The BS column: Rule, Britannica (online only)

(Published in the Business Standard, March 2012)

The names on the spines of the Encyclopaedia Britannica form a litany. As a child, I browsed my way from Baltimore to Braila, Extraction to Gambinus, with a special stop at P-R: Plants to Raymond of Tripoli.

That was from the fourteenth edition, with somber dark blue spines instead of the brown, blue and gold of later editions; the music of the Britannica’s spines would change through each edition. (The first, issued in just three volumes in 1768, went from Aa–Bzo and Caaba–Lythrum to Macao–Zyglophyllum, for those who were wondering.)

For many bibliofetishists, the thistle-stamped bound volumes were inseparable from the content. This month, it was announced that no further physical editions would be printed--the Britannica will now be available only online and as an app.

For many Indians, the Britannica stood for unassailable authority. The aspiring brown sahib bought a set for his fledgling library, though secretly he envied those who’d inherited theirs, complete with age spots on the pages. The Britannica was the caste-mark of the newly Anglicised Indian; a generation later, it would signal the owner’s interest in the wider world, stamp him or her as an aspiring global citizen.

Nirad C Chaudhuri captured the solid place that the Britannica had in many Indian—all right, Bengali--homes, in the days when knowledge was pursued with the same acquisitive fervour that we reserve for Gadino white diamond bags or gold-leaf ceilings these days.

“In 1914 I was able to surprise my acquaintances by chattering about the German General Staff, General Briamont and his fortifications, artillery and aeroplanes. To no one did this showing-off of mine give greater pleasure than to an aged uncle, Mr Das… who was the father of the cousin who owned the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
The edition Niradbabu would have read had very few entries by Indian contributors, though in keeping with its imperial spirit, the Britannica included many entries on India. By the 2000s, this had changed, but the first few editions bristled with entries on Benares, Indian currency and the Frontier tribes, most written by retired British generals and old India hands.

One of the early exceptions was the wonderfully named Sir Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree (Knight Commander of the Indian Empire), one of the very few Indians in the 1890s to be elected to the British House of Commons. Sir Bhownaggree’s expertise allowed him to write entries on the Aga Khan, Sir CJ Readymoney, Jeejeebhoy and Takhtsinghji. It was a respectable list, if not quite as interesting as the one curated by George Cordon Coulton, an expert on celibacy, concubinage, indulgence, knighthood and chivalry.

The insistence on the wisdom of experts set the Encyclopaedia Britannica apart from more modern rivals, such as Wikipaedia. The Britannica’s approach to knowledge is a curated one: the board of editors picks experts on different subjects, and the early bias towards a British, masculine, Christian view of the world has yielded to a more broad and inclusive understanding of history.

The rise of Wiki as an accepted people’s encyclopaedia in the last eleven years was unexpected. Few thought that an online open-source “encyclopaedia” where entries were contributed and edited by ordinary readers rather than experts would be successful, and yet in its 11 years, Wiki has become as ubiquitous as Google.

But neither institution is free of problems. Many Wiki entries focus on issues of ephemeral value or amplify the present obsession with celebrity. The editing battles on Wiki may be its eventual downfall—entries on more controversial subjects read like constantly overwritten palimpsests. If Wiki can’t scrape the barnacles off its hulk, it may not survive. The Britannica is likely to thrive online, if not in print; but the question of who gets to select its panel of experts is likely to become more fraught. Wiki catalogues everything, arriving almost accidentally at accuracy; the Britannica’s utility is that it promises to select only the most important.

That is not how the Britannica began, though. The first edition advertised the Encyclopaedia as “A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled Upon A New Plan In which the different arts and sciences are digested into distinct treaties and systems”. It was compiled by “a society of gentlemen in Scotland”, and William Smellie, a young scholar, wrote most of the articles. He used a curiously modern method, listing the key sources from Alston’s Tyrocinium Botanicum to Ulloa’s voyages and Young on composition, liberally borrowing from all of these books.

It was very much the cut-and-paste method that journalists and students use these days, and Smellie made no bones about it: “With paste pot and scissors I compose it.”

I like that last quote; I found it on Wikipaedia.

