Publishing a book in Barbados has always been a labour of love. It clearly cannot be in pursuit of financial reward. Yet, intrepid souls – count me among them – keep doing it. To be sure, with the outreach of today’s technology (Amazon.com, Borders, and so on) the task can be a wee bit less painful, but you still have to be an Eric Jerome Dickey or James Patterson to reap any success.
You should clear out some space under the bed or in the storeroom or garage to tuck away a few unopened boxes if you are so ambitious as to print 5 000. There may well be some authors who have had to order a second printing of their books. I haven’t met any.
Ten days ago I attended yet another book launch.
Dr Chamberlain Hope and his daughter Anoush Hope-Fischer must be complimented for joining a steadily growing number of Barbadian writers brave enough to introduce books to a society with so few readers.
There has to be some other reason for any Barbadian of the past 40 years to muster up the nerve to publish a book. I tip my hat to the Hopes for their novels Love And Grief During The Riots And The War and Yesterday Was A Woman.
Which brings me to the thing called reading. These days all types of inducements have to be thought up to introduce our young people to collide with the joys of reading. It is not easy; there are so many dazzling distractions dangling before them.
Reading has become a bore to most people born since 1964 – the year television came to Barbados. Most do or did it at school and university because it was on the curriculum.
In Grown Up Digital, Don Tapscott meets a young man studying at Florida State University who says: “I don’t read books per se. I go to Google and I can absorb relevant information quickly. Some of this comes from books. But sitting down and going through a book from cover to cover doesn’t make sense. It’s not a good use of time as I can get all the information I need faster through the Web.”
As if reading is simply about hoarding information – what Nicholas Carr calls “strip-mining of relevant content”.
I met a young man a few days ago near the entrance of the nearby supermarket where I was bilked out of $100 by a trickster one morning last year. I was naturally reluctant to engage when he asked: “Can I have a word with you, sir?”
There was no hard-luck story this time: the young man asked what I meant by the phrase “the equilibrium of need”. I had forgotten about it, but he reminded me that he had read it in one of my columns several months ago and he had since then wanted me to elaborate.
We had a most interesting half-hour discussion and I was glad I had decided while in the supermarket to leave the ice cream until my next visit. I took the opportunity to quiz the young man about his view on the state of reading among his contemporaries and he confirmed my suspicion: too much distraction. He said: “Too much time is wasted on Facebook.”
We came around to agreeing that in the same way other technologies made way for the book, the book will have to make way for other technologies. People found ways to express themselves long before Gutenberg’s momentous breakthrough. The evolution continues.
The term “book” must be accepted in new formats: Kindle, iPad, Nook, Playbook and any of 60 other “tablets”.
I wish Dr Hope and his daughter good luck with their new novels.
As I write, a treasure has just been offered me: part of the library of one of Barbados’ most illustrious educators – books that might otherwise end up in a hole at Mangrove in St Thomas.
