The Lost World Of Print, Privacy, Booksellers and The Freedom to Read Alone

A fragment of a 1912 Minneapolis newspaper on the Titanic disaster that I recovered from a stack of old papers and later sold. The digital world has not only taken away our right to buy and sell the digital equivalents, but may also hinder long term preservation. In the old world of individuals owning physical copies, they formed a distributed network of libraries, bookstores and individuals who ensured that somewhere things have a better chance of being preserved. In a world where everything is locked behind copyright and held by a handful of companies, everything is in their hands.

 

I am sometimes nostalgic for digging into the inch-thick bulk of the Sunday New York Times on a lazy afternoon. It always had a soft, chewy center of the glossy NYT Magazine, Book Review and other goodies folded into the middle. It was a joy to go through the folded sections on their soft, thin paper, almost like onion skin, to find what it contained. Unlike online, I couldn't scan everything in one minute deciding what to read or not, instead having to page through creating serendipitous connections between disparate articles.  According to the Washington Post, the Sunday Times weighs 5.4 pounds. Though the behemoth of a paper is a waste of resources and a pile of polluting paper, ink, and plastics shipped across the country using too much fuel, pouring over pages with a cup of coffee was never more enjoyable.

 

In the 19th century, print exploded and continued to increase until the Internet, and then eBooks started to take over in the early 2000s. During the thousands of years that print media has existed, the ability to buy and sell these packages of information and knowledge was endlessly open to the owner. I have bought and sold two hundred fifty year old books; who knows how many times they had been bought and sold. Today, the buyer of a digital text or article has no such rights, because total control is in the hands of the publishers. This is a power that they never had before in the thousands of years of people writing on physical media. The print pendulum provided balance by giving publishers sole rights to print, but buyers rights to sell the physical packages of intellectual property, just not the contents.

 

 Thus, the rise of the wondrous depths of the used bookstore where one could dig into piles of dusty old newspapers, stacks of glossy magazines, and shelves of books searching for chance finds. Like so many things in our modern world, power has been taken out of our hands and given to large, opaque entities. They have taken control of the informal dissemination of media as it has been done for thousands of years, privatizing not only who looks at what and when but also privatizing the looks and the people looking, extracting profit from both. 

 

Last year I had a chance to stop in at Ken Sanders Rare Books in downtown Salt Lake City, one of those bookstores that is a destination if you are in the area. 

Unfortunately, in the harsh world of bookstores, this unique bookstore, with some irony, because Ken Sanders was a close friend of the anti-development writer Edward Abbey and is a preservation advocate himself, was pushed out of its current location by developers.  My photos are of a place that sadly no longer exists in its iconic incarnation, an all too common fate in our age.  The fate of Sanders's bookstore is a metaphor for how we are being pushed out of the information universe.  Forces of power and consolidation that seek to control every book and article forever continue to push us out of controlling anything while simultaneously reigning us in to harvest us as data-creating machines.

 Today, I connect on my phone or computer, getting stories faster, but it isn't the same. Because I never subscribed and mostly read at the library or bought with cash at a bookstore, the New York Times and whomever they sell their data (my data) to, didn't know anything about me. They didn't know which articles I clicked on, or how much time I spent on them, cross referencing this with all the other data they had about me to make a detailed profile of my preferences to sell stuff back to me. They didn't know anything about me then, but now they know more than I do. Big Brother is watching. Of course, you can use a VPN or other ways of masking your identity and reading online, but there is no way to subscribe and do that. Unless I seek out the rare NYT on a newsstand, if I want to read it, they have me. Interestingly, when accessing the article linked above from the Washington Post, which I do not subscribe to, they forced me to log in and answer questions about whether I would prefer they send me emails about articles they think I would like!

 

The same is true for eBooks. When I read an eBook on an e-reader, it is like having a team of data scientists reading along with me and tracking my every move. How far are we from the eye tracking in Dave Eggers's dystopian near future novel The Every? Print books are still around and as popular as ever, but in an almost cash-free society, someone, somewhere, still knows what you are reading. 

 

Libraries have a robust code of ethics about not sharing and deleting user data in a timely manner. It is of no business to us, and there have been well-publicized cases where libraries have pushed back against attempts to gather user reading data. There is a case to be made for not buying books and instead checking out physical books from the library if you care about nobody knowing what you read.

 

 Despite my unease about nefarious geeks knowing my reading habits and preferences, I still read books on my Kindle with Jeff Bezos sitting next to me and log in to the New York Times with the east coast literati and Wall Street fund managers looking over my shoulder to get the latest. I snicker when after I do a Google search, type on Google doc, an email or on this blog and then turn on the smart screen it often shows me YouTube videos of those very subjects. Mighty Orwellian of you, Google...thanks. Google über alles in der Welt. I am sure glad I don't have an Alexa.

So, when you read a print book, magazine or journal at the library, or pay with cash at your local bookstore, you are engaging in something that is becoming increasingly rare: the freedom to read alone.

Salt Lake City's main library is an airy and inspiring cathedral to knowledge that was wonderful to visit.