Book review: The Groaning Shelf, by Pradeep Sebastian

(Published in Biblio, July 2011.)

The Groaning Shelf and other instances of book love
Pradeep Sebastian
Hachette India,
Rs 395, 295 pages
ISBN: 978-93-80143-03-3

In 1994, the Internet in India was an infant, alien presence, and to log on was akin to conducting an arcane temple ritual. With sufficient patience and enough supplication, the creaking modems of those days might grant you a brief, tantalizing darshan, a quick glimpse of what it meant to be in the presence of the strange god called the Internet.

Pradeep Sebastian and Sven Birkerts occupied very different imaginative spaces in that year. Sebastian, the Hindu’s articulate, incisive, gently brilliant literary columnist, wrote about his love for the printed word, with the accent heavily on the “printed”. First editions, secondhand bookshops, the love of the musty, distinctive scent of books—these were what he celebrated in his column, as much as the richness of literary content.

For Birkerts, 1994 was the year when he published The Gutenberg Elegies, which would become a landmark collection of essays marking the advent of ebooks (and the presumed death of print). The Internet had already changed the way Americans read, understood and processed the world, and Birkerts was one of the first to chart—and comprehend—the order of change upon us. We were shifting from a print culture to an electronic culture, he said, much as there had been a shift, centuries before, from an oral literary culture to a written literary culture. However, this shift would take less than fifty years, not centuries, to come about; and this shift would also involve a transition in how we understood the practice of reading and writing. Birkerts was prescient in many of the fears he expressed in The Gutenberg Elegies—language would erode, becoming less complex; readers would have to “incessantly reposition the self within a barrage of onrushing stimuli”; we would experience a waning of the private self as we became more and more enmeshed in electronic webs.

In just 17 years since Birkerts wrote The Gutenberg Elegies, these are some of the trends in publishing and reading that have changed. E-books have grown in popularity and availability and e-readers from the Sony E-reader to the Kindle and now the iPad have encountered less resistance than many champions of the book accepted. Language erosion has, according to some experts, happened; but this has also been accompanied by the rise of what might be called e-creoles, often complex sub-dialects used on services like Facebook and Twitter, rich in their own ways of combining symbol, smileys and text, expressive and constantly morphing. Traditional bookstores across the world have been under threat, with independent bookstores and large chains alike going under; the cult of the bestseller and the mass-market paperback dominates a great deal of reading. There is a question mark against the concept of territorial copyright; and there are fears that between them, Google and Amazon might own too much of the world’s electronic libraries and bookstores.

That is, of course, a paragraph of over-simplifications, and it is also a demonstration of the limitations of print. In its current form, flat on the printed page you are reading, the previous paragraph conveys only a limited authorial summary of almost two decades of complex, fascinating and challenging arguments. In its electronic avatar, it would have been possible to link the first sentence to the predictions or analyses of Marshall McLuhan, Zizek or Nicholas Negroponte; to link the second sentence to stories from, say Wired or BoingBoing on the rise of e-reading; to link the third sentence to blogs like Language Hat and Language Log, and so on. Deprived of the backbone of the electronic world, of the potentially intense engagement and architecture of the Internet, what you have left in this paragraph is just an unsatisfactory skeleton. (Note: Since this version is online, I've included some links as illustrations.)



• * *



According to the formidable Nicholas Negroponte, the end of the book in its current, physical avatar is closer than we think—he gives it about five years. Observers of the Indian publishing scene believe we have a little longer than that—the physical book will probably never phase out entirely in a country known for its ability to exist in several centuries simultaneously, and even where it does, the process is likely to take ten to 15 years.

It is in this context that Pradeep Sebastian’s The Groaning Shelf, a compilation of writings on the book and on bibliophilia, must be read. This collection of brief, engaging essays—many of them drawn and reshaped from his columns for The Hindu and the Deccan Herald—is at once a nostalgic elegy for the physical book, and a stirring defence of its virtues. Sebastian represents one end of the ebook-versus-printed book debate; he stands for everyone, every reader and writer, who believes that our world would be diminished if we could no longer hold bound volumes in our hands.

