Storytellersunplugged

by Brian Hodge

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This past January 15th, I was glued to the computer screen more than usual. It’s an annual rite. Every mid-January, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs takes the stage at the Macworld Expo and yanks the sheets off all the goodies the rest of us have been speculating about since last Arbor Day.

Yep … I’m not just a Mac geek. I’m one of those Mac geeks.

No home runs this year, but you can’t expect an iPhone every time out.

No, the big news came the next day, in a technology blog on the New York Times web site. The blogger had spent a half-hour interviewing Jobs, and up popped the topic of the Kindle, the electronic book reader that Amazon introduced last November. Jobs was merciless in his assessment, but it had nothing to do with the usual make-or-break factors like design, quality, ease of use, or pricing.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he’s quoted as saying. “The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

It always irks me to read these death knells, for obvious reasons, but I can usually brush off the source. This time it was coming from someone who has had a significant impact on technology and culture. Someone I’ve long regarded as uniquely brilliant at what he does. Over the past quarter-century, Steve Jobs has brought the lightning on multiple occasions: with the original Macintosh computer in 1984, with Pixar Studios, rescuing Apple from death’s door with the iMac, and finally with the still-growing iTunes ecosystem.

He’s influenced my daily life. And now he’s telling me I’m obsolete. Me, all the other SU contributors, and pretty much anyone else who drops by here and … absorbs it all by osmosis, I guess. Obsolete.

Fucking hell, Steve, I’ve been with your team since 1991. What, are you trying to send me over to Bill Gates now, after all this time, because his foundation donates billions of dollars in the hope of improving our national education system?

We’ll leave aside the irony of the nobody-reads charge being leveled by a CEO whose computer platform is still a market niche with roughly a 6% share. And in more than one of the 200+ responses to the blog, people noted that of course Steve Jobs has a vested interest in ass-reaming a potential competitor’s idea until he can figure out how to do it better. Forget all that.

I just want to know how much truth there is, or isn’t, to it.

I want a little more ammunition to use for refutation purposes than simply echoing all the blog responders who said, “Well, I still read,” although God bless them, every one.

I want to assure myself that we writers are more than just a ragtag band of Don and Doña Quixotes, tilting in vain at functional illiteracy and apathy, and facing a vast army of incurious goobers who’d be lost without pictographic cash register buttons when ringing up a Big Mac.

So, ever since, I’ve kept my eyes open, looking for something to hang my hopes on, rather than hanging myself from the rafters. Or going out to sit on the ice like any self-respecting old-school Eskimo would do when he’s reached terminal obsolescence.

And t’would appear that news of our death is greatly exaggerated.

• According to the Book Industry Study Group, 2008 revenues for U.S. publishing are projected to be $15 billion.

• Same source: U.S. readers will buy 408 million books this year.

• According to a survey conducted last August by Ipsos Public Affairs for The Associated Press, 27% of Americans didn’t read a single book in 2006. Nothing to be proud of there. But at the other end of the spectrum, 27% read 15 or more books.

• The top 8% are superfreaks like us, reading at least 51 books for the year.

• If you cast the nonreaders into the Purgatory of their own making and even out the remaining 73%, the average is 20 books per reader.

So why not kiss a superfreak today?

• According to BBC News, reporting in late January on a Nielsen Online survey, books are the world’s number one online purchase, and have been bought by 41% of Internet users in the 48 countries surveyed. That’s a 7% increase over two years ago, when the figure was 34%.

• Some of the biggest concentrations of online book sales are in emerging markets. South Korea, 58% of Internet users. Vietnam, 54%. Brazil, 51%. China, 48%. India, 46%. And while we’re at it, let’s have a round applause for Old Europe, with Germany and Austria coming in at 55% and 54%.

• Finally, there’s the Kindle itself. It’s selling. So far, Amazon — who claim their own book sales have increased every year since 1995 — can’t keep the 10-ounce critter in stock.

Now, I’ve never been convinced that electronic book readers are going to occupy anything more than a niche of their own. The act of reading is too tied up in the epicurean, tactile comforts of paper and covers and the occasional squeak of a highlighter. A slab of plastic, however well designed and wirelessly enabled, just doesn’t seem as much fun to curl up with.

Still, four years ago I did an article about the E-Ink technology that’s central to the Kindle’s display, and have been waiting ever since for someone to do the e-book concept up right. The Kindle appears to have nailed it better than anything else so far, and I wish it continued development and a long, healthy life. Like books-on-tape and, more recently, downloads from the likes of Audible.com, it’s another way of getting the words out there and meeting the listener/reader where they live.

It’s also made me remember that, love books though I may, I don’t traffic in books so much as I traffic in words. Books are just the delivery method. And delivery methods may change, but what words carry — hopes and fears and dreams and ideas and rage and love and hate and every other blessed thing that makes us remember that even at our loneliest we are not alone — these are universal, and timeless, and the human need to share them and experience them will never, ever be obsolete.

Have I cherry-picked the stats here? You bet I have. Just as surely as there are always glass-half-empty people who can look at the numbers, or different sets of numbers, and find a rationale for hand-wringing and woe.

But if all they have to tell you, and the only way they can frame it, is antithetical to who and what you are, why would you ever listen to them? Why give them the power to corrode what shines the brightest in you?

People don’t read anymore?

Read this, Steve Jobs:

Suck. My. Thesaurus.

And if it’s all the same to you, I’ll keep using your computers to write the books that prove you wrong.