Norman Green

THE FUTURE AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

My wife bought me a Kindle. It seems I am joining the 21st century whether I want to or not. It is an amazing device, which I am sure I am one of the last people on the planet to find out. And it will pay for itself eventually, if only because I no longer have to buy Sudoku books. There’s an app for that, and it’s free. I read Mark Rippetoe’s STRONG ENOUGH? on the Kindle, liked the book, even if Rippetoe plows some of the same territory he covered in STARTING STRENGTH, which, by the way, is a great book to check out if you suffer from the sneaking suspicion that you’ve been wasting your time in the gym. (I’m healing up nicely.)

However.

I did not have to pay for STRONG ENOUGH?, I ‘borrowed’ it from Amazon’s ‘library.’ I should know the answer to this but I don’t: did Mark get a bogie behind me borrowing his book? Because I have to tell you, the idea of an Amazon ‘library’ strikes me as complete bullshit. Mark, I think I owe you a buck. I also read a rather lengthy novel which shall remain nameless here, it came highly recommended, ‘novel of the year’ and all that. It was terrible, made worse by the fact that I did not borrow it, I actually paid for the thing. Why is it that so many writers equate length with magnitude? Why do we have to be hit over the head with the seemingly endless internal dialogue of every minor character who happens to wander onstage? I plowed through it, half the time wondering when we were going to get to the point, only to discover, at the end, that I would have to read the sequel to find out what, if anything, happened.

Fat chance of that. Made me want to hurl my Kindle across the room. (There’s a sentence for you. Hurl my Kindle? Sounds like a Chaucerian pilgrim with a bad hangover.)

So now I am buying books which are no longer artifacts, they exist primarily as files on a server somewhere. Soon, if you are enough of a Luddite to want an actual book, you are going to have to send your money off to the Flat Earth Publishing Company, in the bowels of whose warehouse a big steam-powered iron beast will cough and sputter to life, print your book, spit it out and send it to you via Parcel Post, which will get it to your house one of these days.

I have a friend who is a musician of some repute. ‘You remember vanity publishing?’ he says to me. ‘Well, in the music business it’s all vanity publishing, because the music industry is basically dead. You produce your own record, you go out on tour to support it, and if you wind up selling 25 or 30 thousand copies, you’ve done all right.’

That’s where we’re headed, guys.

Who needs a record company?

Who needs a publisher?

The real drawback here, in my not particularly humble opinion, is that one of the services that record companies and book publishers used to provide was that they functioned as a filtering mechanism of sorts, because you had to rise to a certain level of mediocrity before you actually got your book or record published. So now anyone can start a band, but getting anyone except your mother to pay to hear your music is another thing entirely. How the filters will work in the future is anyone’s guess, but maybe Kirkus went under at exactly the wrong time.

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