Billy’s Days Are Numbered, or The Return of Tapestries

Underemployed in the new economy: Billy, his brother Billy, and his other brother Billy

If you haven’t already heard, 2009 is the year of the e-book. Or so it’s been said. Anyway, it seems it’s the thing to talk about in the world of books these days. It seems the older the news outlet, the more arguments there are against the technology, which suggests to me that the people with the best means to make themselves heard are the most worried. But I don’t want to use this space to argue about whether or not we’ll all be reading ebooks by the end of the Obama’s first administration (many of us will be).

When wifey and I moved into our new digs in November we hired professional movers for the first time. We could afford it, my brother who’d moved just a few months prior recommended them, and we couldn’t see ourselves repeating, let alone expanding on, the epic migration that was our last move.

You see, we are book people. We have many of them, they are heavy (one of the moving guys said we’d better re-read all of them), we’re always adding to their numbers, and they travel with an entourage of furniture.

It was over a month before we’d put up all the shelving (from Ikea, of course) and unpacked all the books. Then came the question of order. I’d always held to a pretty durable Fiction/Non-Fiction split with subdivisions (narrative non-fiction, argument/philosophy, British fiction, American fiction, poetry, drama, etc.) but this time I just couldn’t be bothered.

Like I say, this wasn’t the first time we moved our books. But by god, I’d be happy if it were the last. And there’s a feeling in the air that it might be.

Since music became available as a completely digital product it’s become ever easier to imagine the end of CDs. Just this weekend I nudged the medium a bit closer to obsolescence when I finished ripping all of my CDs into iTunes. I rated every album, checked on all the artwork and metadata. Like everyone else on the streetcar these days, my entire collection of music now resides in my iPod.

So why are there colourful Ikea shelves full of 300+ CDs next to me?

I don’t really know anymore.

decorative plate in hanger

From the moment I ripped the first disc, the shelving I’ve had for years, which though inexpensive was not cheap, changed in function — twice.

My shelves used to be attractively laminated particle-board structures that kept my music on-hand and organized in the main living space, sort of like how our glass-fronted kitchen cabinets hold the dinnerware. But when I started ripping my CDs, each shelf became a factory bin holding units awaiting processing. Now that I’m done, they’re now the media equivalent of plate hangers: useful only for displaying artifacts of personal taste.

I don’t mean to get all Fredric Jameson just now, but it seems to me that Ikea’s minimalist aesthetic nears its logical, self-defeating conclusion with the spread of wholly digital media.

Which brings me to the collossal collection of books that presently surrounds me.

I’ve been enjoying hearing my music on shuffle, queueing up songs I enjoy from albums I haven’t felt the urge to listen to in years. But in this respect books aren’t like music at all: it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll re-read any particular book of mine, even if there were a mechanism to cause it to fall open in front of me. Conceding this, I couldn’t object to wifey organizing the books by colour. Never mind that I can still find everything; the point is that we’re done with meaningful order here. I’ve seen how it’s going to be and I’m resigned to regarding shelving as a means for keeping stuff off the floor. I even let her hang a painting on the shelving — entirely blocking access to several volumes — fulfilling a design dream she’d had since she saw it done in a movie (she, unlike me, is far more realistic about the need for free access to every single book at all times — and anyway, I can still find everything).

What if you needed a bird-obstructed book?!?!

Our books haven’t quite become vestigial organs of home decor, but our array of shelving has certainly arrived at a point where any more would feel as gratuitous as a sixth finger.

Ask me what my rooms look like and I’ll say “books”, but really, they look like shelves. Lots of shelves carrying books. The sheer excess of room after room of books has always appealed to me, but as the necessity of books’ physical manifestation fades I fear we’re going to start looking like collectors of rare vinyl recordings that have seen less daylight than the pronouncing index of the Meridian Handbook of Classical Mythology.

