How Stephanie Meyer's Vampires are Sucking Literature Dry

At this time of the school year, the library becomes a tense place to be as the study carrels fill up with the sounds of shuffling pages and frantic typing. It becomes an obsession to check word counts and pages left to write. It's stressful. I completely understand the yearning for a comfortable chair and a mug of hot chocolate and the last thing I want is to pick up yet another "classic."

There seem to be two kinds of books in general interest publishing: books that sell and books of worth. These categories are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I think the best books are those of literary merit that happen to entertain, but I think the market has moved largely towards books that sell, both in the consideration of the publisher and in the action of the consumer. I'm speaking now of those books that are mass-marketed, like the Twilights and the Stephen Kings. By no stretch of the imagination are the Twilight books well-written, but they sell because teenage girls (and let's be honest, us college girls too) are entertained. Is it fair that Stephenie Meyer has made millions of dollars from a piece of work that is mediocre? I still see books being sold that are of worth, that exemplify work of merit, while also being gripping and meaningful, but I don't see Dave Eggers or Chuck Palahniuk or Don DeLillo getting as much recognition as they deserve. I can't say why this is; perhaps they are not as well marketed as popular fiction, or perhaps they are not as easily accessible to the readers.

Over the past few decades, there has been a loss of perspective regarding the actual purpose of books. The goal used to be that if a book was worth publishing, it was worth reading. I think the publishing industry has shifted to a "big business" mindset, where editors are more likely to buy a book because of its marketability, rather than it literary merit.

One reason for this shift is the set of obstacles that this industry has set up for itself. Publishing houses pay huge advances to big names to write books in the hope that they will produce a best seller and garner a profit for the company. If a book doesn't sell as well as projected, the publishing house loses big. They already paid the advance to the author and they lose money on book returns, or the return of all the unsold books to from bookstores for a full refund, a system that has been in place since the Great Depression. Because of the likelihood that a publishing house will lose money, they are unwilling to take risks in publishing books that don't have any obvious marketable value. This often happens to be the books of literary merit, the classics of the future.

As a result, we're seeing another change in the world of publishing. Authors who cannot sell their manuscript to a publishing house are looking for alternate ways to publish their books. This has led to internet publishing, in the style of fan fiction. At the same time, publishing companies are capitalizing on new technologies to sell books in the digital format for e-readers like Amazon's Kindle or Barnes & Noble's Nook.

It is in this world of technology that the publishing industry is struggling to find itself, in much the same way that the music industry was forced to do in the last decade or so. Presently, e-books still make a trip through publishing houses, but soon, there will be little need, as books "leak" to file sharing websites and as authors find ways to "publish" whatever they want, making any written work available to nearly everyone in the world. While this seems ideal for many authors, being able to publish their books without encountering the obstacles of traditional publishing methods, it also means that there is little regulation in what is being published.

I am wary of this entire process. When publishing becomes a free-for-all, where anyone can get their work read by millions of people, where do we begin to distinguish what works have actual worth? I only see more confusion and devaluation. Are we comfortable with fan fiction and the Brothers Karamazov occupying the same (digital) space?

I think that this is something our generation is falling to: the instant gratification and convenience of having your books or music with you wherever you go. I am not exempt from this. My iTunes library is over 10,000 songs but just because I have all of that music doesn't mean I'm listening to and appreciating it. There is something to be said about better appreciating something because it is a physical object. This is much like what vinyl owners say about owning records. There is something intentional about putting a record on, about getting up to flip it, about placing the needle in the groove in the same way that there is something to be said for making room for a book on a shelf, picking it up, opening it, and turning its pages.

There is a similar statement about our respect for those things that hold meaning in the shift from object to digital file as in the putting on equal footing works of literary merit and works of pure entertainment. In an article entitled, "The Slow Moronic Death of Books (As We Know Them)" in Seattle's The Stranger, Paul Constant writes, "And when the number of people reading decreases at the top of the mass-reading market, there will be fewer people filtering down to the serious literary experience, and the idea of reading printed books will be a tiny boutique experience, not unlike collecting vinyl."