I draw your attention to this wonderfully unsentimental yet passionate defense of books by Toby Mundy. The publisher at Atlantic Books, Mundy offers his personal views on the devaluation of the medium for the thought-provoking site Medium.com. Specifically, of course, he draws our attention to Amazon and its Wal-Mart-like ability to muscle publishers (and by extension authors) into lowering prices toward the existential threshold. But from a cultural perspective, Mundy makes a sound plea to consumers not to confuse the book with the information it contains and, thus, not to be lulled by artificially cheap prices into setting fire to the basic economics that make a diversity of books possible. Mundy writes:
“To price a book in the way information is priced is based on a rather one-eyed view of its value. As any textbook author will tell you, Information is undoubtedly part of a book’s utility. But that is only part of the story. A second purpose is to provide readers with transporting Experiences, usually from reading fiction. A third is to impart current Knowledge. When TS Eliot asked plaintively in ‘The Rock’, ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’ he was reminding us that these two things are not the same. Knowledge comes from the interpretation of information, experience and facts. It comes from the stories we tell about those things. Perhaps it is the capacity to create these stories that make us human.”
By contrast, Mundy opens his piece quoting Russell Grandinetti, Amazon’s VP for Kindle, who accurately says that books compete for our time with other things like Facebook, Twitter, and Candy Crush Saga. But this somewhat common market view is only a half truth whose half-lie leaves out exactly the point. There may be individuals who read books and play Candy Crush Saga, but I am confident that they do not value both equally.
See Toby Mundy’s full editorial here.
