Case of the vanishing book

(Representational image) In India, with writers more than readers, books can be accessories and a brag.

The publishing industry is in a bit of a bind. The cover story is coronavirus - the absence of physical bookshops has hit them hard. No reader is up and about, loitering in stores, leafing through the latest bestsellers, transfixed by the blurb, rushing with a pile of books to the cash counter. Book sales are suffering from long Covid.

The inside story is more detailed. In India, with writers more than readers, books can be accessories and a brag. Often read partially, with index and author photo the only parts lingered on, or understood very little post-reading if not outright misunderstood. Of course, serious readers can get carried away and take away more from the words than the words intended. But in countries where the long education years are filled with by-hearting, memorizing, ratta maarna, the inability to bring personal interpretations to the reading or even to grasp nuances and subtexts is sometimes not just a matter of laziness but of intellectual opacity and saturation. It is almost like non-readers and pseudo readers were waiting for something exactly like the pandemic to abandon books altogether.

That leaves the committed reader. Long ago Kindle turned out to be the boy who cried wolf; no one gave up actual books for e-books despite publishing pundits' predictions. David Davidar, co-founder of Aleph Book Company, saw the imminent demise of physical books back in 2103 at a session on publishing at the Bangalore Literature Festival. But it would take a pandemic to fulfill his prophecy almost a decade later.

Serious readers are still out there, hunting high and low for great books, small books, lean books, brawny books… The absence of bookshops and the visual stimulus of books in airports and on pavements has driven them to the virtual word at last. With a high and fatal addiction to letters arranged just so, junkies will find their fix where they can. Bookworms are succumbing to computers and phones, clicking on links for their daily read. Newspapers and magazines cleverly erected paywalls; content providers have to eat too.

The sudden closure of a top publishing house is making moody would-be writers moodier. If at first they grumbled about writer’s block, now it is the shrinking of avenues. For publishing houses that tended to blend a prescient knowledge of reader tastes with marketing mantras, the crystal ball is blurry. Beset with backlogs, publishing dates of scheduled books are being delayed indefinitely. Manuscripts with topical subjects that a fatigued and mentally exhausted readership can absorb, and even applaud in a small way, are prioritized. Anything that is time-sensitive gets a look-in. The rest tap their feet in the queue.

Any rivalry between fiction and nonfiction is now rendered moot under this new regime. Analytic data and research, diagnosis and prognosis are fashionable. Politics and economics, yes! Poetry and plays, though more rampant than ever perhaps, have lowered their decibels. That arena where big juicy books fought each other like studs for advances, royalties and marketing budgets is slowly turning into a ‘once upon a time’.