Back in January, Amazon issued a fourth-quarter report that announced that sales of e-books for the Kindle outstripped sales of paperback books by 115:100, and sales of hardback books by 3:1. The inevitable newspaper reports followed, all pretty much drawing the same conclusions. It’s not a question of whether the patient will survive, they agreed; it’s how long he’s got left.

Well, another day, another death knell. Matthew Cain’s report on Channel 4 News last night revealed some troubling statistics. Overall sales of printed books are down 9.44%: paperbacks by 8.97%, hardbacks by 12.71%. As a consequence, publishers have begun to move away from the traditional model of issuing hardbacks a year in advance of paperbacks, with some titles going straight to the smaller and cheaper print format. ‘The most important catalyst for [this]’, Cain concluded, ‘has been the e-book’.

Remember the television advertisements for the Kindle and the iPad? Both Amazon and Apple sought to promote not only the whizzy gadgetry but also the physical sensation of using their products, and their durability (though I doubt any customers have held their new iPad in their hands while riding pillion on a moped, or let their dog lick their new Kindle). Using the Kindle or the iPad may provide a material experience, but does reading with them provide a material textual experience? Publishers, perhaps, have realised this, and are placing new emphasis on the aesthetic pleasure the hardback has to offer, and are promoting it as an object of physical beauty – in opposition, one assumes, to the rather dull featurelessness and intangibility of the e-book.

I don’t doubt, then, that e-readers and e-books have had an effect – a material effect, no less – upon the publishing industry. What I would dispute is the assumption – and assumption it is, for there is as yet no hard evidence of a causal relationship – that the rise in e-books has caused the fall in printed books. In media coverage, other factors are rarely discussed. Matthew Cain expressed concern that changes to the hardback could render it ‘a luxury gift item’, but at £15-25 a pop, is it not one already? What effect has the recession, falling real and disposable incomes and economic uncertainty about the future had upon people’s book-buying habits? Have rising commodity prices for wood pulp pushed up the price of books as they have the price of newspapers? What changes have there been to the second-hand book market? When was the last time you bought a brand-new hardback? (I can’t even remember).

So far, the news media have been content to stick to a ‘black-and-white’ style of reporting on e-books: e-media is up, print is down, therefore one caused the other, and the trend will continue. Much more research needs to be done into social and behavioural evidence, particularly on how e-books are being integrated into print culture, before any nuanced conclusions may be drawn about the future of the material text. Which socio-economic groups buy Kindles the most? How many printed books does the Kindle buyer already own? How often do new e-reader owners buy printed books, and how much do they spend? Do they use e-media and printed books in conjunction, and if so, how? What kinds of books are bought as e-books, what kind as printed? Crucially, for the e-reader is still in its infancy, for how long is a new Kindle used, and how does the frequency change over time? Are people buying the Kindle for the books, or for the novelty, or both?

In a short story in Granta 113 (‘Eva and Diego’, by Alberto Olmos), the female narrator explains the compulsion that drove her to buy a new iPod:

I had a salary that allowed me to buy approximately fifteen iPods a month…fifteen monthly temptations to buy an iPod. Consequently, I was one of those people who just had to buy an iPod. I simply have to buy whatever they’ve just invented to be bought…I bought the iPod out of boredom. But out of fear as well. Spending is about the fear of dying…Spending implies a future…

Spending on a gadget like a Kindle might imply a future, but books – physical books, material texts – declare both a past and a future, of the sophisticated but simple codex format, of communities of physical and intellectual experience, and of literary culture that e-readers cannot, in my opinion, hope to replicate.

A new book by the anthropologist Tim Ingold is always a reason for me to interrupt whatever I’m doing and to spend the next 24 hours reading, and his Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Routledge, 2011), does not disappoint. Ingold’s mission is to show us how much our fashionable academic languages and intellectual schemas prevent us from understanding the way the world works. He ranges across the globe, drawing insights from numerous anthropological studies, but also from artists, writers, and musicians, and an eclectic array of thinkers past and present, in order to shake off our misperceptions of what life is. For Ingold, modern thought conspires against us, erecting a series of dyads–nature/culture, mind/body, subject/object–which are visible in (and reinforced by) the worlds we create around ourselves. Asphalt pavements, concrete roads, stiff leather shoes, chairs, prescribed gaits and upright postures all conspire to convince us that we stand over above the world rather than in it. The entrenched dichotomies of modern Western thought need not to be thought across or ‘deconstructed’ but thought around, strenuously, with a lot of help from those who would never have dreamed of making such distinctions, and much detailed reflection on the nature of our own experience.

Ingold would perhaps disapprove of the existence of a ‘Centre for Material Texts’, which risks perpetuating the myth that there is something immaterial, outside the world and supervening on it, when in fact all of experience is equally embodied and disembodied, grounded and dreaming. The early sections of the book do a brilliant job of lancing some of the more cartoonish ways in which we are tempted to talk when we start to think about (what Ingold does not want to call) ‘material culture’. Yet, as in his earlier book, Lines, there is much in Being Alive for thinkers on text–in particular, Part V on ‘Drawing Making Writing’, which traces a dazzling set of connections between the legible, visible and singable letter, between writing, wayfaring, spinning, flying kites and doing anthropology. It’s truly inspirational stuff.

A great time was had by all who attended the CMT ‘Eating Words’ colloquium at Gonville and Caius College yesterday. A more detailed report of the day will follow, but in the meantime, I was amused to read this message in the email bulletin from my local Freecycle this morning:

‘WANTED: Any Culture, Cookware or Crockery. I am moving into my first house and as you can imagine it is an exciting but costly time. If anyone has any old Culture, cookware or crockery I would greatly appreciate it.’

As yesterday’s second plenary speaker Sara Pennell revealed in her fabulous exploration of religion in the early modern kitchen, there is indeed a lot of ‘old Culture’ to be found amongst pots and pans and other kitchen essentials…

a full report on the ‘Eating Words’ colloquium can be found on the ‘About’ page–click on the tab to the right.