Learning from Books

One of the major topics of the London Book Fair this year, as indeed in many previous years, concerns the digitisation of books and how that growing trends is having an impact on the industry as a whole. This lunchtime, on the World at One on BBC Radio Four, Martha Kearney has been discussing those issues with a number of studio guests. One of the other commentators savvily pointed out that in the future there will be two types of books: e-books and beautiful books. I wondered whether there was something in this that we might take over into the classical music industry and particularly its dwindling recording arm.

I have recently had the luck to survey some terrific bumper boxed sets: the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra's 125th birthday box of live recordings, as captured by Dutch Radio, and Deutsche Grammophon's overview of Richard Strauss's Complete Operas, about which I wrote last week. They are both superb releases, with sterling recordings. But both leave something to be desired in terms of their presentation. The Concertgebouw release, featuring 152 discs, also offers two lavish books of photographs, Orchestra history and several indexes of the performances included. But the box in which these items arrive is flimsy at best. It was a slight improvement on the Concertgebouw's Mahler anniversary box of DVDs, but I still can't see it lasting to the next five years left alone another 125.

Deutsche Grammophon also shortchanges its customers with the Strauss box. Not a single libretto is included in the accompanying liner book. Of course the purchaser is encouraged to go and find the texts online, code in hand, but three of the librettos were still missing, even online, for Guntram, Feuersnot and Die Liebe der Danae. Why, given the reliance on digitisation, even when the product itself is physical, should the listener invests in physical products? Perhaps, cynically, that is indeed what the record companies want. To get rid of the physical, to rely solely on downloads.

But one of the other factors raised in relation to the London Book Fair – admittedly an old chestnut – is that book survive because of how much people love them in themselves. Their ability to offer stories span numerous mediums, but there is no compensation for not having the actual book on the shelf. Certainly, in the study in which I write this blog, I love having books and CDs around me. Perhaps the recording companies should take a leaf out of the book industry's book and invest in more beautiful versions of their releases, so that the physical can always offer more than the digital.

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