Suddenly, incessantly, "an electric flash of intelligence spreads over the country, carrying the thrill of gratification or of grief."
Your reaction to that line could depend upon your attitude toward, and experience of, the alternate verbal universe known as Twitter. This particular sentence, however, is taken from an article in the August 1873 issue of Harper's magazine and refers to the telegraph.
More recently (yesterday, in fact), USA Today began an article with this Shakespearean twist: "To Twitter. Or not to Twitter. That is the question the publishing world is asking these days."
I don't have the answer, but I'm working on a theory. My research is based primarily on personal experience and observation, with a bit of Darwinism and historical precedent thrown in to create the illusion of rationality.
What I'm suggesting, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, is that booksellers have already mastered the key tool that will propel them into the brave new bookselling world of social media in general and Twitter in particular.
This tool is called the shelf talker.
In my bookselling lifetime, I've witnessed a decline in the influence of long form reviews on readers, but I've seen no diminishment in the power of the shelf talker. And since short and sweet--often acronymic--writing rules the day, this strengthens the position of booksellers, who mastered the art of concise prose a long time ago.
Admittedly I haven't worked out all the details, but I suspect that success in selling bundles containing lots of words (in book or e-book format) will go to those who can make the most convincing argument with the fewest words. A little ironic, I know, but aren't we the poster children for irony?
Think outside the book business for a moment. Whether texting or tweeting, WTFing or LOLing, more and more people are opting for condensed, rapid-fire communication. And that's where Darwin comes into the picture. According to the Harper's article mentioned above, "By the principle which Darwin describes as natural selection short words are gaining the advantage of long words, direct forms of expression are gaining the advantage of the ambiguous, and local idioms are everywhere at a disadvantage. The doctrine of Survival of the Fittest thus tends to the constant improvement and points to the ultimate unification of language."
Now add a dash of historical precedent. As was pointed out recently by Ben Schott in the New York Times, "The 140-character limit of Twitter posts was guided by the 160-character limit established by the developers of SMS. However, there is nothing new about new technology imposing restrictions on articulation. During the late 19th-century telegraphy boom, some carriers charged extra for words longer than 15 characters and for messages longer than 10 words. Thus, the cheapest telegram was often limited to 150 characters."
So, booksellers may have an evolutionary and historical edge over other bookish Twitter scribes? Anyone who has worked in a bookstore that focuses on staff recommend tags knows the awesome power of those modest-looking slips of paper.
Shelf talkers come in all shapes and sizes. Some are handwritten, some typed, some encased in plastic, some laminated. But even if they are just shredded scraps left untended, crumpled and grievously wounded, they still sell books until their last drop of faded ink.
Earlier this year, the folks at Green Apple Books & Music, San Francisco, Calif., ran a great series on their Green Apple Core blog about the power and beauty of that bookshop's unique shelf talkers.
And what is the Indie Next List but shelf-talkers for a national audience?
Booksellers are well prepared to take their shelf-talkability into the Age of Verbal Condensation. Many have already answered the "To Twitter or not to Twitter" question affirmatively. Here's just a tiny sampling: @bookavore, @readandbreathe, @joebfoster, @booknerdnyc, @KatherineBoG, @indierob, @corpuslibris @KarenCorvello, @RichRennicks, @WendyHudson, @kashbk.
Books are being discussed and handsold with intelligence, with passion, with brevity--Twitter as shelf-talker platform.
Ralph Waldo Emerson saw this coming, of course. "I think the habit of writing by telegraph will have a happy effect on all writing by teaching condensation," he wrote in 1866.
And Harper's observed in 1873: "When we consider the immense number of people that every day by writing a telegram and counting the words are taking a most efficient lesson in concise composition, we see in another way the influence of this invention on the strength of language."
Are shelf talkers the next great evolutionary step? Maybe that is the question.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)