Personal libraries as the backbone of a sustainable book culture

The other day Joshua Kim complained about the price of a university press book on his IHE blog, and today he has offered some thoughts on how to lower prices.  This is the typical underwhelming stuff of IHE blog conversations about books and libraries, and I only mention it because of a much more worthwhile response to his first post by Tony Sanfilippo about what exactly factors into the pricing of scholarly books.  Sanfilippo currently works at Penn State Press, and is an indie scholarly bookstore veteran.  So he has fought—and is fighting—the good fight.

Tony writes [in part]:

I've been selling books for over twenty years, first in retail with my own academically oriented bookstore and now for a university press publisher, and if I had to point to one thing that I think is causing this I'd point back to readers. We all still read, as much if not more than we ever have, but how much do we value book ownership? How many young scholars are building personal libraries? We're in a vicious cycle where the erosion of the perceived value of a personal library means a smaller printrun sellthrough, which is noted and reflected in the price of the next book that a publisher publishes. We have tried cutting prices in half, but it has never doubled sales. IMHO, these prices are a direct reflection of a cultural shift where people are happy to outsource their personal library to Google Books, their institutional library, or to legal or illegal digital copies. They are also content to take only what they need, so where chapter four used to subsidize the creation of the entire book, these days scholars are content with just using chapter four in their custom published textbook, or on Blackboard®. No one is being required to buy the whole book.

I'm all about the sort of efficiency and free exchange of critical discourse that is touted by open access and mass digitizing ventures, but this is precisely why personal book collections... with all of their idiosyncrasies, limitations, and inefficiencies... need to continue to play an important role in book culture.  Institutional libraries should be supported and expanded, but we cannot expect them to bear the burden of the entire book industry as its primary consumer base.  Nor should we expect them to have the books we need when our lack of personal investment in the book culture is what drives prices up.

The physical book, hoarded without undue sentiment

Alan Jacobs links a piece in the NYT by James Gleick arguing that books have been made into fetish objects by people who continue to bestow special value on them apart from digital representations that do the job of presenting texts to us just fine.  Jacobs agrees with Gleick against the Folger's Michael Witmore, who tries to argue that physical books are necessary for physical aspects of the interpretive task.

Like Jacobs and Gleick, I agree that this sort of defense of the book really boils down to sentimentality.  To say that a physical book opens up a new world of interpretation is only slightly more palatable (at least it has the veneer of avoiding pointlessness) than the overly aesthetic appeal to books as precious items in themselves.  While I happen to agree about the appeal of books and value them highly myself merely for their physicality, I don't pretend that this attraction is overly important.  In the end, beyond my subjective attachments, Jacobs and Gleick are of course right.  Books are functional, and they aren't special simply because they come in a particular form that strikes me as special.

That said, physical books should be protected tooth and nail, and do not become obsolete simply because there is a high quality digital representation available.  Why?  Not because you can get anything more out of a physical book than a digitized version, but because it is the basic bibliographic artifact, and so long as it remains useful as a text (rather than simply deteriorated paper that hangs around as a relic), it should be kept and curated as one of the original versions. I am in full support of antiquarians who take inordinate amounts of time tending to their collections, or research libraries that devote miles of stacks to fragile volumes, each of which might only be pulled out for examination once every few decades.

But why?  Not because these books are special, but because they're the books.  A digitization of a microfilm of a book isn't going to be as helpful as a digitization of the book.  Likewise future digitizations with more sophisticated resolutions will refer to the book.  A digital repository can say: the text is here, but a librarian can say: Here is the book.  Consider it a sort of insurance for future copying.  Or maybe a claim to the priority version.  Or maybe just the book itself.  For those concerned with texts, isn't that reason enough to keep physical books?  To hoard them, even?

Sometimes I think the irrational excitation of hoarding naturally leads "book lovers" to post hoc aesthetic analyses of why books are important.  While understandable, this explanation of one's devotion to the physical book is somewhat wrongheaded.  Collecting physical books and keeping them safe for use even amidst their digital representations warrants an irrational sort of devotional hoarding because the enemy is, in fact, at the gates.  We lose texts every day because we lose the physical books in which they find print.  So we circle around the books and declare our undying devotion to them, even though the reasons we give for maintaining such devotion are sometimes baseless and do unjustifiably make books into fetish objects.