The Groaning Shelf is really the distilled essence of one reader’s love affair with books, complete with the inevitable moments of darkness and disillusion. It opens with a description of a condition common to those who live their lives in reading, publishing and writing—a moment of turning away from reading itself, becoming, in Sebastian’s phrase, “a lapsed reader”. For him, this is the moment when he shifts from a deep engagement with the content of books to a deep fascination with the form. “The pleasures of bibliophily for me lie in fully embracing the book as material object: its bibliographical aspects—binding, edition, condition, rarity, and typography matter to me as much as their literary content.”

In the first few sections, Sebastian moves through all the complex and beloved rituals of the true bibliophile. Like Walter Benjamin, he derives pleasure from unpacking his library, aware that in describing the humble and yet intently engaging process of rearranging books on a shelf, he is joining a long line of writers from Benjamin to Geoff Dyer to Anne Fadiman. Alberto Manguel and Coleridge share his search for the perfect bookshelf; Baudrillard and Sontag help him understand the romantic richness that lies behind the process of becoming a book collector, an obsession that goes beyond the merely acquisitive. First editions—the hunt for them, the joy of possessing an untouched, perfectly preserved first edition of a Nabokov or an RK Narayan—lead him to the very Indian neglect of these aspects of book-love. He will, later, meet Bibi Mohamed, an antiquarian book dealer in Manhattan who is one of the very few experts in her field of Indian origin; and he will also write with some feeling of the relative absence of book history in India.

Perhaps the only disappointing section in this collection is ‘Writers’, which offers a series of short profiles of writers from Pico Iyer to Ayn Rand, Pankaj Mishra to JD Salinger. The short essay form, with some pieces just two or three pages long, works very well with Sebastian’s bibliophilia—by moving from the joys of reading in bed to the tale of obsessive collectors, he creates a map of the reading world, and a timeline of the development of the kind of reader of books Anne Fadiman would have classified as courtly rather than carnal. But while these brief profiles are necessarily limited—they must have been written for magazine or newspaper publication—they work only as introductions, and often leave the reader wanting a great deal more.

This is the danger of any collection of essays by a columnist, especially one as sensitive and as thoughtful as Sebastian—the truncated length of the essays whets the reader’s appetite, but leaves it unsatisfied. Even within these, though, there are moments of recognition and pleasurable insight. Writing about Pico Iyer (“Thomas Merton on a frequent-flier pass”), Sebastian instinctively does what any committed reader will do when he comes to Iyer’s novel Abandon. He places it among its natural family: “Reading it, you are reminded of other stories about God amidst lovers. I thought of Shadowlands straightaway—the story of CS Lewis and his love, Joy Grisham—and of another little known, astonishing book titled A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken…”

All of his instincts are of this order—the instincts of a disciplined, accomplished reader—and this collection is perhaps the first in many decades in India to celebrate books and reading. The Groaning Shelf has the same directness and ease as Sebastian’s columns: it was written by a reader for other readers, and that is its greatest strength. The moments of serendipity compensate for the inevitable disappointment of wanting more than just this collection of essays, however valuable in themselves; there was a deeper book, the personal history of an Indian reader, waiting to be written, and though it is unfair to criticize Sebastian for not having written it, it is tempting to ask him to write it some day.

As a reader, I am on the other side of the divide from Sebastian, wedded more to the content of books than to their form. Many of us “carnal readers”, to use Fadiman’s elegant division, are fascinated by the promise of the ebook revolution, and are happy to jettison the paraphernalia—the groaning shelves—that accompany being a book lover. Sebastian’s essays are a reminder of courtly love, and all that it can bring: the frisson of learning the arcane terminology of the book trade, the joyous serendipity of browsing in secondhand bookshops and finding what you didn’t know you needed.

Perhaps one of the loveliest essays in The Groaning Shelf is about a visit Sebastian makes to “the bookshop that every bibliophile secretly fantasizes about… an entire bookstore full of just books about books.” Behind that deceptively simple phase lies a lifetime of the love and passion that only the true, dedicated reader knows.

