The final fate of film. (Source: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia)
In the past few days, I had frustration with a series of short stories I wrote. They didn’t work as effectively as I had hoped; I thought to myself “No one will read my book because no one reads anymore,” and that I should shift my creative energies into film. After all, that was the only cultural output anyone cared about; thanks to flawed teaching methods, no one geeks out over books, and you can’t slap an excerpt on YouTube and expect to get any views. Novelists dream of their works being adapted to film and, if they were honest with themselves, would rather be making films.
However, the mighty medium of film has a critical weakness: it is difficult to preserve. (In this post, “film” refers to any audiovisual entertainment that isn’t video games or stage plays.)
The challenges of preserving film are well-known. The original reels rot over time, especially when stored improperly. Formats can change, meaning that one must preserve not only the physical medium itself, but the means to play it as well. Companies that seem invincible today can go under in the future, leaving their preserved film libraries in an uncertain limbo. Purely digital copies are both robust and vulnerable; robust because they can be copied at will and are not tied to a single physical medium, and vulnerable because they can be edited by malicious folks, so you’re never 100% sure you have an original as intended by its production team. All these weaknesses are inherent to the medium itself; new technology cannot cover any of them.
Physical books, on the other hand, are far easier to preserve. There is no worry of changing formats, since languages change slowly and can be translated anyway. You only need a pair of eyes and hands to read, so any book is readable as long as it’s whole. Books are easier to print than films, since only text and images have to be preserved, not sound or motion. Thus, books are built to last — and built to transmit a cultural patrimony.
When it comes to passing stories into the future, the superior format is clear. Books may not be in 4K. Books may not get a ton of fan art. But books can endure in a way that film struggles with even today, in our technological wonderland of powerful graphics cards and neural network AIs.
To be fair, there is a crowd that geeks out over books, but they won’t like the sort of pulp works normal people want to read.
The plus side with how long books last is that they can be handed down and passed around, and frequently are. If someone wanders into a used bookstore or library twenty years after you have died (or whatever they are in the future) and picks up and enjoys your books, if even for a few moments, then it was all worth it. You just ever know how it’s going to work out.
That’s very true. Fewer moving parts makes that easy.
Books are a physical reminder to never quit, because something can be saved. They also show continuity in thought and emotion, word and deed better than film can at this point because film is still so young, it captures the 1890s and later basically. We need books to contrast with film, with other forms of art which are even more ephemeral. Plus when you have old books, you can call out the bastards over time who try to morph those books into things they’re not.
That is quite true. Physical books, once printed, cannot be altered, only vandalized or destroyed. And yes, the print medium has some advantages over film — for example, nothing can do voice like a good novel.