During the early days of the pandemic, when nonessential retail outlets were closed, our local bookstore owner began taking orders at the door. We would knock, Oscar would open the door a crack, ask what book we wanted, then fetch the book and bring it to the door, where we would pay for it and leave. It was kind of thrilling, like buying black-market coffee in Havana. We could also order books by phone, and Oscar would deliver them to our house. On his bicycle. In winter. We’d open the door and there he’d be, snow drifting off his hat, our book carefully wrapped in plastic.
By pivoting, Oscar was not only keeping his store going, he was keeping the book alive.
Before Covid, doomsters foretold the end of the book as a physical object. The onslaught of “bi-directional digital media” like Amazon, they said, was going to wipe out print books – and the bricks-and-mortar bookstores that sold them – the way Netflix had wiped out the DVD and Blockbuster. Who, the doomsters asked, would slog through foul weather to peer at rows of book spines waiting for one to drop into their hands, when with a few clicks they could let Amazon not only tell them what book they wanted but get it to them the next day – or the next second, if they ordered it on Kindle?
Then came Covid. At first, it looked as though the pandemic was going to fulfill the direst of prophecies. In the first quarter of 2020, bookstores reported a 73.7 percent drop in sales, while sales of e-books (in the US) rose from 170 million in 2019 to 191 million in 2021. Canada’s Indigo chain reported a similar, though smaller, decline in revenue, from $1.05 billion in 2019 to $904 million in 2021. Sales went back up to over $1 billion in 2022, but largely because of a 60-percent increase in sales for Kobo, Indigo’s version of Kindle.
But the news wasn’t all bad for the book qua book. Some independent bookstores vanished, but others appeared to take their place: in June 2020, the Guardian reported that since the beginning of the pandemic, 44 bookstores had closed in the UK, but 50 new ones opened. The American Booksellers Association reported a 4-percent increase in the number of independent bookstores in 2022, and in Canada, although some indies went bust, those that survived the first year (like Oscar) saw a 45 percent increase in sales in 2021. Apparently, Covid has forced a lot of stores to become innovative, and innovation is usually a good thing.
As Merilyn Simonds (full disclosure: my wife) observed in Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, her 2017 book that explores the dynamic interface between print and digital books, it’s rare that the advent of a new technology spells the death of an old one. The movies didn’t kill live theatre, television didn’t kill the movies, the internet hasn’t killed television; what new technologies do is force old technologies to adapt. Television today is vastly different from what it was when I squatted in front of the tube to watch “Leave It to Beaver.” Now I watch movies being streamed on Netflix. But even though I haven’t watched traditional cable TV for 30 years, I’m still essentially watching television. As Bill McKibben put it in his 1992 book The Age of Missing Information, you can keep your television in the closet, but you’re still living in a television age.
And we still live in a book age: each year, some 2.2 million books are published worldwide. And within the larger field of books we spend a lot of time in the meadow of fiction – about 100,000 novels are published in English annually: as publishing-industry guru Jane Friedman said in an interview last December, “adult fiction sales have come back after so many years of decline.” We may carp about the quality of that fiction – 10 years ago, George Packer warned that the bulk of novels sold would be commercial titles, and the literary novel would trickle down into a niche market. But hasn’t that always been the case? Hasn’t the literary novel always been a niche within a niche?
And anyway, literary agent Carly Watters reports on a new category of adult fiction: there is literary fiction, there is commercial fiction, and now there is a hybrid of the two called “upmarket” fiction. These are books with “universal themes” wedded to a “hyper-focused plot.” This Pegasus-like creature has no doubt been dreamt up by the honchos of the big-five publishers, the same honchos who admitted, during the recent hearings into the attempted purchase of Simon and Schuster by Penguin Random House, that they really have no idea what kind of books will sell. A plot-driven book with universal values sounds kind of old-hat to me: maybe they came up with the idea after watching All Quiet on the Western Front.
But story, in whatever form it is delivered, is the core of all writing. Years ago, when I was on the Steering Committee of the National Freedom to Read Program – an annual event that encourages Canadians to reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom – we were alarmed when surveys found that children were less inclined to read for pleasure than they once had been. Writing in The Atlantic last week about the decline of “reading for fun” in public schoolchildren (most of whom have smart phones by the age of 11), Katherine Marsh blames the education system for no longer teaching reading as a way of relating to story. Reading, she writes, has become subsumed into literacy programs, where progress is measured by how well pupils can distinguish concrete from abstract nouns, for example, rather than by how well they comprehend different levels of meaning within a story.
I began this with a story about Oscar and his bookstore. Writers know that story is the key, that readers want to be drawn into a story for the intellectual and emotional pleasure it conveys, and are only peripherally glad when they also learn something. As Merilyn wrote in Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, “technologies come and go. What is eternal… is the human craving for story. Clay tablets, parchment scrolls, vellum codices, paper books, bytes on screens: it hardly matters how we get our fix so long as there is a way to share what we know of the world.”
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Nicola. I agree with you about this moment in the history of technology. I've written elsewhere that technology has become like the Farmer in George Orwell's Animal Farm; we depend on it for things we can no longer do for ourselves. I'm not a Luddite (well, I am a bit of a Luddite), but I worry that our reliance on technology is taking us places we don't need to go, and making blind spots of places we should be going. A turning point indeed.
I've just found your substack via a notes recommendation from Margaret Atwood. I love what I've read so far, so thank you!
I'm also keen to read you wife's book based on this comment: it’s rare that the advent of a new technology spells the death of an old one...what new technologies do is force old technologies to adapt.
I think we are at such an interesting time in technological history. I'm reading and thinking a lot about how this is influencing writing/reading/publishing. For example, tiktok's impact on the publishing industry. How AI and large language models are advancing (at what at least feels like) an exponential rate and how this is changing how we work, live and learn. In regards to your point about the importance of story, I couldn't agree more. I think that whatever medium your creative work takes, a novel, essay, video, even a tiktok post - story should be at the heart of it - in my mind at least it's the foundation of communication.