This is hardly the first time that the literati have worried about the demise of book publishing. A July 1927 BBC radio debate, “Are Too Many Books Written and Published?” pitted Virginia Woolf against her publisher husband, Leonard. The Woolfs considered the impact of bestsellers as well as the distractions modern life posed to the “reading habit”—but their most interesting exchange focussed on cost and on the future of books as objects. Leonard argues for hand-made books, criticizing the appetite of the masses for popular fiction, and lamenting the death of quality. Virgina answers:
Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected.
This makes a certain sense: many books aren’t worth keeping around forever, though Virginia’s rationale means that the marketplace alone determines which books get a second edition in a sturdier material. It seems worth noting that her own first novel, “The Voyage Out,” met with immediate success, making her, perhaps, a bit biased. In such a system, how many brilliant books might disappear?
The good news for the present-day reader, of course, is that we needn’t worry about any book disappearing: technology allows us to store a book electronically, and we can keep every word around forever, without concern for dust or space. As the Canadian scholar Melba Cuddy-Keane, who transcribed the debate in the PMLA, points out, Woolf’s argument seems to predict the need for something like the e-book—a cost-effective, eco-friendly, and disposable alternative to cloth-bound volumes. But, if the future of publishing really is the e-book, what would Woolf have thought about a world entirely without paper-and-cloth books? Less dirt, yes, and tidier, certainly, but it’s hard to imagine that it’s something she’d have wanted.
(Photograph: Tory Williams)