Issue 31 / 2007
31 / Imagining the Future
From the outlandish to the pragmatic—what's to come?
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,” Phillip Lopate conjures up versions of books that will meet the needs of humanity in 2025; Donna Seaman, in “Netting the Future,” contemplates our evolving relationship with the Internet; Amy Stolls calculates that according to recent trends, 87% of the population will claim “writer” as an occupation by 2025.
“Imagining the Future” includes seventeen intriguing essays from across the literary landscape and six elegant and thought-provoking illustrations created by Little Kelpie, a creative studio in Pittsburgh. A “Readings” section includes four longer essays plus a profile of Gay Talese.
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FROM THE EDITOR: Imagining the Future
A listener who called in to a radio talk show I recently appeared on told me that he was an engineer who had lost three jobs to robots over the years.Imagine
“Imagine there’s no Heaven” is the opening line of the famous song by John Lennon. “I imagine Heaven as a great library,” Jorge Luis Borges once said. “It’s easy if you try,” the song goes on.YouTube Can Be a Published Author
Now that any poor soul with access to an Internet cafe can post an idea, an article or an entire book to an inexpensive Web site instantaneously accessible to millions of individuals worldwide, now that print on demand places the means of production back in the hands of the beleaguered literary worker, now that blogs break news more effectively than conventional ink-and-paper journalism, forecasts concerning the demise of publishing as we know it are almost too common to track.The Death of the Book
In the year 2025, if man is still alive, I’m convinced that some snarky pundit will write a piece in the Starboogle eTimes, declaring that since the last bookstore on the planet has been driven out of business by Amaoozle (a subsidiary of Starboogle), the book simply cannot survive.The Future in the Past
Trying to imagine the shape of the book business 25 years from now is both challenging and dangerous—challenging because I am by nature a Luddite and claim no particular future vision and dangerous because many unforeseen technologies will no doubt spring up between now and then that could radically affect it.The Fetishistic Book
The Wall Street journal, the newspaper where I work, recently revamped its look: a smaller format, a new typeface and a new mandate to write the stories behind the news rather than simply presenting the news.The Book Business: Looking Ahead
About 15 years ago, a Canadian friend, an expert in the field of advanced technologies, advised me to get out of the magazine business. “In 15 years,” he said, “no one will be reading magazines and newspapers.Introducing…Trump Jerky Books!
What I fear is that 18 years from now, in the year 2025, while browsing through the stacks of her local bookstore, a young creative nonfiction writer will come across this ancient issue of Creative Nonfiction, flip to my page and roll her eyes at my predictions of the publishing world: To boost sales, books will be printed on a tasty compoundknown as book jerky that can be eaten after reading.Books Without Borders
Books represent the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of humans in their interactions with nature, the cosmos and each other. Web advocates, science fiction writers and futurists have all predicted that the Web will replace the book with multimedia, interactive, individualized alternatives.The Library as Storyplace
"A reader can still count on finding everything at a library, and there is still something emotionally secure about that."Best of Times, Worst of Times
Looking back at publishing history to the year 2025, we can see it as a particularly exciting transitional period for our industry. To quote the English novelist Charles Dickens, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”The Phone
The phone. I can’t find the handset; most probably, I left it in the bathroom. Maura called the moment I was going to shower. So I must have left it there.Netting the Future
Outside my office door stands a gadget-of-all-trades. At the proverbial touch of a finger, it copies, produces pristine color prints, faxes, scans and converts documents into graphic files, and sends e-mails.What We’ve Got Here is a Failure to … Um …
Here’s a scenario: It’s 2025, and you want a book—you being a senior who still fondly remembers books and a book being a non-voice-activated, tangible, artfully designed, paper-and ink-scented collection of human-generated original prose.Writing Isn’t the Future of Writing
My 5-year-old daughter recently asked me about the habits of leopard seals. We went to Google and immediately had thousands of results to our search criteria. From the documents we looked at, it seemed that about a tenth of them had the basic information we wanted.The Writers in the Silos
It requires neither imagination nor acumen to predict that our current conglomerating, lowest-common-denominator, demographically targeted publishing industry will soon achieve its streamlined apotheosis—a single, worldwide, Exxon Mobil-owned literary empire offering a list of seven books twice per year.What Future of Newspapers?
In the zany “contract” scene between Groucho and Chico Marx in “A Night at the Opera,” Groucho produces a pair of contracts that flow to the floor. He reads some supposed legalese— “party of the second part,” etc.—andLiterature Can Save the World … If We Let It!
The future that I imagine for writers is one in which a cultural shift has occurred of paradigm-shattering proportions. A change akin to the end of legalized racial segregation and discrimination against women, both revolutions that I have witnessed in my lifetime.Luke and Leonardo
There’s something in your room that reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci,” I told my younger boy. “Something you have in common with him.” At least that was my understanding— flawed as it turned out, or so I’m now convinced, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.Diagnosis/Cure
When I was a boy in Birmingham in the 1950s, Vulcan was, in ways, the city to me.What the Living Do
After a series of visits to the grave of her parents, a writer reflects on the importance of finding a special place to commune with the deadConakry
The telephone rang, it was my brother in Boston. He had survived the operation. Only 35 years old and he’d already had his mitral valve repaired.Shoot the Messenger: Gay Talese at 75
The forbidden. The hidden. The unspoken and unspeakable. Life behind the façade, beneath the fancy dress, calls out to Gay Talese, the grandson of an immigrant Italian stonemason, the son of an immigrant Italian tailor.