Book Survival
“The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen… Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up.”
— Phillip Roth
It isn’t hard to see that today’s “dying art” is, well, art. Books are being read electronically. Paintings can be viewed online on crystal clear 1080p screens. Music is sold without a package or simply taken for free off any number of sites. The tactile experience of seeing, feeling, and interpreting art has been lost in an endless barrage of entertainment. People used to read books to travel to places they had no way of visiting. They used to see one-of-a-kind paintings and marvel at the subtlety that went into their creation.
Many people have written on these phenomena in recent years and how technology has made so many things obsolete and so many more relevant that weren’t before. As an aspiring writer of fiction, I have to admit that I often wish I was born thirty years ago. Not because “things were better back then” and “people just aren’t the same nowadays” but because I might have been able to make a living writing books that didn’t involve a post-apocalyptic world, a wizard, a vampire, a zombie, or a woman who is not yet empowered going through the process of empowerment. Call them the holy quintuplet of modern fiction if you like.
I don’t dislike any of these topics necessarily. A certain wizard franchise might very well be my favorite book series and I am always interested in the hypothetical end of our world. I would say that I have a difficult time understanding the broad appeal of all things vampire and zombie. Do they just fill the void left behind by the black hole that was the end of Harry Potter? If so, what mythical creature will take their places once we’ve grown tired of them? (And please, please. Let us grow tired quickly.)
I’m not jealous of their popularity either. People can read whatever they want. I always find that a strange argument whenever someone dislikes a popular thing. I didn’t not like Avatar because of its overwhelming commercial success. Avatar was like watching a special effects porno: you can say it looked amazing, but don’t pretend you watched it for the story. So read vampires and zombies and anything else you like ad nauseam if you must.
Let’s take all of that as a given. For those who love Literature with a capital, snobby L, who read Nabakov and Dostoevsky, Rushdie and Proust, and are always looking for a new and exciting voice to teach them something new about life, let’s not kid ourselves and think things are any different than they currently are. Back to our categories we go.
Each one of the book topics I outlined above has a specific hold on the adult and young adult fiction market. Stories of female empowerment, or romance, have been big sellers for quite a long time, but it wasn’t until Oprah’s book club did everyone start buying the same ones. However, this isn’t necessarily the phenomena I’d like to focus on. The children, as they say, are our future.
The Harry Potter series has sold over 400 million books. The Twilight series’ final book sold 1.3 million copies in one day! All three of the Hunger Games novels are in most every best seller list as is the bundle of the three books together. While I agree that it’s great to see kids enthusiastic towards reading, I find it odd that they are all reading the same things. In every other facet of the technological world, diversity of entertainment has oversaturated the market. Cable television and the internet killed the sitcom. Networks no longer draw 20 million viewers like they did for Seinfeld and Friends. A show like Mad Men on AMC draws 2.9 million viewers for its season four premiere and it’s considered a rousing success. There are simply too many things to watch for everyone to be expected to watch the same things at the same times.
That’s why the success of Harry Potter, Twilight, and the Hunger Games is such an oddity, though that success might be explained if examined a little closer. A book consumes us for such a drastic amount of time in comparison to any other form of entertainment we have that we almost feel as if we want to know that we won’t be disappointed with the experience beforehand. It seems as if with books people are more inclined to stay as close to the fold as possible. More than ever, in our new world of instant communication, the bandwagon thrives. We want to see a movie because it gets a high rating on Rotten Tomatoes. With so many things to occupy our time in modern society, who would want to take a choice on a book that might not be the most rewarding experience ever?
A lot of people would say that Harry Potter did great things for books. The series got people reading, and I don’t think it’s very hard to argue against that. A book, or series of books, can touch an emotional strain that a film never could. We know this. That’s not a new idea. “I liked the book better than the movie.” Everyone who reads the book first is disappointed by the movie, and yet most people watch the movie anyway. It’s a matter of time. Even when you hate a movie, you’ve only wasted a short amount of your valuable time consuming it. The same can’t be said for a book. The same definitely can’t be said for a series of books. Therefore, people don’t like to take chances, and in that sense, it is more difficult to become a successful author, especially one who strays from the norm genre-wise, than pretty much ever before. It is easier than ever to publish a new novel, in e-book form or otherwise, yet probably harder to get read. The modern aspiring author lives in a “cowardly new world.”
The world has and always will be like this. It will be up to those who consider themselves artists to refrain from “guffawing” the changing times, a prideful act that will lead to their irrelevancy in the future. You may have to write a series with vampire characteristics to garner a loyal audience before releasing what you hope to be the next great literary novel. Is that any different than painters and sculptors working for popes and kings?
Let’s not kid ourselves; artists have always sold out. The only thing that changes is the item being sold. Art will never again be what it used to be and never was that back then. Art will always be dying.