tiredI'll start with the clinical: according to the dictionary (and Wikipedia), poverty is "the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions." So if you don't have as much as everyone around you, you're poor.
I'll move on to the personal. Poverty is the state of waking up freezing in the middle of the night because it's a waste of money to run the heat when everyone is sleeping anyway, and you need that money to buy lunch meat from the "eat it tomorrow or it will kill you" clearance bin. Poverty is the state of making that lunch meat last a week and a half, even after the edges have started turning green. Poverty is sending your little sisters to beg staples off the people in the crap-ass apartments surrounding yours, because everyone is poor, and everyone is hungry, and cute little girls stand a better chance of success than anybody else. That's poverty.
The U.S. Census Bureau said that 43.6 million (14.3%) Americans were living in absolute poverty in 2009. According to the report they released this past Tuesday, the national poverty rate rose to 15.1% in 2010...and we still don't know what 2011 is going to look like.
This is the "official" poverty level, by the way; there are a lot of sociologists who think that the actual poverty level is much higher, since we calculate using a "socially acceptable miniumum standard of living" that was last updated in 1955. To quote Wikipedia again: "The current poverty line only takes goods into account that were common more than 50 years ago, updating their cost using the Consumer Price Index. Mollie Orshansky, who devised the original goods basket and methodology to measure poverty, used by the U.S. government, in 1963-65, updated the goods basket in 2000, finding that the actual poverty threshold, i.e. the point where a person is excluded from the nation's prevailing consumption patterns, is at roughly 170% of the official poverty threshold."
Things that did not exist in 1955: home computers. The internet. Ebook readers.
It is sometimes difficult for me to truly articulate my reaction to people saying that print is dead. I don't want to be labeled a luddite, or anti-ebook; I love my computer, I love my smartphone, and I love the fact that I have the internet in my pocket. The existence of ebooks means that people who can't store physical books can have more to read. It means that hard-to-find and out of print material is becoming accessible again. I means that people who have arthritis, or weak wrists, or other physical disabilities that make reading physical books difficult, can read again, without worrying about physical pain. I love that ebooks exist.
This doesn't change the part where, every time a discussion of ebooks turns, seemingly inevitably, to "Print is dead, traditional publishing is dead, all smart authors should be bailing to the brave new electronic frontier," what I hear, however unintentionally, is "Poor people don't deserve to read."
I don't think this is malicious, and I don't think it's something we're doing on purpose. I just think it's difficult for us, on this side of the digital divide, to remember that there are people standing on the other side of what can seem like an impassable gorge, wondering if they're going to be left behind. Right now, more than 20% of Americans do not have access to the internet. In case that seems like a low number, consider this: That's one person in five. One person in five doesn't have access to the internet. Of those who do have access, many have it via shared computers, or via public places like libraries, which allow public use of their machines. Not all of these people are living below the poverty line; some have voluntarily simplified their lives, and don't see the need to add internet into the mix. But those people are not likely to be the majority.
Now. How many of these people do you think have access to an ebook reader?
I grew up so far below the poverty line that you couldn't see it from my window, no matter how clear the day was. My bedroom was an ocean of books. Almost all of them were acquired second-hand, through used bookstores, garage sales, flea markets, and library booksales, which I viewed as being just this side of Heaven itself. There are still used book dealers in the Bay Area who remember me patiently paying off a tattered paperback a nickel at a time, because that was what I could afford. If books had required having access to a piece of technology—even a "cheap" piece of technology—I would never have been able to get them. That up-front cost would have put them out of my reach forever.
Some people have proposed a free reader program aimed at low-income families, to try to get the technology out there. Unfortunately, this doesn't account for the secondary costs. Can you guarantee reliable internet? Can you find a way to let people afford what will always be, essentially, brand new books, rather that second- or even third-hand books, reduced in price after being worn to the point of nearly falling apart? And can you find a way to completely destroy—I mean, destroy—the resale market for those devices?
Do I sound pessimistic? That's because I am. When I was a kid with nothing, any nice thing I had the audacity to have would be quickly stolen, either by people just as poor as I was, or by richer kids who wanted me to know that I wasn't allowed to put on airs like that. If my books had been virtual, then those people would have been stealing my entire world. They would have been stealing my exit. And I don't think I would have survived.
