Let’s Ban Books, Or at Least Stop Writing Them
There was exciting news last month among the Twitterati. Brian Stelter,
The New York Times prodigy and master of social media, announced to his 64,373
followers that he is going to write a book. The obvious question: What’s up
with that?
Not that I doubt he can do it. The man The New York Observer calls our
“Svelte Twitter Svengali” has a history of setting the bar high and vaulting
over it. He files prodigiously for The Times; stars in the new “Page One”
documentary; and has promulgated, as of my last check, 21,376 Tweets —
not counting the separate Twitter stream where
he records every morsel of food he consumes. (Brian lost more than 90 pounds
last year on a Twitter-assisted diet; it’s probably hard to feed yourself when
your fingers are permanently affixed to a keyboard.) As his colleague in the
media-reporting unit, David Carr, memorably said of the talented upstart, “I
still can’t get over the feeling that Brian Stelter was a robot assembled in
the basement of The New York Times to come and destroy me.”
So yes, he can write a book. But why would he want to? Why, in fact,
would anyone want to?
For years now the populist prophets of new media have
been proclaiming the death of books, and the marketplace seems to back them up.
Sales of print books in the U.S. peaked in 2005 and have been in steady decline
since, according to publishers’ net revenue data reported to the Association of
American Publishers.
Watching that trend, I find my grief for the state of civilization comes
with a guilty surge of relief. Sure, I would miss books — and so, by the way,
would my children — but at least the death of books would put an end to the
annoying fact that everyone who works for me is either writing one or wants to.
I would get my staff back!
Every month, it seems, some reporter drops by my office to request a
leave of absence to write a book. I patiently explain that book-writing is
agony — slow, lonely, frustrating work that, unless you are a very rare
exception, gets a lukewarm review (if any), reaches a few thousand people and
lands on a remaindered shelf at Barnes & Noble. I recount my own experience
as a book failure — two incompletes, and I’m still paying back a sizable
advance with a yearly check to Simon & Schuster that I think of not as a
burden but as bail.
But still the reporters — and editors, too — keep coming to sit in my
office among the teetering stacks of Times-written books that I mean to read
someday and to listen politely to my description of book-writing Gethsemane,
and then they join the cliff-bound lemmings anyway.
Off they go to write books about wars, books
about spies, books
about diplomacy. Books
about basketball, books
about China and,
coming soon, a book about basketball in China.Half a dozen books exploring aspects of
the recent financial meltdown. One (and
one more pending) about George W. Bush; one (and another pending) about the
Obama family. We do cookbooks, travel books, puzzle books and movie guides. A
book explaining the English. A book
explaining the French. Books
about The New York Times. We do biographies (Whittaker Chambers, Edward Kennedy, Virgil Thomson, Einstein) and
memoirs (growing up in Alabama, growing
up in Liberia, growing
up Catholic). Cancer. Jazz.Physics. Pipe organs. Marriage. The weather.
Over on the Op-Ed page, where I am migrating in September, every columnist except one has
written a book or two or three, though only one is closing in on William Safire's
20-something output.
I’ve learned interesting things from the books of my staffers. I learned
that I employed a financial writer who got himself so deep in debt he couldn't make his mortgage payments, a media
columnist who had been a crack addict and
a restaurant critic with a history of eating disorders. (To
those who found these cases problematic, I replied that there is no better
qualification for writing about life in all its complexity than having lived
it.)
I confess I have not set a great example. I signed two book contracts,
after all, and although I fulfilled neither of them, I did manage a short biography of Nelson Mandela for
“young readers,” pardon the oxymoron, and I’ve written a few introductions for
compilations of Times material. The Times covers books, reviews books, ranks
books and publishes books. We are total enablers.
We indulge our writers because we want the talent happy, and because a
little of their prestige accrues to The Times. But we do so at a cost. Books
mean writers who are absent or distracted from daily journalism, writers who
have to be replaced when they leave their reporting beats and landed somewhere
when they return. There is the tricky relationship between what they unearth
for their books and what goes into the paper. There is the awkwardness of
reviewing books by colleagues — and the greater awkwardness of not reviewing them. There is the
resentment of those left behind to take up the slack, especially where fat
advances have been paid.
So, why aren’t books dead yet? It helps that e-books are booming. Kindle
and Nook have begun to refashion the economics of the medieval publishing
industry: no trucks, no paper, no returns or remainders.
But that does not explain why writers write them. Writers write them for
reasons that usually have a little to do with money and not as much to do with
masochism as you might think. There is real satisfaction in a story deeply
told, a case richly argued, a puzzle meticulously untangled. (Note the tense.
When people say they love writing, they usually mean they love having written.) And it is still a
credential, a trophy, a pathway to “Charlie Rose” and “Morning Joe,” to
conferences and panels that Build Your Brand, to speaking fees and writing
assignments. After Brian’s book, he will be an even more stellar Stelter.
His book, by the way, will investigate another durable old medium —
morning television. It will come in both print and electronic formats, but he
confesses, “I’m sure I’ll prefer it as a hardcover.”
Sigh. It will never end.
Bill Keller is executive
editor of The New York Times.
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