Let’s start with the good news first. Science publishing, a notoriously slow field, has boomed during the current pandemic. Even compared to the SARS epidemic a few years ago, this time the volume and frequency of scientific publications have risen manifold.
But, of course, that is not what we mean when we think of books. We mean books for ordinary readers, not scientific papers for virologists, epidemiologists, and medical experts. And there the news, as expected, is not at all good.
The Federation of European Publishers (FEP) conducted surveys of its membership in the first few months of the pandemic. The immediate effect of the corona-crisis was the closure of bookshops in the five biggest markets of Europe (Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Spain) and in almost all other territories. FEP estimated that sales in bookstores dropped between 75 to 95 percent during lockdowns, and they continue to be low after lockdowns were lifted. The trade in Germany, the biggest market on the continent, is expected to lose 500 million euros during the year. Many titles meant to be published in 2020 were dropped or postponed, with the maximum recorded in Italy, where more than 23,000 announced books did not appear. The situation was similar, with only quantitative differences, in other European nations, and in America and Asia.
Dark as these figures seem, there is a darker cloud looming on the horizon. That cloud was there before the pandemic and will continue, swollen and more dangerous, after the announced vaccines have eliminated the danger of Covid-19.After all, bookstores have been suffering for many years.
There are three main causes of this suffering: Legislative, market-related, and digital. The legislative reasons are the ones we are least aware of, and they are related to market ‘imperatives.’ The rise of online proto-monopolies like Amazon has enabled readers to procure books while sitting at home and usually, despite the postage or courier costs, at low prices. This appeals to the individual reader.
But what the reader forgets is that such huge proto-monopolies can afford low prices only by offering substantial discounts on the books being sold: they negotiate such discounts with publishing houses via bulk purchase understandings and by cutting their own profit margins. They can do so because they sell, say, 500 or 50,000 copies of successful books. An independent bookshop cannot sell more than a few dozen copies of the same book. It still largely depends on readers walking into it and purchasing the books, and only that many readers physically visit a bookshop in any specific locality. Hence, an ordinary bookshop can seldom negotiate special discounts with publishing houses or sustain major cuts in its profit margins.
This situation has skewed the publishing business for years now, leading to the disappearance of independent bookshops and their replacement by online shops and book chains. Both online shops and book chains are skewed in favour of ‘bestsellers’: Try to check this by looking up the price of an old Dan Brown on Amazon and that of, say, one of my old novels. While online chains, like Amazon, might still offer a copy or two of literary and other serious books, bookshop chains, which need to keep books on shelves, are unlikely to do even that—after a fortnight or so of the publication of any ‘non-bestseller’ book. Next time, walk around in airport bookstores and check.
While this seems to be a marketing matter, there is a legislative side to it. For instance, one of the few countries that has managed to protect its independent bookshops is France. It has done so largely with the help of a simple law: It prohibits all sellers, including online ones, from offering more than (if I remember correctly) five percent discount on any first edition. This simple legislative device levels the playing field a bit, enabling independent bookshops to compete with large corporations.
The third cause, digitalisation, has also preceded the pandemic and will survive it. Moreover, it has been heavily reinforced during the current crisis, with online reading becoming almost a necessity at times. Digitalisation, like all technical developments, has certain advantages and disadvantages, though the latter tend to be overlooked by those who have much invested in highlighting the former. Also, like any technical change, digitalisation has differing impacts in different fields.
It remains highly popular in the financial world, which also determines its political popularity. This makes sense: With the abandonment of the gold standard in the 1980s and the unprecedented rise of speculation, capital has gained in speed and invisibility. Today, the volume of capital invested in sheer global speculation is many times the worth of international trade and production. Obviously, digitalisation enables such speculation, where capital is a play of numbers, and no longer primarily rooted, as it was in classical capitalism, in labour, production and trade. The disadvantage of this is the fact that national governments, in every country, now have to use public funds to keep billionaires happy—but that is another story.
In the book field, digitalisation has clear advantages of access—as ATM-machines and online banking have in the financial world. It also has some disadvantages—of which the most significant and overlooked is the fact that, as yet, online and digital reading does not enable the depth of contemplation and concentration that a good book requires and enables in book form. There are studies proving the greater educational value of reading on paper. Digitalisation will impact on not just what is published, but also on the reading and thinking abilities of the public. There is evidence that it already has.
All these factors are not going to disappear after the pandemic is over. Bookshops will open and have already opened in many countries. Readers will be able to enter these public spaces without fear—at least until the next pandemic strikes. But the factors that have affected the book trade will still be there—and they have swollen in the meantime.
The future of the book trade—no, the future of the book—will depend on our willingness to face up to these factors. But that, in its turn, will depend on our ability to face up to the factors that are behind the pandemic, both as cause and as a relative global failure to control it. We will need to ask: What kind of world do we want live in? Is it a world in which the discourses of change and development, which are always tied to profits and power for some, occlude the material needs of humanity and the limits of the earth as an ecosystem?
It might help to remember that even the word, book, comes from the proto-Germanic word for ‘beech’ wood. The French word for book, ‘livre’, is derived from the Latin, ‘librum’, which used to mean the inner bark of trees. And both in Sanskrit and Latin, ‘writing’ is derived from two different kinds of trees: Ash and birch. We need to recollect much that we have forgotten in order to fashion a sustainable future beyond 2020—not just in the book trade, but on earth.
Tabish Khair is a poet, novelist and critic. His major books include ‘The Thing About Thugs’, ‘How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position’, ‘Jihadi Jane’, and ‘Night of Happiness’.