I’ve bought my last CD and though the switch to e-books remains a ways off, certainly my first e-book purchase is imminent, though who’ll get my money remains to be seen. I can see boxing up the CDs and tucking them into a corner of the basement before year’s end: between Last.fm and whatever else is on the horizon I can’t rightly say that I’m worried about losing the social aspect of music collecting. Will LibraryThing do the same for books?

There’s just no reason to keep CDs around as digital music gets easier to access. But a beautiful book is a nice thing to have at hand. Then again,what’s your relationship to books if the only ones you have around are the ones you like to look at? What’s the distance between that and Ikea’s dressing their showroom shelves with Swedish remainders? If e-books are cheaper and more convenient to collect, would it really be so bad to collect printed books only for their aesthetic appeal? What’s wrong with bibliophiles expressing their love as pure physical attraction? I think on some level my spouse has anticipated this sea-change with her bold, strictly aesthetic arrangement of our not terribly comely books, and for that I’m very grateful.

And I’m glad that for now when we throw a party our friends will still have the option of wandering through the apartment scrutinizing spines, though the day isn’t far off when we make new friends who’ll have to actually ask what we majored in instead of looking for a copy of Survival or Practical Ethics while we look for the corkscrew. In the meantime I guess I’ll be pricing tapestries.

Touchscreen, Touchscreen, On The Wall…

Laura Miller had an interesting piece in the New York Times last year about the difficulties some people face keeping their book collections lean. It contained this observation:

When you’re young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential, and if you’re single, your bookshelves provide a way of advertising your discernment to potential mates. I’ve met readers who have jettisoned whole categories of titles — theology, say, or poststructuralist theory — that they once considered desperately important.

We surround ourselves with books and other cultural objects not only because we enjoy them and may wish to enjoy them again. They also help us to moor ourselves — to remind us of the identities that we have constructed for ourselves; to delineate those identities to others; to remind us of the arduous processes we’ve undergone to create and solidify our cultural perspectives. Cultural objects actually come to embody us if we allow them to. We arrange our book collections — consciously or unconsciously — to show a side of ourselves to others and back to ourselves.

What’s true of books can be even more true of music, which is more explicitly public. Music, obviously, transforms the atmosphere around you, both figuratively and literally. Unless your sole experience of music is by headphones, your visitors and friends are exposed to your music regardless of their own preferences or interests. Music selection at a party is as critical a part of the activity as planning food and inviting the appropriate mix of people. While displaying your books — just like prominently reading Gravity’s Rainbow on the subway — is public manifestation of a (usually) private activity, listening to music is always, by default, public.

What better way to show off your superlative cultural taste than to have your guests literally stand in it?

This is why, I think, the digitization of music risks losing an important element — the ability to have one’s music collection available for the browsing of visitors. Without LP bins or CD shelves, how might a casual browser chance upon something that showcases your cultural identity?

Fortunately, we already have a model for this. It’s been around for decades, and it has served as a model for the iTunes GUI for some years.

It’s the jukebox.

So here’s what I want: a massive wall-mounted multitouch iTunes jukebox interface. It’s a big multitouch monitor that lives on your wall, displays images of your choice while you’re not using it, and would enable a coverflow interface to browse your music library. And would serve all the other touchscreen applications that we’ve been excited about for some time.

As Nathan points out:

Bolt a high end virtual surround source to the screen, and you’ve got a one-panel touch-screen media centre. Naturally, you’re already using an iPhone as the remote control, so why not employ it to calibrate the system to the room? Sync it to the unit and follow the instructions to stand a little to the left, a little to the right, hold it, point iPhone at the screen, away, got it, and voila, reflecting surround sound calibrated without employing anything as cumbersome and wasteful as a cheap single-use proprietary microphone.

Note that the virtual surround effect works best if your walls are free of clutter, i.e. shelves full of books and CDs.

It’s the perfect fusion of a classy consumer product and a cultural need. We surround ourselves with cultural works not just because they speak to us — about their authors, about our memories, about who we were when we experienced them for the first time — and because they speak to others about us. Locking all your stuff in your hard drive obscures this. But technology should enable all aspects of our relationships to culture, not only those that we think are most obvious.