style="margin: 1em 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: AvenirNextLTW01-Regular; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20px; ">First, some cold, hard facts.

FACT: A signed first edition of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch will set you back $2,000 at Powell’s City of Books.
FACT: You can get it in digital format for $10.91, or free if you’re willing to click on some sketchy-looking pdfs.
FACT: I sometimes miss holding things in my hands.
FACT: It’s not an either/or proposition.

Last week I visited Portland, Oregon; naturally, my first stop was Powell’s and its 68,000 square feet of books. While it does have thriving e-book and print-on-demand departments, Powell’s is primarily a living monument to the printed word, a magical place where throngs of readers crowd the aisles in the middle of a weekday.

I had been thinking a lot about the alleged death of print, so I climbed the stairs to the Pearl Room, which houses the rare books. The rare books are kept in a climate-controlled glass enclosure and monitored by a friendly and vigilant employee; the room has more in common with a museum than with the ramshackle chaos of the fiction aisles downstairs.

The attendant and I get to talking, and soon enough I've arrived at several theories about the future of the printed word.

1. A book’s value is not necessarily linked to content, but a book’s value is totally linked to content. Popularity can decrease value because when a book is popular, more copies are printed, and editions become ordinary. The most exciting collectibles work both angles: they surpass popularity and vault into that unique realm we call a “classic” or (machismo intended here) “seminal.” East of Eden versus Eat Pray Love is no contest. However,East of Eden versus the first Harry Potter might get tricky, due to the ever-present wrench of fan obsession. And cover art matters.

2. E-books and e/print hybrids push readers away from collecting because the content is not encased in a physical object; it is always available, always floating in the ether and ready for consumption.

3. At the same time, e-books push us in a more accelerated fashion toward collecting books, because we fetishize the physical object more. When technologies go obsolete, their artifacts become more collectible. The boards and pulp become special. Rare.

4. As publishers get more creative with electronic and hybrid print/electronic packages, what constitutes a “collectible” edition of a given title is unclear.

5. As books change, bookstores will change. Powell’s may become more of a museum and less of a store — an archive, a physical representation of literature. It’s already halfway there: most of the customers I see crowding the entryway are there to buy souvenir tote bags and t-shirts, not books.

6. I don’t think printed books will ever disappear entirely, but they are certainly in the process of losing their popular monopoly. As e-books grow in prominence, used bookstores grow more specialized; independent stores will carry a smaller spectrum of titles geared toward small, dedicated audiences. Like vinyl record stores, bookstores are on their way to becoming boutique retailers, with a customer base made up of aesthetes and collectors. Print freaks.

7. Powell’s has a 1924 edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables hand bound by Virginia Woolf. It’s $9,500. When I hold it, even through plastic, I pause. I think about Woolf’s hands holding it. She madethis book. Does that make me want to read it? Not particularly. But it kind of makes me want to take it home and pet it whenever I want.

Images courtesy the author

“I feel like I’m supposed to be here,” he said.
Kathy was silent.
“It’s God’s will,” he said.
She had no answer to this . . .
Kathy rolled her eyes.
“Of course,” she said.
“I love you and them,” he said, and hung up.
—Dave Eggers, Zeitoun

Let's talk about Dave Eggers's Zeitoun. It's the story of Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun, who survive Hurricane Katrina — Kathy because she left beforehand with their children, Abdulrahman through luck, resourcefulness, and bravery, but not without great despair. Their reunion is perpetually delayed by the strange machinations of governmental agencies who imprison Mr. Zeitoun and consider him a danger, not a hero. We could consider the book a call to action or an act of reportage. Fundamentally, though, it’s a love story.

That story became a whole lot more complicated earlier this month, when Abdulrahman was arrested for assaulting Kathy. Judging by its Amazon rankings, Zeitoun is flying off the shelves again. So what should the book’s publishers do? They’ve already ignored the couple’s divorce, but assaults and arrests are much more difficult to shrug off. It's hard not to read the telephone conversation I quoted above without a new sense of irony.

