Ursula K. Le Guin, who most famously wrote modern
classic sci-fi and fantasy novels such as The Dispossessed and A Wizard of Earthsea, is a fairly prolific commentator on literacy and
publishing. Last week, she wrote about her disapproval of the Time feature on
“5 Famous Authors Who Loathe E-books,” which sparked my interest in compiling a
retrospective on some of her extemporaneous writing from the past few years. Le
Guin tends to post her op-ed-style pieces contemporaneously with milestones and
watersheds in digital publishing, making her essays a unique insight on authors
who are adapting and evolving along with the e-publishing process.
In May of 2011, Le Guin wrote a brief opinion piece for Northwest Book Lovers on the prospect of an all-electronic publishing
environment. It is an essay meant to caution against forgoing the possibilities
of paperback and print-on-demand in future publishing.
Time appropriated several comments from the essay and used them to
describe Le Guin as an author who “loathes” e-books for their list that was
published online on January 30, 2012. Le Guin wrote a refutation
to her inclusion in Time’s list on February 6, published at Book View Café and on her personal blog.
Time correctly quotes Le Guin’s statement “I read fast,
carelessly, superficially on the screen, and don’t enjoy it. I don’t know why”
and also correctly acknowledges that in the same essay she stated, “E-publication
offers vast availability and accessibility to older texts via our libraries,”
but ultimately Time loses the broad context of Le Guin’s original essay.
Le Guin prefaces her predictions and cautions for e-publishing by
titling them “my personal reactions.” As an author with specific content that
has been digitally formatted, and also as a reader, she has personal
preferences for how she would like her content to appear and how she would like
to read content in the future, but she is not proposing any industry-wide
movement. She is not inciting rebellion against e-books, as the title of Time’s
list suggests. In fact, by the end of the essay, she writes, “I welcome
e-publication, so long as it works like an immense new-and-used bookstore
network including bookstores selling both paper and e-books—and so long as it
is fully and freely hooked up with the public libraries,” as well as going on
to hope she can publish in future with small publishing houses in both paper
and ebook format. Le Guin is advocating for freedom of choice, while Time has
included her in a list with the likes of Maurice Sendak, who had one four-letter word for digital publishers.
Le Guin’s blog entry rebuttal points out that the Time list turns
her hesitation to embrace an all-digital publishing world into a threat to
ebooks in a way that her words were never intended. Her advocacy for dialogue
rather than vitriol, whether for or against digital publishing, is both
important for the ebook movement as well as consistent with her essays from
recent years.
When Amazon first gained widespread attention for its
game-changing Kindle introduced in 2007, the Question in publishing went from,
“Will ebooks ever work?” to “What is next for ebooks?” Just like when the
similar question was posed in the music industry when their own brand of
digital publishing began, answers were solicited from the biggest names in
technology. Steve Jobs, who in January 2008 was introducing the MacBook Air,
was asked by the New York Times about Amazon’s Kindle as a device
that might compete with his netbook-style laptops (and future iPad), and responded:
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
Now, years after the comment, it would be unusual to count the
Amazon Kindle as a failure. The known sales history alone is enough to
show that the device is a commercial success. But Jobs’ message was less about
the possibility of Amazon or any ereader company making any money in device
sales (a possibility that remains suspect until Amazon releases exact figures
for greater financial transparency) and more about a fundamental flaw that
would ultimately derail ebooks: eventually, we would cease to ever need them.
Ursula Le Guin’s response to Jobs’ comments, which she wrote for
Harper’s Magazine in February of 2008, was an illuminating
statement on both the future and the past of reading:
“I think [books are] here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?”
More than that, Le Guin pointed out several flaws with a statement
such as “people don’t read anymore”:
1. Who are the “people” we are talking about? The vast majority of society has historically had little access to, and was
often actively prevented from, the opportunity to read until the 19th
and 20th centuries. If even a small percentage of underrepresented groups are now allowed and have ready access to
reading, is that no longer important?
From Advice to Young Men And (Incidentally) Young Women in the Middle and Higher Ranks of Life, by William Corbett, 1829.
2. What kind of “reading” are we talking about? “Novels” as we know
them did not exist until the 18th century, and mass market
publications did not exist until the mid-20th century. Prior to
those times, the majority of reading available was either religious or
rhetorical in nature, and was available only to wealthy, privileged men. Are certain kinds of reading acceptable (perhaps “cannon” literature or “important”
writers) while other reading “doesn’t count,” and who makes those decisions?
3. If we are using faulty reasoning to make a statement like
“people don’t read anymore,” what kind of problems might we create for the
future if we act on that statement? Le Guin makes several statements about the
potential for some people to act as gatekeepers to knowledge, and also on their
tendency to view book sales the same way that other retail goods are sold,
rather than as an incomparable product that has a relatively short history of
existence. What would happen if people started scrapping digital publishing
ideas based on a faulty statement like “people don’t read anymore”?
The essay is a holistic view (drawing from all three business,
political, and emotional perspectives, which I talked about in my last post) on the current state of
reading that ultimately asked people to let go of some preconceived notions
about publishing. If you have ever wondered if ebooks “even matter,” I think
you will find it a thought-provoking entry into the digital publishing
discussion. Also, she is just a generally awesome lady and a terrific prose stylist, so if nothing else it is an enjoyable read.
Le Guin titled her most recent blog post "Fear and Loathing," which is a
tongue-in-cheek way of addressing what has become a sticking point in the
transition to digital publishing. People have come to take political stances on
digital publishing based out of fear: you are either “for” or “against” ebooks.
When you lay it out like that, and as Le Guin does on her blog, it shows how
strange the situation is. Many people are afraid that ebooks will not succeed
as a medium, and others are afraid that ebooks spell the end of book reading as
they know it. As Le Guin points out also, it is time that people stopped
reacting to the publishing transition with fear from either “side,” and instead
approached the transition with open minds. Fear of ebooks can only cause
industry stagnation and exacerbate the problems that already exist in
publishing.
On Friday I will feature another popular author who has recently
commented on how they would like their own books to be formatted, although this
writer took a very different stance from Le Guin…
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