The E-Book Tempest — At Home on a Sea of Words

Readers say they’re afraid the book is disappearing. Writers are going nuts trying to figure out what to write and how to publish it.

Both have gone flibber-flabber.

I wear a T-shirt that can bring all the solace of assured truth. It says, MEMBER OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST PROFESSION… STORYTELLER.

What we need is perspective.

Fact: Homo sapiens have been on the planet for about 250,000 years.

Probability: We’ve had stories for those 250,000 minus one day.

Human beings yearn for stories. The last words of children every night are, “Tell me a story.” People need stories, have always needed stories, will always need stories.

The printed book? That’s only one package stories come in. The packages have changed and will always change.

Stories were born astale-telling around a fire and at some point added song and dance, grew into myth, and so on. About seven thousand years ago came the first revolution—writing, on papyrus, silk, parchment and on tablets and scrolls.

Five hundred years ago, the second revolution—the printing press. Gutenberg put everyone else out of business. I doubt that the monks feared for the life of the book. One century, the third revolution—the movie. The e-book may make printed book a memory, or a rarity, but…

STORYTELLING GOES ON FOREVER

Since that’s true, you and I are links in a tradition honored for a quarter of a million years. We are valued. And we’ll always have work.

In some mysterious way, from the depths of our imaginations, we birth stories into the world. The big print publishers, and Amazon and Nook and their brethren, love to forget this, but without writers, stories wouldn’t exist. And maybe human beings wouldn’t be fully human.

Yes, all of us, writer, publishers, and readers, stand right now in the swirling winds of a tempest. The e-book has turned the book world topsy-turvy. (And publishers, running for their lives, are cutting writer’s royalties and grabbing desperately for authors’ rights.) For worse, or probably better, the coming decade may bring along new venues that make the e-book a dinosaur.

Painful? Confusing? Gut-twisting? Sure.

Terrible? Not at all.

We writers are like kids faced with a warehouse of myriad flavors of ice cream and only one spoon. We gaze upon so many of ways of reaching our audience that we can only bubble with joy and laughter.  No generation of storytellers has ever had such opportunity.

Yes, it will be hard, in fact gnarly, and scary. The chaos will make the floor of the New York Stock Exchange when stocks are going wild look like a tea party. In the end?

As the solstice draws near, winter is drawing us to our hearth fires. Traditionally, among American Indian people, this time of gathering around the flames is the time to tell stories. So let’s turn to our notebooks, or typewriters, or computers, and bring forth beauty with words. That’s what we came into the world to do.

Let us always remember. We are the storytellers. And storytelling is with us forever.

—Win

Starting with the new year, we will do a series of Sunday blogs about e-books—the 21 reasons you shouldn’t, the 22 reasons you should, how to, how not to, why you should (or shouldn’t) join the fray. Today we ask, what does it all mean? Stay with us.

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