Richard Gwai Lo sent me the book So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, by Gabriel Zaid, translated by Natasha Wimmer.#

This book looks at reading and books and contains the author's thoughts about the state of the publishing and reading world. Backed up by statistics for effect, Zaid attempts to make these points clear:#

• The publishing of books is at such an explosive rate that it is impossible to read any significant portion of them.
• This is not a bad thing, in and of itself, because most books are only interesting to a few people, and these people generally find the books they want to read.
• Reading itself is not always a desirable activity, morally or aesthetically speaking. Socrates famously disliked books because they are not as powerful or responsive as a real conversation.
• The only real problem this represents is that more people want to write books, than want to read them. Statistics related to academics are abound, as well as an interesting survey that found over eighty percent of Americans feel they should write a book.
• Books are the most versatile media form because they support blockbusters and experimentation--they promote wealth, diversity, and creativity. This is because the barrier to entry is so much less than a movie or a television program, and thus a book doesn't have to make as much money to be justified, and thus it does not have to appeal to as many people to be published. Thus diversity flourishes and hits are possible.
• Although not necessarily a problem, because it is sometimes solved, another issue with the deluge of books is finding the books that are right for you. A book may be perfect for three thousand people, but often times only two thousand find the book. Book advisors, book clubs, and "constellations" of readers and books are ways around this and they all have room for improvement. [I hope that my book-related blog activity helps readers find their books.]

So many books...#

Books are published at such a rapid rate that they make us exponentially more ignorant. If a person read a book a day, he would be neglecting to read four thousand others, published the same day. In other words, the books he didn't read would pile up four thousand times faster than the books he did read, and his ignorance would grow four thousand times faster than his knowledge. [p. 22]

Barriers to entry...#

Book people (authors and readers, publishers and booksellers, librarians and teachers) have a habit of feeling sorry for themselves, a tendency to complain even when all is well. This makes them see as a failure something that is actually a blessing: The book business, unlike newspapers, films, or television, is viable on a small scale. In the case of books, the economic threshold, or the minimum investment required to gain access to the market, is very low, which encourages the proliferation of titles and publishing houses, the flourishing of various and disparate initiatives, and an abundance of cultural richness. If the threshold of viability were as high as it is for the mass media, there would be less diversity, as is true of mass media. Let us suppose that only one of every hundred titles were published, but for readerships the size of film audiences. What advantage would that scenario offer? None at all, because those titles are already being published today: they're our bestsellers. [p. 26-27]

The lack of the all teaching importance of books:#

In a survey of reading habits today, Socrates would score low. His scant scholarship and his lack of academic titles, foreign languages, resumé, and published work would prevent him from competing for important posts in the cultural bureaucracy, which would confirm his criticism of the written word: The simulation and credentials of learning have come to carry more weight than learning itself. [p. 38]

Chances of finding a particular book...#

A good general bookstore carrying thirty thousand titles doesn't stock even 1 percent of all books available. Supposing the demand were the same for every title, the probability of the store not having a certain one would be 99 percent. If, under these circumstances, a strange arrived blind-folded to take charge of the store and responded "We don't have it" to any request, 99 percent of the time he would be right. [p. 102]

So...

We must take joy in fat, embrace it, celebrate it, explore bookstores in hope of a miracle. As Heraclitus said, if you don't expect the unexpected, you won't find it. In our wanderings across islands of overloaded shelves, on deserted beaches, and even in those floating garbage dumps that bob alongside piers, a fortunate encounter may come swimming along: the message in the bottle you've been waiting for. [p. 110]

Some thoughts...#

I found the discussion of how the real important thing about books is not how many you read or what you remember from them, but what conversations they allow you to be a part of and how you experience life afterwards. Part of me used to feel that I should keep out of the conversation until I was officially learned enough, but I don't think that makes sense anymore. You learn anything by doing it, if even in theory, rather than staring a book. Not that a book can't be a good teacher, but without utilization it is little more than nothing.#

As part of embracing conversations, in think speaking foreign languages is a clear advantage here. While I could generally find an English speaking person to talk to about any particular subject, an Arabic and Pushtu speaker is likely to have a different take on many things and I will be able to navigate a wider sea of memes.#

One thing I found lacking in this book was a discussion of the overlap in books. For example, reading books like Empire and The Wealth and Poverty of Nations make it possible to learn a great deal about certain subjects while avoiding the requirement of reading some hundreds of other books. By looking at the relations between books (due to citation and bibliographies) it is very possible to imagine a discussion of what books have the most 'bang for the buck' in terms of content.#

A final thought I had was related, of course, to blogs. Many of the things that Zaid writes about books could easily be applied to blogs. The entry point is even lower, both in terms of start-up capital, but even more in terms of the investment of the author. An blogger with only a few pages of thoughts every month is very unlikely to be able to put those pages in a mass-media outlet and equally unlikely to personally publish a few pamphlets. With a blog, small bits of writing can slowly build up. Also, this should have something to say about the quality of the most popular bloggers. They are not popular because they are overwhelmingly good, but because the appeal to a wide amount of people. (This of course, can be interpreted to mean that they are good if you measure 'good' in number of viewers, but critics of television do not seem to think this, so for analogy I do not assume it.)#