A book is always a message from writer to reader, from one human being to another. It is rather like a message in a bottle, marked “To whoever finds this,” and the letter begins: “I do not know whether anyone will ever find this message…”
The relationship between a book and its reader is interesting and delicate. In the modern world it is a group marriage, in which, besides those two, there are a great many other husbands in the room, all influencing how the encounter between them takes place—if it takes place at all.
First there is the publisher, who on the basis of cultural and economic judgments decides what will be published; then the bookstores, which invest in different books in different ways; the critics, who display their cultivated literary opinions; parliament, which passes the laws governing the distribution and taxation of books; the organizations of the book and publishing industries, which lobby for their own aims; libraries, which decide what books they offer and to what extent; second-hand bookshops, which sell orphaned copies that have ended up on the road; recycling centers, where abandoned books wait miserably for someone to take them even for free, so that they will not be sent to paper recycling or turned into heat energy; and so on. Around the book there is a crowd.
And yet a book is always a message from writer to reader, from one human being to another. It is rather like a message in a bottle, marked “To whoever finds this,” and the letter begins: “I do not know whether anyone will ever find this message…”
For a book, even a novel, is always the opening of a conversation, an address: a shy “hi.”
Some books have more to say than others, and sometimes the message is easier to notice and understand, sometimes harder. Sometimes it is easy to accept; sometimes it irritates or angers us, or seems incomprehensibly stupid. All communication between human beings is like that.
History Goes On Forward Too
The book is a big thing. Its revolution began around 1450, when Johannes Gutenberg, who invented movable type, founded a printing press in Mainz, Germany. The rest is history.
But history has this particular quality: it never ends. Toward the future it is even longer than toward the past. The production and distribution system of the book, however, seems to have remained stuck in Gutenberg’s time. Although for decades the development of information technology has offered tools which, if suitably developed and used, could allow book and reader to meet without intermediaries, this has not happened.
Partly, no doubt, this is because readers are accustomed to the old system. Partly it is because the actors in the old system have so much invested in it that they do not want change. And partly it is also because technology has not developed as quickly as, say, ten years ago it still seemed it would.
But I am certain that precisely in these years this too is changing. Or at least, for the first time, there is a genuinely real technical possibility of change. There is no longer any necessity for the meeting between writer and reader to be a mass event in which a large number of actors bustle about as middlemen, cash registers ringing, when one small human being simply wants to acquaint himself with what another small human being has thought.
The Reader Can Meet the Writer Directly
Modern technology makes it possible to convey books to readers without intermediaries. It makes publishing much faster and the book cheaper for the buyer, while still increasing the author’s earnings per copy. Nor do the walls of homes any longer have to fill up with loooooovely but dusty bookshelves and books, which unfortunately cause allergies for many people, and which the heirs will eventually clear out to a recycling center or straight into the trash.
In the worst case, the books that have accumulated on the shelves and become unnecessary are transformed into carbon dioxide in the circulations of the atmosphere, giving climate change a small literary kick. For tastes and values change from one generation to the next. The literary discovery of my youth only very rarely speaks any longer to my children, let alone my grandchildren. On my own shelves, too, there are thousands of books that were and still are doors to somewhere for me, but mean nothing to my children. So the world changes, my dear Erkki. Every generation seeks its own doors. And rightly so. Hoarding printed books at home is no longer a good idea.
Of course it is also possible that without traditional distribution and marketing channels, book and reader will not meet, and that any other way of thinking is mere fantasy. But I will take that risk, and from now on I will offer all the books I write only without intermediaries, electronically, and only in that form. These books will never be printed.
Before this, I have published one printed novel, The Dream King of Segrfell (Segrfellin unikuningas, Teos, 2013), and quite a number of popular-science books in which I have been involved as editor and/or as one of the writers. But not one more tree will be felled in order to print what I have said and thought.
