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Much Ado About Publishing

Paper or Plastic?

By Nina L. Diamond

I like the way it looks, smells, and feels, especially the way my hand feels when I write on the good stuff with my extra fine rolling ball pen and the paper absorbs the ink and I feel like I’m writing on a cushion. And the feeling is as good as a mouthful of dark chocolate.

Okay, I’m getting carried away. Nothing is as good as dark chocolate, but this comes pretty darn close.

I’m also one of those writers who loves history, and preserving ideas and their expression.

So, I’m a little ticked off right now.

Ancient manuscripts written on papyrus thousands of years ago have survived better than some of the 10-year-old paperbacks on my bookshelves.

In this modern era of climate-controlled homes, offices and other buildings, and advanced printing technology, there’s no excuse for this.

The pages in some of these paperbacks (published by the world’s largest publishers) are so brittle and yellowed – no make that crunchy and browned – after barely a decade that they now stand as a fine testament to the great potential of el cheapo paper.

The other night I was watching a History Channel documentary on ancient artifacts and manuscripts, and those scrolls of papyrus had endured a whole lot more before archaeologists dug them up – thousands of years of sun, wind, storms, sand, rubble, and war – than my pampered paperbacks ever had to go through while sitting gently on my regularly dusted shelves, protected from direct sunlight, in my air-conditioned home.

Will anything survive our cheaply made, throw-away culture? Will future archaeologists be put out of work by our short-sighted manufacturing choices?

Forget keeping your paperbacks, or even hardcovers, on a shelf. Maybe our books would fare better if we just buried them in the backyard.

If the techies get their way, we won’t have paper quality to worry about anymore. That’s because we won’t have paper.

Instead, we will have e-paper.

Call it a substance, call it a place upon which to read stuff for a little while until you erase that stuff and replace it with some other stuff, but don’t call it paper.

I’ve read all the technical descriptions of e-books, e-paper, and e-ink, and comparing any of it to books, paper, and ink is simply delusional.

Sparing you the high-tech descriptions of what they are and how they operate – and sparing me from having to condense a couple of pages of that into a couple of sentences – let’s just say that they remind me of what you’d get if an Etch-A-Sketch suddenly went all digital and computery on you.

All of this just screams temporary! Not to mention conditional. You can only read your so-called books if your technology is operating correctly.

Let’s try a little experiment: Everyone who has ever gone a day without some kind of computer problem, glitch, or hiccup, please raise your hand. Be honest. That’s better. No hands, just as I expected. If our refrigerators, televisions, or even toasters gave us the kind of trouble that our computers do, we’d be rioting in the streets. Yet, people have been conditioned (brainwashed?) to accept from their computer what they would never accept from any other appliance, not even a can opener.

Reading a good book (hey, even a bad one) is one of the ways we unwind from the stresses of the fast-paced, digital life. At least for now. Pretty soon, even that simple pleasure will be no more. Reading a book will be just another one of our daily digital battles.

One day, when those future archaeologists study what they’ve stumbled upon or dug up from our culture, they won’t find any books or manuscripts. They’ll find bits of plastic. Wordless bits of plastic. And they’ll wonder which of our machines these were once parts of…and they’ll never know.

Paper or plastic?

I’ll take paper.

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Nina L. Diamond is a journalist, essayist, and the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Omni, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.

Ms. Diamond was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, for its entire run in Miami and select markets nationwide from 1984-1998. As an editor, she works frequently with other authors and journalists on both fiction and non-fiction.

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Logo image courtesy of George Glazer Gallery, NYC georgeglazer.com