Back Talk — Throwaway Books?

Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>

At the Fiesole Retreat in Basel this spring, Laurent Romary of INRIA (National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology in France) spoke provocatively of one future for print books in libraries — print them on demand cheaply and throw them away afterwards unless the user you printed them for wants to keep them or a librarian rescues them. I may misrepresent him slightly on that, but it’s how my handwritten notes from the event read, and what I remember is the sharp sense of provocation and recognition.

The idea is not crazy. Print books are expensive well beyond the purchase price, what with the cost of cataloging and housing them. If we really did rely more heavily on POD, moreover, we’d see fewer print books coming in the door and wouldn’t have to deal with them afterwards either. At some point, it’s an arithmetic problem that may very well play out in favor of some form of Romary’s idea.

So why a shock on hearing this? Takes me back to my sophomore year in college, when I spent the summer with my parents in a tiny temporary apartment they had in Springfield MA on their way to a more permanent retirement home on the Connecticut shore. I remember the view of downtown Springfield, with a clock that always read 12:30. Cramped quarters, where everything got in the way of everything else and space was precious. I had just taken beginning ancient Greek that year and spent my serious reading time that summer reviewing grammar and vocabulary.

One success that year was Frank Herbert’s Dune, then only a few years old. The sweeping epic on the imaginatively realized world captivated me, so, when I finished, I immediately proceeded to the sequel, Dune Messiah, a much slimmer volume then quite new. I hated it. It seemed to me to betray the original, to be just a quickie knockoff with none of the rich imagination or thoughtful plotting. When I finished it one evening, I jumped up, walked thirty feet down the corridor of the apartment building to the trash room, and pitched the book down the chute. And plotzed.

OMG, what have I done? I’ve just thrown a book away How could I? The impact of the moment is best measured by the ease with which I recall it now many years later. I had never done such a thing before and it felt very wrong.

OK, I was overreacting. The rules by which we decide what printed matter can be trashed and what can’t be are subtle, undoubtedly vary from person to person, and make no intrinsic sense. Newspapers and “magazines” can go, certainly. Hardcover books, no, with exceptions. In between, much trickier. Is National Geographic a magazine for these purposes or something with a longer life? Judging by the piles and piles of them we used to see in secondhand bookshops, a lot of people thought there was something (the binding?) that kept them from the heave-ho. (I assume that owners of secondhand bookshops, on the other hand, learned soon enough how to do the needful.)

What was going on there and what can it tell us about books — and libraries? The “book” is now very old in human terms — call it 2,500+ years for words on durable material in quantity and presentation raised above the everyday; call it almost 2,000 years for the codex book with its turning pages. For a very large part of that time, books were scarce and expensive and the differentiation of titles meant that a given work, once it had been produced and sold off, could be hard to find. So on principle, we collectively hoarded them, nurtured them, cared about our secondhand shops, and occasionally crowed about surprisingly valuable finds we might make in them. A tiny paperback edition of C.L.R. James’s Melville book, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways , washed up on the 25¢ table at a shop in Paoli, PA one day in front of me, and I snatched it up in astonishment, recognizing it, as the shopowner hadn’t, as an extremely rare first edition, privately printed, of the first book by the Jamaican activist and historian. Ten or fifteen years later, the secondhand book world had moved to the Internet and I saw that my 25¢ purchase would then sell for at least $500, now only about $200 on Abebooks. (I donated it to the Georgetown University Library.)

So it made sense to be careful. Hoarding made a material contribution to what we now call preservation and discovery. Today? Not so much. Yes, yes, rarities retain value, but James’s books, several long out of print, are now available in standard editions, and Dune Messiah is doing nicely, thanks ($8.99 paperback, $9.99 Kindle). The tasks of preservation and discovery now depend as well on two advances: the combination of cheap reproduction with a nearly frictionless transparent global market in books (and yes, Amazon is problematic, but, for the moment, at least its contribution there is significant) and the possibility of digitization by libraries. I was already overreacting to my youthful fit of pique back then, and today it would just be silly — I doubt any 20-year-old is having a similar experience.

But we’re not where we need to be yet. Our friend Brewster Kahle is faring badly just now with the good ship Controlled Digital Lending, but the concept has merit and at least some prospects. The issue that it addresses remains vital — what Brewster calls the missing 20th century, when large quantities of books published from the 1920s forward, by authors less fortunate than James or Herbert, are slipping from conscious view, because even the Internet secondary market and the worthy libraries can’t help them reach readers and researchers as easily as the technology would allow if we were able to solve the intellectual property problems. (Among other things, a comprehensive collection of digitized 20th century books would be a gold mine for AI-supported research into all sorts of subjects in social, cultural, and intellectual history.)

We’re surrounded by folks these days only too ready to destroy books they don’t like, so I certainly shouldn’t be smug about what I did. But thinking about the way in which the physical copy is not really the book itself and about the ways in which we can ensure preservation and distribution without depending entirely on physical artifacts — that’s work we should be doing thoughtfully and carefully.