The Death of Literature?

Over at Lapham's Quarterly, Curtis White explores how the divergence between literature as art and literature as commodity has contributed to the imminent death of both:

As far as I’m concerned, the book business deserves to die if for no other reason than that its business model is something out of the 1930s: send a bunch of loser Willy Loman’s out as “reps,” people who don’t read and don’t understand the books they sell, and have them place the books on consignment, just as if they were old chairs that you were trying to unload at the local consignment store. As far as the bookstores were concerned, they were mostly purchasing decoration for their stores, so that it at least looked like a place to buy books. The few books that actually made money—celebrity memoirs, confessions of failed politicians, moronic self-help tomes, and jokey piss-jobs about not running with scissors—were profitably located on a few tables at the front of the store. Everything else was just ambience.

Bad as this was and remains, the really fatal flaw in this system is that it allows stores to buy new titles not with money but with the return of all the books you sent them months ago that they never sold, and never really had much interest in selling. How could they sell them? No one working in the store read books, and they were no more capable of recommending a challenging literary title than they were of shaping your investment portfolio or diagnosing a kidney complaint. Every few years in the ‘80s and ‘90s, B&N would take some sort of national warehouse purgative and back would come books you thought you’d sold months and years earlier. (I once watched in appalled amazement as two-hundred copies of a backlist title that had only sold maybe five-hundred to begin with was returned by Barnes and Noble five years after it was first released. I had to wonder, did we ever sell any copies of this book?) The best that most of our books could hope for was a short shelf life of four to six months, a single lonely spine out in an acre of shelves and books.

Now even that stupid and insidious racket seems to be failing.

With the death of each new generation of booksellers, each failed “business model,” the independent literary writer/poet/publisher wants to say, “Good riddance, they had it coming,” only to be mortified by how much worse the thing is that takes its place.¹ In ten years, for people raised by computers (and by that I mean everyone), buying a book will mean buying an ebook from Amazon, Google, or maybe Barnes and Noble, if it survives. I asked John O’Brien, the legendary publisher of Dalkey Archive Press, what he thought, and he said this:

The greatest threat to book publishing in the United States right now is Amazon. Through various spin-offs, they have become a publisher, and this means that they are moving towards becoming both a distributor of books and a publisher, and no book publisher will be able to compete. In the future (and I am sure this is the plan) Amazon wants to control all distribution and all publishing. This is a very scary prospect: that a single company will have such power to determine what will be published and on what terms. Once the ‘Amazon plan’ is realized, they will be able to charge whatever they want to charge and will of course be able to decide what the best-sellers will be. They will have gotten themselves into the position of making such decisions because they will be the only game in town.

Even a year ago, O’Brien would have sounded paranoid to most people, but then came this article in the August 17, 2011 edition of the New York Timesbusiness section,“Amazon Set to Publish Pop Author.” 

Amazon moved aggressively Tuesday to fulfill its new ambition to publish books as well as sell them, announcing that it had signed Timothy Ferriss, the wildly popular self-help guru for young men.

Amazon has been publishing books for several years, but its efforts went up several notches in visibility when it brought in the longtime New York editor and agent Laurence Kirshbaum three months ago as head of Amazon Publishing.

To read the rest of White's article, click here . . .