By 2025, “devouring a book” may be more than a figure of speech. Books will be consumable products—in digestible pill forms, as injections and even as beef jerky, according to predictions in Imagining the Future. This issue brings together voices from across the publishing spectrum—from novelists and journalists to librarians and editors—all of them speculating about the ways literature and the business of writing will change in the coming decades.

From the outlandish to the pragmatic, the writers find common ground as they marvel at the way technology has ushered in a new era of communication. In “Best of Times, Worst of Times,” essayist and memoirist Phillip Lopate conjures up versions of books that will meet the needs of humanity in 2025: the floating book (“in response to the rising water-levels at our coasts”), the impulse book, the book-shot (“devised for cultivated diabetics who requested a literary dose with their daily injections”).

Booklist editor Donna Seaman, in “Netting the Future,” contemplates our evolving relationship with the Internet and observes: “As we write, read, surf, scroll, talk, watch, sample and shop, the manufacture of our marvelously smart and companionable machines—seemingly clean objects—involves the use of toxic chemicals that are now found all around the world embedded in soil, ice, water, air and the bodies of living humans and animals. ... The virtual world has an all too tangible impact on the living earth.”

Amy Stolls, literature program officer for the National Endowment for the Arts, calculates that according to recent trends, 87% of the population will claim “writer” as an occupation by 2025. Furthermore, she writes, “the universal library of all human verbiage [will show] 1.4 million genres, with 230,000 subcategories labeled ‘For Dummies.’”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

From the Editor
Lee Gutkind

Feature Section • Imagining the Future

Imagine
Muharem Bazdulj

YouTube Can Be a Published Author
Dinty W. Moore

The Death of the Book
David Henry Sterry

The Future in the Past
George Gibson

The Fetishistic Book
Robert J. Hughes

The Book Business: Looking Ahead
C. Michael Curtis

Introducing . . . Trump Jerky Books!
Robin Hemley

Books Without Borders
Gloriana St. Clair

The Library as Storyplace
Rebecca T. Miller

Best of Times, Worst of Times read an excerpt
Phillip Lopate

The Phone
Immanuel Mifsud

Netting the Future read an excerpt
Donna Seaman

What We've Got Here Is a Failure to . . . Um . . .
Amy Stolls

Writing Isn't the Future of Writing
Astro Teller

The Writers in the Silos read an excerpt
Heidi Julavits

What Future of Newspapers?
Ira Berkow

Literature Can Save the World . . . If We Let It!
Marita Golden

The Readings

Luke and Leonardo
Denise Shekerjian

Diagnosis / Cure
Dennis Covington

What the Living Do
Judith Barrington

Conakry
David Applefield

Shoot the Messenger: Gay Talese at 75
Barbara Lounsberry

138 pages

It is hardly an opinion to say that the future of book publishing is uncertain, what with Apple's recent iPhone release, Google's continual digitization of American libraries, and talk from more and more publishers about serious consideration of print-on-demand technology. Certainly books themselves will be around for some time, but their locations and the amount of use they receive is in question. It seems possible for them to disappear from our everyday lives, to be replaced by electronic paper, or to have their value negated by the next phase of Google's information empire takeover, the physical texts then relegated permanently to some Library of Congress vault forty feet below street level. That this hypothesising increasingly goes on today asserts what we all intuitively or consciously realize: our relationship with printed matter is changing rapidly.

This is the subject Creative Nonfiction tackles in their latest issue, number 31, which became available this past summer (see cover image above). Looking at the issue's unassuming cover and graphic-lite content, a reader may not readily assume the issue contains a wealth of intellectually dexterous and engaging writing about the future of book publishing by some of the most interesting minds in the business, including Heidi Julavitis (The Uses of Enchantment; co-editor of The Believer), C. Michael Curtis (fiction editor for The Atlantic Monthly), Amy Stolls (literature specialist for the National Endowment for the Arts), Philip Lopate (Art of the Personal Essay), Dinty W. Moore (editor of Brevity), and many more. If, say, Tin House or Zoetrope: All Story did an issue on the same theme, the cover would have a futuristic image adorning it, the text, a heavy techo-typography (possibly even embossed), and the inside would be laden with graphics depicting the wild and exuberant world of the near future of books. Something attention getting, to say the least. Creative Nonfiction, on the other hand, has always been more reserved in their public image (and less well funded, obviously, than Mr. Coppola's or Mr. McCormack's magazines). The only thematically revealing aspects of Creative Nonfiction's cover are the two subtitles: "Writing and Publishing in 2025 and Beyond" and "Imagining the Future," which are hopefully enough for readers to locate this find among the mass of newsstand possibilities.

Lee Gutkind, editor of Creative Nonfiction, asked the issue's contributors to imagine the future of book publishing in the year 2025. Though the writers each at least refer to the year at least once in their essays, the content and predictions of the essays are refreshingly all over the map (something always nice to discover in themed issues). The essays could easily have all discussed the usual suspects of book future--the fear of literary digitization, downloadable e-books replacing print books, the distractions of new media eliminating new readers or "real" books, etcetera--but the writers in this issue are able to push down different tracks and explore new possibilities to seek out publishing's future. (Image at left was done by creative studio Little Kelpie; it is one of the many graphics about the future of books the studio created for this issue of Creative Nonfiction.)

Take Heidi Julavitis's essay, "The Writers in the Silos" (recently republished in Harper's readings section). In a subtle high-irony, Julavitis takes us from an Exxon Mobil (yes, the oil company) global takeover of literature, through an elimination of all the world's books, to a final resurgence of literature in an Adam-and-Eve-grassroots like rebirth of reading at--of all things--your local farmers market. "Soon a slogan will attach itself to the phenomenon--'Read Locally,'" Julavitis writes, "and the new AgriCultural movement will begin." In less than three pages Julavitis takes literature from its pessimistic free market destruction to a warm recreation within local communities--a future which, though obviously somewhat comic, contains a nice element of hope.

The rest of the issue ranges from explorations of the possible necessity of gatekeepers in the literary world to cities where digital books are accessible from anywhere 24/7. And the complete issue feels not like an off-the-cuff prediction of an unknown future, but instead like glimpses into publishing's crystal ball explained by the sort of people you think might know a thing or two about the field. The result is both an eye-opening look at the many diverse possible futures of the book world as well as a reaffirming assertion that, no matter where the future takes us, writing is something we will have to deal with--even if, as Lopate amusingly imagines, its "a book-lozenge which dissolved novella-sized works on the tongue, or the book-shot, devised for cultivated diabetics who requested a literary dose with their daily injections."

Reviewed in Luna Park