figures that you get a true picture of the health of reading.

Young produces many facts, statistics and quotes to support the argument that nobody reads. None of them is quite conclusive but they’re certainly compelling. It is certainly true, it seems to me, that there are very few real readers out there. Just how many is a matter for debate.

There are a couple of areas which Young doesn’t really mention which I think are pertinent.

One area is pulp fiction which I think often gets overlooked in discussions about reading. Crime, romance, sci-fi, westerns, fantasy all have or did have huge dedicated followings. The statistics around romance alone are quite staggering.  Pulp fiction readers are some of the purest readers around. They read purely for pleasure. They read voraciously. They don’t read to show off. They’ll take the books however they can get them; from second hand shops, from libraries, from charity shops, from friends, in magazines. Pulp fiction somehow doesn’t find its way onto the bestseller lists so it often falls under the radar. People don’t often talk about it either; saying you’ve read the latest Louis L’Amour doesn’t quite have the same social cache as saying you’ve read the latest Ian McEwan. When Young says that ‘Nobody Reads’ he needs to put in a big asterix for this often overlooked but sizable group of readers.

The other area which I’d love to know more about is the phenomenon of people buying books and never reading them. I’m particularly guilty of this. Although I gave up buying paper books a while ago I still have a huge backlog to read. Recently I’ve been ruthless about getting rid of books that I know I’ll never read. (As a direct result of reading The Book is Dead I did a big clear out of my anti-books). I often find when I go around to friends’ houses that the spines of books are suspiciously smooth. I remarked on this to one friend and he made the rather unconvincing claim that he always made a point of not bending the spines when he read books. I tried doing it; it’s almost impossible, not to mention completely pointless. It’d be interesting to do a sudden spot check survey of 1000 bookshelves and see how many of the books had actually been read.

The argument that nobody reads is one that I will continue to wrestle with. It’s a provocative argument and one which deserves more attention.

My love affair with “book objects” died a few years ago. It’s an obsession which is actually very hard to get over. I really loved owning books. I still feel a small twinge of sorrow whenever I sell, give away or even delete a book. A few years ago I read A Race for Madmen by Peter Nichols. It’s a brilliant book; one of the best I’ve ever read in fact. One of the reasons that I rate it so highly is that it made me change my attitude towards possessions. That’s quite an achievement for a book about a sailing race! In the particular chapter which affected me Bernard Moitessier having been at sea for nearly a year finally becomes at one with the sea and starts casting overboard everything but his most essential possessions. That small passage made me do an evaluation of my own “yacht”. Among other things my critical gaze fell very harshly on my books. Did I really need them? The answer was a resounding no and I haven’t looked back since.

At the heart of The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book) is the argument that we need to dissociate a book’s content from the paper object. The publishing industry has become focused on selling objects, not ideas. This in turn has lead in part to the near death of reading. Just as publishers have shifted their focus from books to ideas, so have readers. In the conclusion Young offers the hope that new technologies will allow a return to ideas. When you look at it like that I can’t help feeling optimistic that we are on the brink of a reading revival and that books will really matter again. There have been glimmers of hope. Barack Obama’s two books certainly played a role in his election as President but I’m sure that he would have been elected even without them. Perhaps a book will be responsible for electing the next President.

Half way through reading The Book is Dead I found myself outside Dymocks on George street in Sydney. I generally avoid bookshops. I find them overwhelming; so many books so little time to read. There outside Dymocks however my mind was on books so I thought I’d go in and immerse myself in the publishing industry. Normally I would have felt my usual drowning feeling and yet, having read Young’s book, I was able to walk completely unfazed past those thousands of books. I didn’t even feel the need to go through the arbitrary ritual of picking up random books (based on what? the cover? the title? the price? the author? the location on the shelf?) and reading the back covers. What I was seeing, I realised, didn’t actually have much to do with reading culture at all. What I was seeing were the products of an industry obsessed with selling objects. Very few people actually get around to reading any more than a handful of books a year. Just standing in the doorway of Dymocks you can see many more books than you’ll ever be able to read in your lifetime. Seeing so many books makes a mockery of the claim to be “well-read”. How can anyone ever claim to “well-read” when there are so many books and so little time to read them all? I don’t want to be well-read; I want to read well.

