After five centuries, the printed page is giving way to PDFs and HTML. Does that mean the end of reading and the beginning of information processing, asks John Sutherland
The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
G W Dahlquist Viking, ten-part serial, £25, see http://www.glassbooks.co.uk
(A one-volume version will be published in January 2007, £16.99)
Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge
Jean-Noë Jeanneney University of Chicago Press, 96pp, £10
What do the following four books have in common? 1) Arthur & George, 2) Schott's Original Miscellany, 3) The Dangerous Book for Boys, and 4) The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters.
One thing the first three have in common is that they are bestsellers. What all four have in common is faux-Victorian packaging.
Buy-me gimmicks are cheap in today's book world, where 160,000 titles hustle for the customer's attention. There is, however, more than a marketing ploy at work in this particular new-wine/old-bottles fad. One can interpret faux-Vic as a response to a terrifying event that is coming soon. What is that precisely? Nothing less than the death of the book as the defining artefact of our culture.
Since the appearance of the print-and-paper codex in the late 15th century, innumerable death sentences have been read over it. Yet it has survived longer than any other cultural apparatus. "What eight 78s," plummy Roy Plomley used to ask, "would you take to your desert island" (assuming you had an endless supply of steel needles)? Now, with Kirsty Young, it's the solar-powered iPod. But the castaway's book is physically what it has always been since the Bible and Shakespeare (Roy's two non-negotiable volumes) first saw the light of print.
Finally, however, extinction is nigh for the printed book. Should we be worried? Very worried, thinks the president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Jean-Noë Jean neney. This custodian of his country's national book store has published a blazingly chauvinistic polemic on the subject.
For him, a new high-tech dark age was ushered in by Google on 14 December 2004. In co-operation with five major research libraries, the firm revealed its project to convert 15 million volumes - 4.5 billion pages of text - into digital form. Four of those libraries, Jeanneney sourly notes, are American; the fifth is English. The lingua franca of this new age? Forget "franca".
National pride apart, Jeanneney's anxieties are threefold. One is digito-homogenisation. The kind of book you buy, "3 for 2", in Waterstone's is the product of scores of differentiating choices as to quality of paper, font, size, dust-jacket, and so on. With Google, it's simpler: PDF or HTML?
The new technology de-individuates. It is not merely a question of wrapping and packaging. Books are frozen particles of individual thought. The million or so titles currently in print have one thing in common: they are each different from the other 999,999. And, although we may not always notice it, we adjust our mental sets to read different kinds of book differently: watch yourself consuming, say, John Grisham and Richard Dawkins.
The pressure of physical uniformity - a one-size-fits-all, one-stop delivery system - will, Jeanneney argues, culturally impact on content and the ways in which we absorb content. This leads to his second anxiety - "disorganised bulk". Reading via search engine is not browsing. It's information processing. You are able, by Googling, to handle vastly larger bundles of data. But the larger the bundle, the less the discrimination. The apogee of digital is an endless grey wasteland. Wandering through a bookshop and sampling the wares is a universe apart from keyboard clicking.
Jeanneney's third anxiety is what he calls "hyperpower" - by which he means Americanisation. He quotes General de Gaulle: "If the market ruled as master, it would be the Americans who ruled as masters over the market. They are multinationals that are no more multinational than Nato. It's just a camouflage of American hegemony. If we follow the market blindly, we will find ourselves colonised by the Americans. We Europeans will no longer exist."
The Google project is the largest book marketing project ever undertaken. It will transform things. And quickly. It has taken centuries to amass the contents of the Bibliothèque nationale and the British Library, but the first phase of Googleisation will be completed in four years. As with Iraq, the UK is just tagging along, happy with a paltry fifth share of the project.
In this context, the faux-Victorian syndrome, with its ostentatious hyper-differentiation, can be seen as an energetic assertion of traditional book values. The assertion is taken many steps further in The Glass Books. G W Dahlquist's fantasia is offered, in the first instance, as a ten-part weekly serial. It is packaged less as faux-Vic than as faux-Dic - Dickensian - complete with an "advertiser", a "double" final instalment, pastiche typeface and "curtain lines" (cliff-hangers) throwing out hooks at the end of every number.
When the Great Inimitable revolutionised the fiction industry in 1836 with The Pickwick Papers, it was, commercially, the solution to two intractable problems. The first was how to spread cost so that the 19th-century pocket could afford a very pricey commodity. A Dickens novel in parts cost, cumulatively, £1: the average weekly wage of most Victorians. In effect, they bought Dickens as we buy furniture: on the never never.
The second problem was how to get books out of London and into the country-wide market. The solution was to use the new rail network, and the delivery system that W H Smith had developed for newspapers and magazines. Books were too bulky. But books broken down into serial particles could be got, on the same day, to John O'Groats and Land's End.
Penguin's decision to market The Glass Books as a Dickensian serial is not mere biblio-nostalgia. It is an attempt to root their 2006 product in the past, while branching into the present and beyond. You can't buy Dahlquist's serial on Mr Smith's Euston Station bookstand, as you could a monthly part of Bleak House in 1852. You must "subscribe".
There are 5,000 copies - first come, first served. Those who don't get on board will have to wait for January 2007, when the volume-form of the book comes out.
It's the 18th-century system - even deeper-rooting, historically, taking us back past Dickens to Samuel Richardson. But for Dahlquist's serial, subscription has to be done via a website (www.glassbooks.co.uk). That site, elaborately designed, contains various boards. The most important links the serial to the blogosphere (which, incidentally, is already buzzing about The Glass Books - check it out with a search on www.technorati.com).
Penguin has fashioned a product that is both deeply traditional and cutting-edge innovative - something that goes back to the 18th-century congeries, detours via Dickens, and zooms forward to YouTube. It's both book and beyond-book. It's also risky. When, in 1996, Stephen King's The Green Mile was issued in monthly parts, it worked, sort of. But when, four years later, King tried cyber-serialisation with The Plant, the project wilted.
Dahlquist is a dramatist and experimental film-maker of no great distinction, who lives in the Pacific north-west. This is his first novel. But forget the absence of track record. Dahlquist has something that the marketers like: he's hip. The narrative of The Glass Books is so smart it hurts. We are in an imaginary country that may be Victorian England, but isn't. A young lady, Miss Temple, has been jilted by her fiancé. She follows him by train to "Orange Canal" and a sinister house that may be a high-class brothel, or the laboratory of a mad mesmerist. Miss Temple is sexually molested - so offensively that, next morning, her maid, without being instructed, burns her soiled silken underwear. There is a murder. Mistaken identities. Villains (or are they?) with names such as Francis Xonck and the Contessa cross the stage. They are confronted by heroes such as Dr Abelard Svenson of the Macklenburg Navy, in diplomatic service to his majesty Prince Karl-Horst von Maasmärck (there's a lot of this stuff).
It's Wilkie Collins on ecstasy; sensationalism (as the Victorians called it) run mad. The Glass Books is a prop-box full of quasi-Victorian narrative effects, tricks, devices and costuming, but underneath there's a blank. The story is, ultimately, as rattlingly empty as the title. Pomo and faux-Vic don't mix. Or, if they do, it needs a writer with more Dickensian skills than Dahlquist has.
But seen as what Thomas Carlyle called a "sign of the times", The Glass Books, with its elaborate faux-Vic and cyber-fic hybridity, is portentous. Can the book, with its half a millennium's worth of baggage, survive in its traditional form? Or will it be Googled into digital porridge? We'll know very soon.
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