We need paper books to endure. Every one of us, if we can log onto this site and look at this entry, is a "have" from the perspective of a kid living in an apartment with cockroaches in the walls and junkies in the unit beneath them. A lot of the time, the arguments about the coming ebook revolution forget that the "have nots" also exist, and that we need to take care of them, even if it means we can't force our technological advancement as fast as we might want to. I need to take care of them, because I was a little girl who only grew up to be me through the narrowest of circumstances...and most of those circumstances were words on paper.
Libraries are losing funding by the day. Schools are having their budgets slashed. Poor kids are getting poorer, and if we don't make those books available to them now, they won't know to want them tomorrow.
We cannot forget the digital divide. And we can't—we just can't—be so excited over something new and shiny that we walk away and knowingly leave people on the other side.
We can't.
that's a lot of comments
September 17 2011, 20:56:33 UTC 5 years ago
Right now, print-on-demand appears to be a chi-chi little niche market for out of print books and should be out of print vanity books. Assuming a world where all publishing is routinely tree free and the idea of low-cost or on-loan e-readers for the low income crowd is torpedoed by device theft, why not attach print on demand to libraries and cover the cost through some kind of public service or charitable organization like the United Way?
(brought here by Twitter)
Re: that's a lot of comments
September 17 2011, 21:45:22 UTC 5 years ago
Publishers generally don't like the used book market, or libraries, and some have already taken steps to make library ebooks "wear out" faster than physical ones. Harper-Collins library ebooks can only be loaned out 26 times before they expire--does that sound like a business decision that's compatible with "libraries can print their own copies to loan out?" Even if there's a cost for the print-permission, it's pretty clear the publisher wants a new sale for every X many times the book is read.
On e-book expiry dates
September 17 2011, 21:50:05 UTC 5 years ago
And I keep coming back to that one.
Re: On e-book expiry dates
September 17 2011, 21:54:08 UTC 5 years ago
That approach to book-sharing is making the transition to digital content a lot more difficult all around.
Re: On e-book expiry dates
September 17 2011, 22:37:12 UTC 5 years ago
A physical book DOES wear out. It has to be replaced or retired. People don't check it out. Publishers, and authors, count on X number of library sales per year. Going digital-only, and not having a "every X number, you have to replace" clause, means that those sales go away. Which means those authors don't get paid, which means...
It's a complicated issue. If they wanted a per-use fee, I would be more in agreement with the "oh, they're treating it like Netflix" statement. As it stands, we have to remember that publishers aren't charities, and neither are authors.
Re: On e-book expiry dates
September 17 2011, 23:25:13 UTC 5 years ago
The class schism that the ebook industry makes possible terrifies me. I don't see any way to stop it; it's not like anyone can say, "you there! Stop spending money to support development of nifty tech toys that poor people don't get!" But I want a lot more attention paid to issues of fair use and education with digital materials, because we're rapidly approaching a situation where rich kids have access to recent media (of many sorts), and poor kids get digital scraps.
That you can build an excellent educational & cultural foundation out of those "scraps" doesn't change the schism. The distance between two large cultural groups is growing, and we don't need *more* communication gaps between the rich & the poor.
Re: On e-book expiry dates
September 18 2011, 01:39:42 UTC 5 years ago
Re: that's a lot of comments
September 18 2011, 00:13:06 UTC 5 years ago
How about an extremely limited device about the size of an iPod (or a paperback) with no networking capability that is programmed to hold one book that has been downloaded from the library and must be overwritten to hold another? Instead of a library card, patrons bring their reader to the desk, plug it into a slot and get the next book. If publishers want to be extremely assholish about it, they can even limit the number of patrons checking out the e-book.
My thought is that if the device does nothing but read one library book, who's going to want to steal it?
I'd like the opportunity to get in on spreading negative publicity about all publishers who make library lending harder than it has to be, but I do live in a world with very blue skies and wide open spaces. (tr.: I may be a bit naively optimistic.)
Re: that's a lot of comments
September 18 2011, 06:40:44 UTC 5 years ago