I’d recommend everyone who’s interested in reading to read The Book is Dead. (Long live the book). A lot of people certainly won’t agree with it but it will definitely get you thinking and most importantly it will give you ideas.

I was in my local library yesterday just browsing through the literary history section and came across a book about the history of books. The book, as you’d expect, starts with an introduction to the earliest known writing forms and makes mention of what many consider to be the oldest novel, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Like Beowulf it’s one of those books which I felt like I ought at least acquaint myself with even if I never actually read the whole thing.

The edition I’m reading comes with a lengthy introduction which is actually longer than the Epic itself. The Epic of Gilgamesh was found among the Library of Ashurbanipal and it turns out that the story of the finding of the library is almost as extraordinary as the Epic itself. One of the fascinating features of the Epic is that it contains an account of the great flood which is surprisingly similar to the story of Noah found in the bible. The discovery of this pre-biblical account of the great flood caused something of a stir in the 1870’s when it was became known to the public. The Epic of Gilgamesh was the Da Vinci code of its day but without the sloppy plot and character development and lucrative movie tie-in.

A short rant about authenticity

The British Museum in London contains many Assyrian tablets. Quite what visitors get out of looking at stones covered in cuneiform I’m not sure. Most times I’ve been to see them I’ve spent about 30 seconds looking at the cuneiform and then about 5 minutes reading the blurb on the plaque next to it. The tablets are just around the corner from the disputed Elgin/Parthenon marbles. I’ve always been in favour of returning the Elgin marbles along with a lot of the other plundered artefacts in the British museum. It’s important that collections like the Ashurbanipal library remain together for the simple reason that works are much easier to understand when they are complete and in their context. Stonehenge wouldn’t make much sense if you split up the stones and sent them tto museums around the world or, as has happened in the case of the Elgin marbles, split the individual stones up and sent the pieces around the world.

My changing attitude towards paper books has really reinforced this opinion. Why are we so hung up on objects? Why does it matter that we are looking at the actual Elgin marbles? Aren’t near perfect copies or pictures good enough? The same goes for paintings as well. Why is the original Mona Lisa in the Louvre any better than a $3 Mona Lisa poster. And actually come to think of it I’ve got some issues with music as well. Why is an original version of Bob Dylan singing Like a Rolling Stone any better than an enthusiastic German cover. The tune, the lyrics and the essence of the song are still there. I’ve seen lots of cover bands who I reckon are better than the original artists. Classical music lovers are happy to listen to music regardless of who performs it. (Although classical music isn’t impervious to the whole fame thing either: witness the big bronzed walking Dutch mullet which is Andre Rieu). Our actual enjoyment of art (be it books, sculpture, art or music) has been superceded by an obsession with objects, fame and antiquity.

Anyway, rant over.

The Epic of Gilgamesh was written down before the invention of paper. It was engraved onto stone tablets in cuneiform. Now, nearly 5000 years after the stories originated, we have come full circle and the Epic can be read again without paper. There’s a free version on Google Book Search which is of dubious quality or you can buy the version I read as an ebook here.

After Peter Carey’s submission to the Productivity commission, another Australian literary heavyweight has weighed in. Tim Winton used his acceptance speech for the Miles Franklin award to launch a scathing attack on the proposed reforms.

Here’s his full speech:

It’s quietly spoken but passionately delivered and I agree with a lot of what he says. Maybe protecting the Australian publishing industry is the best way to support Australian writers. Winton is right that parallel imports will severely affect local publishers. If the proposed changes go ahead then the government needs to plan other ways to support that industry to ensure that Australian literature gets published.

In the end though I’m rapidly losing interest in the parallel importation debate. The debate isn’t really about reading. It’s about selling books. I can read Tim Winton’s Breath for free just by going to my local library which has six copies to lend out. If I really love it and want to read it again I can always borrow it again or borrow it off a friend. If I really, really love it and I’m going to want to read it a few times a year and I’m too lazy to go to my library then I could buy myself a secondhand copy. I contend that people who really care about reading shouldn’t care about owning books.

