Leah's Price's 2019 What We Talk About When We Talk About Books is informative and witty. It resonates differently in the pandemic's later stages than when published two years ago. Since March 2020, immersion in a world made of words (whether printed or digital) has taken on new life, sometimes sharply (Kendi's How To Be An Anti-Racist), sympathetically (Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half) and sometimes purely escapist (The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires).
Not only does Price quash numerous assumptions about books, readers, libraries, and futurists, she unearths the work of many editors, designers, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and reviewers who mediate the business of books between author and reader. Their invisible work is usually missed only in its absence: just try reading a error-filled, typo-rich self-published e-book on Amazon to get the point. Full credit to print book interior designer Jeff Williams, cover photographer Laura Hennessey and designer Chin-Yee Lee, research assistant Maia Silber. Since the author's acknowledgements are in alphabetical order, I am not sure which person is her editor at Basic Books/Hachette.
Books and their readers and non-readers, occasional readers, dip-in-and-out readers are in many ways the main subjects. Price has taught book history and English at Harvard and Rutgers. She has a sharp eye for the telling detail as well as the point of academic theories and critical turns.
Price overturns many assumptions both by readers and those who claim reading is becoming a non-issue. Why do both fetishize cover-to-cover reading of literary classics when that has always been a small minority of all book uses? She looks at what books can tell us about their users: which pages are thumbed, marked, dog-eared, which apparently untouched. The myth of the ideal book complements the myth of the ideal reader, and both are conveniently misleading.
The remarkable ignorance regarding book history and usage by those who first designed digital book readers led to costly and avoidable mistakes for Amazon, Barnes & Noble (the sad Nook) and Apple. The confident predictions of futurists and disruptors have time and again been left blowin' in the wind even as books have changed significantly at every turn of technology, social history, and political ideology.
The jacket image and design perfectly illustrate Price's points: red bordered page scrolling around bindings suggest the codex, the scroll, readers' uses and abuses, as well as the flames that have consumed libraries, readers, and régimes (the biblioclastic Fahrenheit 451; Winston Smith's tell-tale paperweight in 1984; Savonarola's, Trollope's, and Tom Wolfe's bonfires of vanities and Josef Goebbel's bonfires of books and their authors). As in Matthew Battles' The Library: An Unquiet History, books have as often attracted scorn and destruction as they have acclaim and conservation: books as sources of power, fear, and disruption.
Price's book is subtitled The History and Future of Reading. Universities often discount the presence of books because they are so routine. Undergraduates who seem unwilling, unable, or simply disinclined to read (as assigned, or on their own) may not be the accurate bell-weather faculty and administrators believe them to be. Sales and circulation of printed and digital books were both up during the pandemic, sometimes constrained by availability. Book sales were up 12% between June and mid-August 2020 compared with ten weeks' prior numbers.
Books have at the forefront of numerous developments in marketing: door-to-door marketing, consumer credit, self-serve retail sales, and online direct. Every time books have been proclaimed as dead (including Thomas Edison's confident predictions in 1913), they have had a way of sneaking back, whether hardbound, paperbound, or digital, print or serialized. Much hinges on whether time for reading of any kind will be available in surveillance gig-work economy. Price is confidently warns that "the experience of immersion in a world made of words will survive in and only if readers continue to carve out places and times to have words with one another."