SNL, Britney's Memoir, And Scrolling in Bed

On The Future of (Other Types of) Books

During his SNL monologue on Saturday, Nate Bargatze joked about his reading habits.

He has a point.

I read books almost exclusively on my Kindle (which, miraculously, syncs with Libby), and it’s astonishing how little an ebook does given what it could do. Ebooks are just…words. Every screen is words. Even when the book is Britney Spears’s memoir, which is a book that really should include audio and/or video clips, or at least an easy way to find them off-reader.

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When I’m not reading on my Kindle, I listen to audiobooks. Lately, I’ve been interested in music, so I’ve been reading books about pop music: how it works, the pop music factory. I usually listen to them on walks, and I do stop to switch over to Spotify to listen to the music the books describe. How simple, I think, to simply add those songs to the audiobook. Think how much more an author could do with an audiobook if clips of the music described were included with the audiobook version. Michelle Williams narrates Britney’s memoir, which is sending people to seek out the audiobook version. Imagine if it also included Britney’s songs?

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I am (was) a huge fan of Sam Sanders’ Into It podcast, which has just been cancelled. In one of the final episodes, he talked with the music critic Maura Johnston about Britney’s music, and they went through the songs, discussing their musical components in detail, from the vocal fry to counterpoint and guitar riffs. They played clips of the songs. It was a fabulous episode, and I learned so much.

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Two friends of mine have recently told me they “never read” anymore; both have PhDs in English Literature. Two other friends—one who works in publishing, the other a creative writing professor—describe their bedtime routine as “my scrolling time.”

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Here’s the first part of Bargatze’s SNL monologue:

I am not romantic about reading. Not everyone needs to read books. The vast majority of humans who have lived did not read, much less read books. Nate Bargatze correlates his lack of reading with not being smart. He is wrong (also, of course, it’s a joke. Reading is important only to be a certain kind of smart. Nor is reading a moral good, or something, as are my four friends above, to be ashamed about not doing.

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Books are now, I think, and will continue to be more clearly over the next two decades or so, a minor form. Like opera, or theater, or ballet. I adore all of these art forms. I spend money of them, as I do on books. As do millions of others. And we will all continue to. But our numbers will stay flat, or dwindle. So it goes. Art is history, and history changes art, and what was once dominant becomes secondary. It’s fine.

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There have been many efforts to “rethink the form of the book” over the centuries, and particularly in the past few decades. The hypertext experiments of the early computer age were some of the best. None have really taken off, for a variety of reasons, but one is that the book is an extremely good technology! It’s contained, and portable, and affordable (these days), and form, or constraints, are enabling.

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Ebooks and audiobooks are “new forms of the book” that have, indeed, “disrupted” books over the past few decades. These are not seen as interesting experiments, but they certainly do accomplish what so many artists and theorists have played around with on smaller scales. But neither ebooks nor audiobooks exploit the potential of their form. They are simply transpositions of printed codices. It’s a huge, missed opportunity.

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I am not thinking about “experiments” with books here. I am thinking about giving readers like Nate Bargatze that break he jokes about longing for. I am thinking about adding more than just words to books (as we always have with children’s books, and did with most books through the middle of the 20th century, when illustrations were commonplace).

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Ebooks and audiobooks are produced by book publishing companies, either the publishers of the books or independent companies who specialize in making these formats. There has been astonishingly few experimentation with either form by any company. Music and video are copyrighted; someone would need to pay someone to include “Oops I Did It Again” in these The Woman In Me formats (podcasts, at least some, do not). I’m not sure how the numbers work.

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I think a lot of people would start reading ebooks and audiobooks if they were able to exploit some of the many— basic, popular— new technologies available. I think my four friends would be four of them.

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Last night I felt like lying on the couch consuming something light but vaguely interesting. Nothing on TV seemed right. So I decided to read Britney Spears’ memoir. The ebook cost me $16.99. That’s more than I would have spent if I had decided to buy a movie or TV series on Amazon Prime. That’s about what it costs to see the Eras Tour movie, a cultural event.

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I do know how the numbers work on ebook production and distribution: it is CHEAP. The single most expensive part of any book is the printing cost. Ebooks are zero printing costs. Simon & Schuster could charge $4 for an ebook and still do fine. Ebooks prices here, and across the board in traditional publishing, particularly Big Five publishing, are way way too high. Many more people would start using ereaders and purchase ebooks (so climate friendly!) if they were cheaper. When Belt runs ebook sales—offering them for $1.99, say—we sell so many so quickly. People will buy these books if the price is low enough.

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What if there were a few versions of ebooks and audiobooks of The Woman in Me, at different price points, and some contained copyrighted songs or videos?

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The print book is not going to change its form, nor will it grow to become more dominant than it is now. Publishing has been absurdly uncreative when it comes to producing the new forms, e- and audio- that have emerged over the past few decades. Book buyers of any form are going to stay flat or dwindle going forward.

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We don’t need to experiment with the form of the print book. But we certainly should attend to other book forms, and make them more appealing to Nate Bargatze, who wants to read more, but finds it intimidating, and for people who find scrolling in bed soothing. I don’t think it would be very hard. And I do think it would be crucial to the health of the companies and organizations who depend on book sales to survive.

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One week until my proposal course begins!

I did spend last night starting and finishing Britney’s memoir. People are discussing how little of her music or career per se she writes about, and how much her exes, family, and children figure into the book. I always ask prospective authors what their goals are with a book—to make money? to get a better job? to prove to themselves they can? etc. Britney wrote that book to the people in her life she discusses and to explain herself, particularly the headline-making parts of her life, to her fans; that was clearly one of her goals, if not the main one (another goal may have been money, which for her might have meant spending the least amount of time on it to get the proceeds earlier, and if so bravo to her; that’s very smart). Thus what she includes and does not.