For print, the options are scant. Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine was recalled and refunds made available. They could print new editions with a preface or afterword, like James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. And let's not forget that the paperback edition of Eggers's first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, comes with the upside-down bonus section "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making: Notes, Corrections, Clarifications, Apologies, Addenda." Basically, that's how physical books are handled — as products of a specific moment, with cumbersome revisions.

But what happens with e-books? Technically, they can adapt to the shifting fortunes of their content. In Zeitoun, I'd love to see footnotes that acknowledge what Eggers couldn't have known earlier. I'd love the backstory to this statement to the press.

I’m reminded of Black Balloon publisher Elizabeth Koch’s essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books. She wonders what would happen “if, through evolving books, we could somehow shock ourselves awake enough to recognize that we hold the power to narrate, and live into, a different story of our lives.” As for readers, so for writers and their subjects: these e-bookscan change.

So far, evolving books are hard to come by. (Example? Oh, I don't know...there is Louise: Amended, the latest Black Balloon title.) But the possibilities are dizzying. A Farewell to Arms could incorporateHemingway's 47 alternate endings seamlessly, without an appendix. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance could let its readers map their own journeys onto Pirsig's — ditto for Kerouac. We've seen the Waste Land app, but what if we could pull up different performances of Waiting for Godot(especially Robin Williams and Steve Martin's run) whenever we wanted to see Beckett's words made flesh?

So many books can be unshackled from their origins in a specific time. The original words don't change, but our understanding of them does, and the possibilities are limited only by what our technology can do. We've invented e-books; now we can let them evolve.

image credit: flickr.com/photos/gruber

Bowker, an organization that generates (and sells) all sorts of information—logistical, sales, customer preference—about the publishing industry, just released the results of a study on ebook buying habits in 10 countries, “major world markets” all. The study presents a daunting array of data: correlating likelihood to buy with age, gender, and income; predicting increases in ebook sales in certain markets; differentiating pace of growth across regional markets; et ceteraz. There's a lot to say about the study’s intrinsically fascinating details, but what I really like is the flurry of responses popping up throughout the publishing blogworld—and usually revealing way more about the responders than the data.

Lots of the responses smack of confirmation bias. Printing Impressions, a business publication for American printers—who, obvs, want to find hope for pulp-n-fiber books—highlights a post pronouncing that the breathless predictions of ebooks eradicating printed books and brick-and-mortar stores are “way off the mark.” (Although, R.I.P. Borders.) Meanwhile, Digital Book World looks into the morass of data and sees that “the world has caught up to the U.S. when it comes to e-book buying.” On the internet, everyone wins! But where do I get my ice cream?

And then there are the thought-tickling observations. At MobyLives, Kelly Burdick was struck by the fact that both the French and the Japanese seem less than enthusiastic about purchasing ebooks. French insistence on the sensuous pleasures of reading a bound book? Or, as Burdick suggests, simply a result of the Amazon ebook store being relatively new in France? Time will tell; there’s nothing in the current study to say. Other people found other things significant. And more people will likely write more, shortly: watch them do it, in real time!

That’s the thing about studies like this one. Bowker generated so much data, and then correlated it in so many ways, that without some sober (boh-ring!) statistical thinking, extrapolations begin to look meaningless. They suggest that data can be bent to support virtually any argument. Which means these broad interpretations may reveal less about what’s going to happen with ebook sales and more about what the people jockeying the data want to believe.

For my part, I find it interesting that India leads the globe in percentage of people who have purchased ebooks: I want to see that correlated with pricing in Indian ebook outlets, access to old-fashioned print books, and availability of ereaders, as well as some remarks about the culture of the book in the subcontinent.

I could avail myself of Google and the lieberry. Or I could take my cue from the blogosphere: extrapolate first, ask questions later.

Image via flickr user Josh Bancroft