The worldwide pandemic has changed our reading habits. Some people have more time to write, and to read. In April, my sister organized a much-needed socially-distanced book club for our far-flung family members. We were already geographically distanced, as far north as Anchorage and as deep south as New Orleans and right in the middle, Colorado. Books became a way to gather round, to swap ideas, and to shift to other topics, wholly unrelated to the book.
We started off with Severance, a book that anticipated the pandemic, while also offering a trenchant critique of the Asian immigrant experiences in mainstream America and the death of the shopping mall, the making of consumer zombies. We also read The Vanishing Half, a book that examined colorism with Black communities, and the perils of passing.
To my shame, I was first one who dropped out of the club. Not because I didn’t want to read but because I was overwhelmed by my sheer amount of reading, most of it on a screen. Student discussion posts, book reviews, graduate student grant proposals, even the proofs of my book. I needed to give my eyes a break by turning to a horizon measured in feet, not inches.
My reading habits are not the only ones that are shifting. People’s reading habits are indeed changing. As we restrict our social activities, books are companions. People are returning to old favorites and exploring new genres.
Less said is how the book itself has been reimagined as a vector of contagion.
Books in Quarantine
In March, the city’s libraries shut their doors. When they reopened in late spring, the libraries announced a shift to “contactless borrowing.” I tried several times to return my library books only to find the after-hours book drop locked tight. Now we had to return books when the library was open. One day, I knocked on the glass door. A librarian poked out their head, “We don’t take books.” “But these are yours,” I handed over a grocery sack of ten or so books. “Put them in there.” A black trash was next to the door. Now, how was I to know I should toss library books in an open trash can?
The trash can was not because the library planned to throw the books away. They collected the books and then held them in quarantine for three days before they were checked in. The extra days don’t matter because patrons are no longer charged late fines. Instead, we are charged fees for “lost books.” And once those fees top $20, a single unreturned book, we lose the privilege of renewing the books or checking out additional ones.
My university library is no different. Books are also quarantined before they are checked in. And it is this policy that has deterred me from assigning books in my class. Before March 2020, I would place books on-reserve for students in two or three-hour blocks. Now we would need multiple copies of the book to account for their quarantine. The library would order e-books, but those did not always come with a license for multiple users. And some did not even have e-books available.
There is different in what platform carries the e-book. My favorites, unsurprisingly, are those affiliated with universities like JSTOR or Project Muse. The books are easy to read and easy to download. They serve an ideal: making the books available to wide readerships. But of course, they are still encased within university library systems that first require users log in with their credentials. By contrast, the for-profit platforms, unsurprisingly, require that you sign up for accounts and limit the number of pages you can download or print.
I’ve always believed in city libraries as the commons. A book that circulates through the hand of many readers holds promise for access and distribution of knowledge. But that circulation is threatened as physical books are vectors of contagion, which threatens our vision of the commons as well. Add to the mix disruptions to warehousing and distribution channels.
I now rethink the kind of reading I assign students. Until 2020, I was a believer in the long-arc argument of books. I assigned books by anthropologists, journalists, and creative non-fiction authors. I believed, and still do, in books.
Binding and Unbinding books
It is ironic then that library-bound books may be contributing to their own demise. University libraries purchased specially made books intended for long-term preservation; the pages were sewn in pace, the spine reinforced, and the cover made of buckram, a sturdy cotton cloth, and then coated in acrylic to withstand insects, water, and even ultraviolet light. Specifications for binding books were intended to ensure the books would withstand circulation, like US dollar bills hold up while passed from one user to the next, again and again.
Now library binding is an additional cost for physical books, given the shift in people’s reading habits to electronic materials. Clothbound books are not intended to withstand 100 or more times of changing hands. Mass produced paperbacks are read and then put on a shelf, passed to a friend, donated, or sold at a garage sale.
So whither library books? The trend to reading online is undeniable even among book-reading academics. A colleague once pronounced, “if it’s not online, it doesn’t exist.” The warning was clear: how do our publications gain visibility if they are not online, or at least if the metadata of the publication cannot be scraped?
If our reading habits are shifting, and the doors to libraries are no longer open as wide as they once were, how should prospective book authors respond to this new world order?
While I’m not in the business of making predictions, I do think this shift opens space for long-form essays, or excerpts from books recently or about-to-be published. Academic authors are increasingly creating webinars and podcasts that pull back the curtain about the making of the book. In other words, the physical book will do less work because the author and audiences do more. And perhaps we have a new commons in the making.
