After spending a lot of time listening to panels about the future of books today I thought it was only fitting to talk about an essay I read (in an issue of Creative Nonfiction I got at the Twin Cities Book Festival) about what publishing will look like in 2025. In number 31 of the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction essayists wrote on the topic Writing and Publishing in 2015 and Beyond. Phillip Lopate, the man who edited the anthology The Art of the Personal Essay titled his predictions The Best of Times, Worst of Times. One of his most interesting ideas is bringing old authors back from the dead, and in doing this he predicts they'll produce nothing more than boring biographies full of their regrets. You can read a portion of this short essay on Creative Nonfiction's website.
Lopate also predicts that the physical book will continue to exist, but that the industry will be full of experimentation. One example is the book-lozenge, "which dissolved novella-sized works on the tongue, not to mention the book-shot, devised for cultivated diabetics who requested a literary does with their daily injections." Can you imagine being given an entire book through candy? I think it might be fun to try every once in awhile, but I wouldn't want it to replace books. What does that say about our culture? That we'd rather be fed culture than experience it?
I'm really interested to hear what other people think about Lopate's predictions and what all of you think might happen in the book industry by 2025. A more serious suggestion made by Jeff Kamin at the Twin Cities Book Festival today was offering paperback books with the hardcovers simply because people will probably buy the book sooner. I think this is a really good idea and a lot of us agreed on that today.
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