Bought: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

This article by John Siracusa has nothing to do with Hitler or Nazis. I'll get to them. It's about the reasons e-books haven't caught on big yet, and why they will nevertheless replace paper. There's also a good, concise explanation of why DRM is a colossal boondoggle. The iPad has premiered since it was written, so the author's baffled exasperation that Apple isn't selling e-books dates it. But it's still worth a read, with tons of great links. I recommend it to anyone who still reads anything printed on paper. It convinced me, much against my will, that old fashioned books are on the way out, and probably sooner than anybody thinks. Here's a snippet.

If you remain unconvinced, here's one final exercise... Take all of your arguments against the inevitability of e-books and substitute the word "horse" for "book" and the word "car" for "e-book." Here are a few examples...

"Books will never go away." True! Horses have not gone away either.

"Books have advantages over e-books that will never be overcome." True! Horses can travel over rough terrain that no car can navigate. Paved roads don't go everywhere, nor should they.

"Books provide sensory/sentimental/sensual experiences that e-books can't match." True! Cars just can't match the experience of caring for and riding a horse: the smells, the textures, the sensations, the companionship with another living being.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn't. I'm sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a "horseless carriage"—and they never did! And then they died.

Zing!

And then they died. That pearl of wisdom reminded me of a quote I've been attributing to James Clerk Maxwell. It took me forever (30 minutes!) to track it to the actual source, nineteenth century Harvard professor Joseph Lovering. He used to tell his students, "There are two disparate theories of light, gentlemen, the wave theory and the corpuscular; today, one hears only about the wave theory, because all those who believed in the corpuscular theory are now dead."

Boo-yah!

Let's hear it for Death, the Great Convincer, who changes the mind of Mankind without changing a single individual!

I hope to instill a love of reading in my sons, but I am making peace with the fact that I will never make them love books the way I do, not least because they can see for themselves that even their book-loving father spends more time reading a computer screen than any book.

You'd think an old sf fan would be better prepared for this, but I never in a million years imagined I might live to see the end of the morning paper, the magazine rack, the bookstore, the public frickin' library.

Yet that doesn't seem at all far-fetched now. It seems entirely reasonable to think that in 20 years:

Newspapers will be nonexistent.

The few remaining print magazines will be curiosities, available by subscription only to an aging group of aficionados.

And any book made of paper will be by definition a special edition, either printed and bound on demand by a vending machine in the lobby of your assisted living community or lovingly published by a small press in an edition of a few thousand, to be sold online at collector's prices.

Libraries, of course, are vulnerable to politics as well as economics. I want to shy away from politics here, except to affirm that yes I do believe that public libraries as well as public schools, public radio, public health, public art and even public hand-holding are all good things.

Politics aside, the economics are bad enough. Here's a post about cost per circulation by LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding. Here and here and here and particularly here are more of his grim but frighteningly reasonable posts. This blog is a great resource for links and wisdom, aimed more at librarians and with a little less doom and gloom. Read this guy too, 'cause I know you've got all that spare time on your hands. The big question nobody really wants answered is this: if you can "borrow" a book via download, in your home or on the bus, what purpose does that big brick building downtown serve, other than as a place to duck in and use the restroom?

It's a bit off-topic, but we might as well hit the USPS while we're at it. Cheap postal service is possible because the truck stops at every house, reducing the cost per delivery. The junk mail industry is the only thing propping it up now. When they move their money online, POOF!

None of this is news, but putting it all down here makes me feel all future-y and just a little bit dystopian. It's not holodecks and jetpacks, but an old fanboy's gotta get his gosh-wow where he can.

The slow but steady demise of the mass market paperback is one of the signs that paper books are on the way out. For years a "pocket" edition of something like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich made economic sense because the publisher could count on casual readers finding it in airports, drugstores, etc. That's what mass market meant: books intended for sale outside of bookstores. But thanks to technology and mortality casual readers have been replaced by casual gamers. The old markets have dwindled. The cost of getting a book on the shelves has risen drastically, and prices have followed. The math has shifted steadily in favor of trade paperbacks with their higher profit margins. Today almost all nonfiction (and most fiction other than bestsellers and genre titles) comes out in trade.

E-books, which effectively have zero overhead, are a natural to replace paperbacks as the mass market edition, for sale 24 hours a day, where ever you are. Right now prices are being kept artificially high to shore up the old system of distributors and retailers. But the overhead for physical books will continue to rise, while demand for them drops. Sooner or later e-book prices will start to reflect their real cost, and hardcovers and trades will start pricing themselves out of the market.

To recap, it's the end of the world as we know it. Also, I bought a book!

Used of course. Used bookstores may actually have more life in them than retail. Stubborn old booklovers will be driven to them as new paper books disappear. A lot of people (and libraries) will be selling their old analog books as they switch over to digital. I suppose used bookshops will gradually be absorbed into the antique stores as their customer base dies off and their stock becomes, well, antique.

I found The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, a mint copy of a 20 year old mass market paperback, on the dollar rack outside Half Price Books. I keep finding amazing old nonfiction paperbacks there and I'm convinced HPB is just dumping all they get rather than put them on the shelves with the trades and hardcovers. Their reasoning isn't hard to guess but really I don't care as long as they keep doing it.

There's not much to say about the cover. Almost every edition of Rise and Fall has closely followed the same rather austere template. It's a classic of its kind, almost iconic. It reminds me of, and for all I know it may have inspired, this fantastic early cover for Hunter Thompson's book on the 1972 presidential campaign, featuring the work of the late Tom Benton. Apropos of nothing, in 30 years of haunting bookstores I've never even seen this edition, in any condition.

Shirer was an American print journalist covering Europe between the wars. In 1937 he got a call from future legend Edward R. Murrow of CBS. One dinner and one voice test later he had a job in radio. He and Murrow and some other punks flying by the seat of their pants improvised a lot of what we think of as broadcast journalism.

All this and much, much more is in The Nightmare Years, the second volume of Shirer's three part memoir 20th Century Journey. Like a lot of people I've only read the middle book. I wouldn't call Shirer a great writer, but he was a great reporter: sympathetic, shrewd, persistent and for the most part lucky. He seems to have gone everywhere, seen everything and talked to everyone.

Murrow went on to become the quintessential celebrity journalist. Shirer (on the right) did not, but he did write this massive international bestseller, along with the equally massive companion volume The Collapse of the Third Republic.

I probably won't be reading Rise and Fall anytime soon, in part because Nightmare Years, besides being a personal memoir, is in itself a very good history of events in Germany and throughout Europe from 1930 through the end of 1940. But mostly because a few years back I read a more recent history by Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich, which impressed me deeply and affected me rather oddly.

Burleigh's approach is the opposite of sensational; he doesn't dwell on the horrors of war or mass murder any more than is necessary. He is in fact rather analytical and I didn't have a strong emotional response to the book at all while I was reading it, beyond the familiar pleasures of reading good prose and learning new things. But once I finished it, I set the book down, sat there looking at the front cover for a few minutes, and started to weep. For about 15 minutes I just sat there at the dining room table and cried, not thinking about anything in particular, just overwhelmed by horror and pity. I cried off and on the rest of the night.

So I think I've done my time in Nazi Germany, at least for a while. I'm not sure I ever want to experience anything like that again. And if I read a book that covered the same ground but didn't provoke that kind of response I'd be left wondering whether that represented a failure on the author's part... or on mine.