The Problem with Digital Books

Sunday, January 15, 2017

If you’re expecting a screed from an ex-publisher about how ebooks are ruining the world, destroying the book business, and how much I love the smell ink in a new book, you’ll be disappointed in this piece. Move on to the next cute cat photo. This story is actually about Amy the Automaton.

But first, the problem(s) with digital books. A decade ago, they were going to make paper books obsolete, save many trees and swallow up the earth’s entire bandwidth, once Google finished digitizing them all. As most people who follow the book industry know, the ebook revolution hit the virtual ceiling a couple of years ago, somewhere around 20% of all books sold. It isn’t increasing and some reports indicate the percentage of ebooks is shrinking.

In the academic world, it is considerably more complex. Scholarly journals have almost completely gone  digital, which is a boon for researchers who hate going to campus and for pajama makers and coffee manufacturers. Books are a much more confusing story, though the latest study I read says that paper books held by college libraries are checked out more often than digital books held in their collection.  

Textbooks? Just about the time that the big three—Cengage, McGraw Hill, and Pearson—moved entirely to digital textbooks, the studies started filtering in that no student wants to read their textbook online. Cengage went through a bankruptcy, Pearson tossed all their textbooks away to other publishers for a fee, McGraw-Hill remained as dysfunctional in the crisis as they had been in good times. Now they’ve each rebranded themselves as companies offering “digital learning solutions.” Alex, a former Left Coast employee, is not an Acquiring Editor for Cengage but a Content Developer.

Even hybrid models have had their challenges. Yes, we were able to substitute color illustrations for black and white in the online version of some of our Left Coast Press books. Some authors took advantage of the digital world: Joe Norris posted videos of the plays he describe in his playbuilding book.  Jay Sokolovsky, hosted an entire multimedia addendum to the textbook on Mexico he wrote for us. And then we sold the company, and all the work that we did on linking the book to the digital extras had to be done all over again on the new publisher's platform.

Did I mention there are problems with digital books?

As long as we’re talking about textbooks, let me tell you about Amy the Automaton.  We were in Book Passages in San Francisco’s Ferry Building a couple of weeks ago and a book called Textbook caught my eye. For someone who has published a few hundred of them, it was a pretty audacious title. And shelved in the fiction section yet? Amy Krouse Rosenthal writes both children and adult books. I’d never run across her before. But the jacket copy described this as “distinct blend of nonlinear narrative, wistful reflections, and insightful wit.” The Table of Contents had chapters entitled Geography, Social Studies, Romance Language, and Final Review. That’s my kind of book. So I took it home.

Amy has caught the digital bug. “Welcome to the first book that offers additional engagement via texting” is the first line of the introduction. And, having made it to the website where she hosts readers’ stories that reflect ideas in her book, I can see she means it. But to get started you first have to send her a text:

“To begin, simply text Hello to 312 883-xxxx.” And so I did. The dialogue went as follows:

Me: Hello [as instructed]

Amy: Hi, it’s Amy. I’m elated to share this part of the book w/you. A few years ago it was a dream & now it’s a for real thing between us.

Nice, an author who will talk to her readers. Brilliant in fact. What a way to build an audience.

Me: I like the US map in alphabetical order, and I’ve just begun.

No throwaway compliment, it was really a clever idea. Redoing the US map with Alabama in the Pacific Northwest, the A’s and C’s stretched across America’s northern tier, West Virginia living where Florida used to and Wisconsin and Wyoming adrift in the Pacific Ocean. I think Wisconsinians will love becoming Hawai’ians, particularly at this time of year. People in Wyoming might not be able to tell the difference between Casper and Kotzebue. Amy responded quickly.

                Amy: I’m really trying to understand what you just said, but my automated self is not yet fully enlightened. Try again?

                Me: Ah, Amy is an automaton. Go back to sleep or rest mode or whatever you do.

                Amy: I’m really trying to understand what you just said, but my automated self is not yet fully enlightened. Try again?

I detected a theme here. Her Geography chapter with the map also contains a few pages on serendipity. So I thought I’d link the two:

                Me: Coincidence. In alphabetic order, Idaho is Idaho and Iowa is Iowa. What are the odds? And why do they both start with I?

                Amy: I’m really trying to understand what…

Her book makes a very good point, quoting Stanford statistician Persi Diaconis that 280 million people in the US would produce 280 coincidences a day at the rate of a one-in-a-million chance. Idaho and Iowa being in the same place both geographically and alphabetically gives you a 4% incidence (2 out of 50). Now that’s serendipity!

But Amy is pretty monotonous when it comes to answers to texted questions and comments. One might hope that she’s take this opportunity to provide a little serendipity of her own. Maybe instead of the canned message, she could provide her grandmother’s recipe for chopped liver, or recite the first few lines of Where the Wild Things Are in Maori, or calculate the likelihood of someone batting .400 in the 2017 baseball season. Who knows, maybe that is just what the texting reader was going to ask about. You have at least a one-in-a-million chance, don’t you?

Did I mention there are problems with digital books?

Update March 13, 2017: The New York Times reports that Amy Krouse Rosenthal died today at age 51. RIP. 

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