The Timeless Value of Hardback Books
In my home office I am packed between what feels like half the output of Eisenbrauns and Dover Books, dust-jacketed hardcover books on Aelian the Tactician, self-published softcovers with the study notes of renaissance tailors, and the black brick-shaped bulk of Pierre Briant’s From Cyrus to Alexander. My hard drive and bookmarks folder are crammed with thousands more PDFs and links. Databases of medieval wills, Attic Red Figure pottery, and small finds are a click of my browser away. But even then, I believe that the choice to print a book makes sense today.
A well-produced book is a pleasure to the eyes and the hands. Much like the illuminated manuscripts in the century after Gutenberg were some of the most beautiful which were ever painted, well-produced books today have beautiful crisp paper, ingenious illustrations, and careful typesetting. If they are not always copyedited as well as they should be, the scribes of those manuscripts made mistakes too. Writers have had to hone their skills and refine their craft to lure audiences away from the television or the smartphone.
Printed books last. A well-made hardcover book on acid-free paper can last for a thousand years with minimal care. Years ago I wrote about how publishers preserve websites but readers preserve books. Electronic publications are always vulnerable to a website crash, a failed software update, or just forgetting to ask Grandma for her Kindle password before she passed away. Anyone who has been on the Internet long enough has seen a site they loved go down, delete things it once encouraged, or attract a new membership which they did not want to be associated with, and has seen technologies such as Flash stop working. This is not just because of whimsical billionaires, greedy investors, or dysfunctional corporate leadership. Keeping computer systems working for decades is hard and needs continual effort.
When someone takes a printed book into their home, they are making a commitment to it and its author. They are saying something about who they want to be and what they want to spend time with. Anyone can download a PDF or an ePub in an instant. But its hard to value that PDF as much as something which they paid money or went out into the world to obtain. Its hard to remember yet another glowing white PDF with black text like the blue linen binding of my Oxford Classical Text of Plautus, the rough edged textured paper of Robert Fagels’ translation of Homer, or the deep murey and red cover and battered corners of Lyle Campbell’s textbook on historical linguistics. Those eBooks and scans of articles blend into one another in the memory, and its hard to feel an emotional connection to them. And while you can lose a printed book, digital files can also be lost in the depths of your hard drive or forgotten when you migrate to a new device without the Downloads folder. Like odd socks, electronic documents have a way of disappearing when you let them out of your sight, even if there are only a few places you could have put them.
Writers love to talk and argue about ways to publish a book, from self-publishing platforms such as Ingram Spark and Lulu, to small and university presses, to the corporate giants of the Big Five. Like many other things writers talk about this can be a way of sounding smart while putting off the day when they put their next work out into the world and face the possibility that it could be criticized or ignored. All of these approaches work for some authors with some goals, and by the time its clear that one approach is good, the cultural and economic winds may have shifted. The self-published novelists who enthused about how much money they were making from eBooks got quieter as more people imitated them and Amazon tightened the screws. The right way to promote a book on ancient Persia may not be the way to promote a romance novel or a guide to furnituremaking; publishing one book one way might not get the same response as sending a different book down the same path. But I think that hardcover books still have value in the digital age. And if a lot of what you create is for the Internet or for academic journals, there are still reasons to sit down and publish a book.
(post sponsored by https://brick-digital.co.uk/ but written by your gentle blogger)
(scheduled 4 December 2024)
Nothing quite compares with the look and feel of a decently produced book in the hand. In the case of Pierre Briant’s opus, From Cyrus to Alexander, that would be hands. While I’m admittedly not of the “kindle generation”, I simply cannot warm to that digital medium – even unto taking books in carry on luggage for plane flights.
And the two volumes by Jacobs and Rollinger, or the sourcebook by the late Amélie Kuhrt, are even bigger! I wonder if we will see the academic literature bifurcate, with some books and electronic publications produced quickly and meant to be read online and forgotten quickly, and a few for a larger scholarly readership with more lasting value meant to be read through.