[Note: One thing he mentions that I'd be interested to clarify is the issue of royalties on parallel imports. Surely he would still receive royalties on parallel imports. He'd just receive them in the US or the UK instead of in Australia. I'd be interested for someone to clear that up for me.]

Well, I’m not quite sure that it is but I’m reading The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book) by Sherman Young at the moment so I’m in the mood for headline-grabbing titles.

I have long thought that e-ink’s days are numbered. I love my Sony Reader but at the same time it’s a very limited device. Just as minidiscs were a stopgap measure between tapes and mp3 I can’t help thinking that e-ink devices are just a stopgap measure until really good tablets come along. A few bits of news recently have suggested to me that that time is coming sooner rather than later. May I present the case for the prosecution:

1. There are two defining features of e-ink readers: screen quality and battery life. This new LCD screen from Pixel Qi certainly looks as if it’s come close to matching the quality of e-ink. Here’s Mary Lou Jepsen showing off the same screen. Their website says that the screens use 25%-50% of the power of normal LCD screens which should help challenge e-ink’s continued dominance in battery life
2. Asus have finally got around to launching a tablet version of their incredibly successful Eee PC in the form of the T91. This version of the Eee PC is long overdue in my opinion. The XO, after all, was a tablet from the outset.
3. It seems pretty improbable that a blog would be able to design and manufacture a groundbreaking tablet but it seems as if it’s the going to happen.  The Crunchpad is now in prototype and it looks great. Whether they manage to get it out before someone else beats them to it is another question. It seems certain to me though that these things will be huge.

I’m half-way through The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book). It’s really thought-provoking. In particular there are some insights into the publishing industry which are helping me to refine my half-baked opinions on the whole parallel importation debate. I’ll write a proper post once I’ve finished.

In other book related news I just watched Francois Truffaut’s Farenheit 451 for the first time. As a realistic vision of a dystopia it’s a little bit half-hearted and nowhere near as terrifying as the Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In fact the utopic vision painted at the end looked decidedly unpleasant to me; a bunch of shell-shocked bookworms staggering about as if they were in the Ardennes Offensive.

At the heart of the ebook movement is a yearning for openness. It’s a desire to see great literature freed from the confines of libraries and bookshops and back catalogues. This desire for openness is part of a wider movement on the web; a movement towards freedom built on the bedrock of standardisation. That’s the best I can do at a segue to the completely un-ebook-related topic of Google Wave. As a fan of ebooks and the web in general I was left completely in awe at what I saw on Saturday. I am literally itching to start my first Wave.

At 1hr 20min it’s by far the longest YouTube video that I have ever watched but I was gripped the whole way through. All the little glitches in the presentation just give it an air of understatement. The king of understatement and it seems the originator of the Wave idea is Jens. There’s a great bit in this interview where Lars explains the genesis of Wave at length. When it becomes apparent that Jens was the one who came up with the idea in the first place the interviewer turns to him to ask for his comment and Jens just replies “What he said”!

Over the last few days everyone has been struggling to summarise Wave in a few words. I think Adam Turner sums it up nicely in the Sydney Morning Herald when he says that it’s a Mega-Client. It has the potential to unify all our emailing, instant messaging, blog commenting, document creation, meeting organisation, RSS, status updates and so much more in one place.

For those of us who have been following developments in web technology and in particular the emerging social web over the last few years this video came as something of an epiphany. At the heart of Google Wave is a vision which all of us have glimpsed at some point or other. Some have seen it more clearly than others. It’s a vision of a unified profile in the cloud. Other services such as Friendfeed and Facebook and Twitter have tried in various ways to unify our online profiles. The problem which all of them faced was that they weren’t standards based, they were ultimately just websites. Email gained its preeminent status not as a result of any particular website but as a result of standards. At its heart Googel Wave is a set of standards; standards around how we will communicate in the cloud. After many false starts I really believe that this is the Facebook killer we’re been waiting for.

For those lucky few who saw the presentation live and the millions who will view the Youtube video (1.5m already) things will never be the same again. A vision has been laid out before us which it is impossible to ignore.