‘But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls?”
If such cultural-legacy issues were part of the agenda when Virginia Woolf wrote her series of essays The Common Reader, one wonders what she would make of the contemporary literary scene. As a novelist, critic, publisher and voracious reader, Woolf, born 132 years ago today, would no doubt have plenty to say on the ebook revolution that is fundamentally changing the way society reads and writes.
Concerned as she was with those “tiny pearls”, it is unlikely the writer, or her eponymous reader of 1925, ever conceived of Oyster, an unlimited-access ebooks subscription service that launched in the US last September. Billed as a Netflix for books, the service offers members a digital library of more than 100,000 titles for $9.95 a month. It is currently available only in the US and compatible only with the iPad and iPhone, but it has plans for growth in both areas. The content-sharing platform Scribd launched a similar service a month later, available globally and undercutting Oyster by $1, prompting speculation that the all-you-can-read market will be the next big thing in the world of ebooks.
This is not a new concept to consumers familiar with on-demand streaming of films and TV shows from Netflix, or music from Spotify. It is not even a new concept in the book world. Amazon Prime, the Spanish site 24Symbols, the German company Skoobe and the recently rebranded Entitle all offer variations on this business model.
Room for improvement
What is different about Scribd and Oyster is their scope, and the similar routes they are taking to grow that scope. As of last month both companies have deals with the self-publishing platform Smashwords and HarperCollins, the latter the only Big Five publisher on board with this unlimited-access type of service. This leaves much room for improvement.
Classics, self-published books and lesser-known titles from smaller publishers are all well and good, but whichever company can entice some of the other big players its way is likely to gain the most subscribers. Oyster appears ahead on that front, having recently signed the American publisher Perseus Books Group. As both Scribd and Oyster compete for customers, they will aim to outdo each other’s catalogues, which is good news for Woolf’s common reader.
A fan of ransacking public libraries to unearth "sunk treasure", Woolf may well have signed up to digital versions like Oyster if she were alive today. She would be arguably less impressed, however, with the fleeting interest that members tend to show in the books they rent from such services. Recent Oyster readership data shows that Pride & Prejudice, among the most opened books on the site, was finished only 1 per cent of the time. Or spare a thought for the German Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, whose collected stories have been opened by more than 100 readers but are yet to be finished by anyone.
Obsession with the future
In many ways, pick-and-mix subscription sites such as these are a byproduct of the age of instant gratification that today's reader inhabits. They offer members the chance to have within their possession, if only ephemerally, more books than they could ever imagine – and all at the same time. They also reflect society's obsession with the future, constantly on the move, searching for new trends. In an age where sitting still is out of fashion, it's no wonder traditional ways to read are being upended. How do you find a quiet corner to curl up in when there's a party going on in every room?
But while it is a shame that so many readers will never fully delve into the story that informs Jane Austen’s “universally acknowledged” truth, it is possible that this is simply a magnification of traditional reading habits. Isn’t it similar to going into a shop, a library or a friend’s house, and reading the back cover or first page of a book before putting it down again?
Unlimited access ramps up the number of books available to open and discard at will. This can be seen positively. If such services continue to grow in popularity, so too will the audience that gets the “universally acknowledged” reference in this and other articles, however shallow their background knowledge of it may be. A sliver of literature, but literature nonetheless. Proponents of the site are keen to emphasise this. Instead of people spending time on social media or playing mobile games, they point out, members will be reading and exploring the world of books (and then using the social-media functions on these sites to tell their friends what they’re reading).
As with all limitless buffets, the insatiable benefit most. If you’re happy to forgo new releases – this is a library, not a shop – reading two ebooks a month will, by and large, constitute a saving. Or you could download 50, or 100, or 500 books, and read a chapter of each. But who has time these days to read that much? If only Virginia Woolf were still around: “I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs 10 others at the same time.”
Sarah Gilmartin is an arts journalist.