Speaking Volumes: Reading on rent: ebooks

(Published in the Business Standard, July 25, 2011. Will probably do an expanded version of this soon, with a greater focus on reader's rights and how we stand in danger of losing them.)

It takes less time than you might guess to convert a reader wedded to the idea of the physical book into a Kindle or an iPad enthusiast.

As most ebook newbies have discovered over the span of the last few years, the switch to reading on a device is smoother and easier than anyone would have predicted. The smell of the pages, the feel of the physical book, the pleasure of flipping through a book; these are easily, and seamlessly, replaced by the screen experience.

I read faster on a Kindle than I do on the page; the e-ink and the ability to format the size of the font to my preferences on the page work beautifully for me. Scrolling through pages is automatic, and while I missed page numbers and think ebooks should offer both options, it’s interesting to use the percentage method.

Percentages make me evaluate more sharply whether I want to continue reading or not, in a way that page numbers never did. At 42% of the way through a tedious, limply written family saga, evaluating whether you want to spend precious hours of your life struggling with the remaining 58% becomes surprisingly easy. This can also be daunting: who wants to know that days of reading have taken them a mere 16% of the way through Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake?

Moving from the physical book to the ebook, the switch is both sharper and less threatening than I would originally have guessed: like moving between cities, rather than shifting from one house to another. The Kindle, the iPad, the Sony Reader and other devices answer the big fears we all had about shifting to ebooks. Yes, the ebook is portable; the few situations in which battery life or screen brightness are problematic are rare in real life. As I adapted to the fact that the Kindle allowed me to have a portable library, not just a portable book, my reading habits changed. It was easier to browse through six books on similar subjects when you didn’t have to hunt through your physical shelves to locate them.

Nostalgia for the printed word on the physical page ebbs fast, in the face of the very real conveniences of ebooks, the ability to make marginalia which will never deface the books, to customize the page, to buy books that are hard to find in India. Kindle readers downloaded George RR Martin’s Dance with Dragons two weeks ago—it is yet to arrive in Delhi’s bookstores. The ebook version of Aravind Adiga’s Last Man In Tower was available three weeks before the first Indian reviews came out. Unless publishers enforce a deliberate territorial lag on ebook versions, this is one of the joys of reading the virtual book: you don’t have to wait for weeks, sometimes months, for the books you love to come into your library.

But there is one thing missing from the ebook experience, and it’s a big one: a sense of ownership over your virtual library. In order to prevent piracy, the industry doesn’t allow owners to download books onto your hard drive. Looking at my virtual shelves, I am struck by the knowledge that these books are in effect, there on rent: Amazon, or the publisher, could delete them from my library faster than you can say “disapparate”. (This is one of the reasons why Richard Stallman militates against ebooks—he thinks that in their current form, ebooks offer readers diminished rights over their own libraries.)

For those who think that this is unlikely to be a problem, consider possible situations: a publishing house may recall editions, or replace a virtual edition with a cleaned-up, or bowdlerized, version. A regime may demand censored editions of certain books, before it will allow Amazon or other ebooksellers to set up shop.

Those paranoid about government interference point out that one’s Amazon wishlist or virtual library may be used as evidence against you, much as suspected Maoist sympathizers were recently being prosecuted on the ridiculous charge that they owned copies of Bhagat Singh’s speeches, in Chattisgarh. And there are far less sinister, more plausible, scenarios, where a customer’s dispute with Amazon or other booksellers might lead to their accounts and virtual libraries being frozen.

There are far too many benefits to e-reading for people like me to abandon the ebook.
There’s the not insignificant pleasure of knowing that you’re saving paper, dead trees and acres of shelf space. There’s the pleasure of cross-referencing within your virtual library, and access to the excellent Kindle Singles—standalone longform articles, hard to get anywhere else. Buying ebooks allows me to buy the most obscure, the hard-to-find, the out-of-print; or to get my hands on a favourite writer’s book faster than Delhi bookshops can get the book to me.

It’s not nostalgia for the physical book that we should be debating; that argument, sadly, is unlikely to move generations who are growing up reading on screen and on Kindle. But ebooks raise a whole set of questions about reader’s rights. At present, the shift from the physical book to the ebook has resulted in a loss of ownership, and a potential loss of privacy and other rights, for readers. That’s where the debate should shift, in the next five years.

