Fred

I have worked in the book industry on and off for thirty years — my first bookstore job was at NYU when most of you were still gleams in your fathers’ eyes — and I have watched this industry endure one seismic shift after another. It has changed so much people don’t even want to call it the “book industry” anymore. Now we’re the “publishing ecosystem,” or the “published content community,” or, I don’t know, “Fred.”

But here’s the thing about Fred. He’s a resilient sucker.

First there was the massive retail expansion of the early and mid 1990s, when Barnes and Noble and Borders were dropping superstores on the landscape like Johnny Appleseed. The square footage devoted to book retail in America tripled in a few short years, while the overall size of Fred remained relatively flat. Do the math, it’s not pretty.

Then it was the rise of e-commerce. Not only was the retail pie getting cut into ever smaller pieces by the brick and mortar crowd, now it was being cut into wafer thin slices by a seemingly infinite expanse of virtual square footage.

But those were only the warm-up acts. They were Marshall Crenshaw and Aztec Camera getting the crowd ready for Elvis Costello and U2. Retail expansion was impactful, but it wasn’t transformational. No, for that, we needed something beyond comprehension. We needed digitization.

The digital transformation of Fred has been written about ad nauseam and covered from every conceivable angle. I’ve read how print books will be dead in two years, and I’ve read how e-books are just a fad. (“No,” and “gimme a break,” by the way.) I’ve heard speakers posit a world in which digital content will save Fred, destroy Fred, and introduce Fred to a nice girl from Hartsdale so they can settle down, all in the same speech.

And yet, when I ride the commuter train home from New York City, I see people reading books. Lots of books. True, many of them are Kindles or Nooks, but an increasing number — you read that right — an increasing number, are reading print. It’s as if there has been a collective sigh of exhaustion from looking at screens all day, and people are craving the tactile and visual sensation that is ink on paper.

Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not as if digital books are going to slowly fade into the sunset. They’re not. And it’s not as if Fred — and in case you’ve already lost the thread of this meandering post, “Fred” is the book industry — doesn’t have its problems. It does. People who used to buy books to learn how to cook spaghetti, or build a deck, or be a better lawyer, now often get their content from the Internet, and usually for free.

But even with that, there’s something about books that continues to hold our interest. Books, as artifacts, are special. Think about how quickly music changed. The iTunes store launched in April, 2003. and within five years, by 2008, people were buying twice as many downloaded singles as they were CD albums, and CD albums were in steep decline.

ALBUM SALES 1973 – 2010

SINGLES SALES 1973 – 2010

In the book industry, uh, er Fred, while digital book sales have soared, the growth still pales when compared to the music industry. (For a clarity’s sake, we’ll continue to call “the music industry” the music industry.) Why? For one thing, listening to a downloaded MP3 is experientially identical to listening to a compact disc. For another, music can be sold in small discrete packages (songs). With books, neither of those things is true. Maybe that explains why for the most part, print has held its own even while digital has grown. (I say “for the most part” because mass market books have in fact taken it on the chin.) If anything, we should be thanking digital for growing the pie again.

Before any luddites out there rejoice, we might simply be in the calm before the storm. We could be one technological innovation away from another seismic shift. The truth is, no one knows and I’ve given up trying to predict the future.

But let’s not worry about the future. Let’s worry about the here and now. And for now, for right now and right here, Fred is alive and kicking, and people are reading books, print or digital, they’re reading books. And that, my friends, is good.