The BS column: Ebooks and Wylie's War

What Gutenberg really did when he invented the printing press was simple: he changed the relationship between book and reader. It’s often forgotten that pre-Gutenberg, you were either a patron—able to afford to commission your own manuscript, copied painstakingly by scribes from an exemplar—or a privileged member of the Church, or, more commonly, just a listener.

What the arrival of the e-book has done is to change the relationship between publisher and reader, and the rising screams of distress you’ve heard over the last decade has been the response of the publishing industry, in general. Statistics support the idea that the e-book, and e-reading, are not passing fads, despite the nostalgia many of us have for the scent and feel of the printed page. The Kindle and the iPad are game-changers, and every significant trend indicates that e-readers will rule the markets over the next decade, even in relatively slow-adopting countries like India.

The problems before the publishing industry are complex. The customer wants e-books cheaper, arguing that s/he isn’t getting a paper book, and should pay significantly less. The author wants a better cut, arguing that publishers don’t have to carry the distribution and warehousing costs involved with print. There are aggressively unpleasant wars over monopolies: will Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Google end up owning digital rights, which e-reader will rule the market? Publishers, battling piracy issues, stuck in a model of geographical territories and royalties inherited in the 15th century, have been under siege for a while now.

This week, one of the UK’s top agents, the notoriously aggressive Andrew Wylie, promises to change the rules of the game in drastic fashion. Wylie has started Odyssey Editions, an initiative that will sell the digital versions of some of the greatest modern classics—from Updike’s Rabbit series to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to Nabokov and Hunter Thompson. Wylie is offering better terms to authors, though he’s angered many who would otherwise encourage the growth of digital publishing by agreeing to a monopolistic deal with Amazon.

Odyssey Editions books will be available exclusively via Amazon’s Kindle store, which would be the equivalent of telling a buyer of a print book that he can only buy from Waterstones and only read his book in selected locations. This part of the deal makes absolutely no sense, and Wylie needs to consider the precedent he’s setting. But the fact that he’s offering authors a significantly larger percentage of profits for their work, and that readers will get their ebooks at a realistically cheap price is what’s upsetting some of the biggest names in publishing. At present, Random House has announced that they will not do new business with the Wylie Agency—which represents some of their top authors, including Rushdie—until the matter is resolved. Bluntly, expect pistols at dawn.

If Wylie had been acting in isolation, the publishing industry might be able to brand him as a maverick—there’s a reason why he’s called The Jackal, after all. But whenever the e-book debate comes up, it’s a good idea to take a look at what Japan’s doing, because trends in that nation tend to anticipate what will be happening in the rest of the world a year later.

Earlier this month, one of Japan’s hottest authors, Ryu Murakami, announced that he would publish his new book, A Singing Whale, as an ebook download in conjunction with the iPad. Murakami’s readership in Japan and elsewhere is huge—he may not be as well-known as the other author with the same surname, Haruki Murakami, but he is a highly-regarded, bestselling author. His defection from Kodansha, his print publisher, to epublishing is significant. It was foreshadowed by the decision Stephen King made years ago to release some of his books online before they were made available in print. While moving straight into ebook format and bypassing print won’t work for all authors, if it works for a significant set of influential writers, you’re looking at a game where the rules have changed beyond recognition.

It’s worth noting that the Japanese tech giant Sharp has plans to open an ebook store in Japan that will challenge the Amazon monopoly on ebookselling. And that in the world of e-readers, applications like the Nook, which promises to convert the Android phone into an e-reader, have just been launched. This debate is no longer about the ebook versus the printed book; realists need to accept that ebooks are already here and that despite the massive industry problems, e-readers have converted customers far more easily than anticipated.

What Wylie’s done this week with Odyssey Editions is to expose the fact that the modern printed-book publishing industry is a dinosaur. By and large, excluding a few innovative firms, publishing has treated ebooks like a version of print—in terms of design, pricing, distribution and author’s royalties. Wylie may not be redrawing the map the right way, but he has made his point. The old maps for the industry just aren’t going to work any more.