Issue 106—Long-Term Memory for Civilization
Hey there, welcome to 500 Words.
TOP OF MIND
The sun is having a moment, as Bill McKibben writes in The New Yorker.
It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or early next.
That’s because people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours.
McKibben points out that last year, ninety-six percent of the global demand for new electricity was met by renewable energy.
The clouds move aside and the sun comes through, to force the metaphor, but these bits of good news amid the other kind have me thinking about the old-timey business of reading words in books made of paper.
Government websites are being erased, and online data is vanishing. Did you know that Amazon can disappear e-books from your Kindle and prevent you from reading books that you've bought on anything that is not an Amazon device?
In this slithery world of ours where everything seems to be moving underfoot, I'd like to make the case for paper books as stable long-term memory storage for civilization. It's reassuring to glance over at my many bookshelves and see that the books are still there, maybe getting dusty, but otherwise unchanged. Walter Stephens, the author of How Writing Made Us Human, has this to say:
Writing enabled memory to outlast the human voice and transcend the individual person; written thoughts could remain stable over generations or centuries.
Without writing, we would forget not only our grocery lists, but also records of progress, like McKibben points to.
COPING STRATEGIES
For the next few weeks in 500 Words, I'll be writing about coping strategies. Writing itself is a coping strategy for me; my third novel Liberation will be published on October 7. When I'm not imagining my own worlds, I've been escaping into those written by others, and I've become obsessed with tracking my reading.
Goodreads may come to mind when you think of book tracking. It's the biggest, but not the best. I find it visually cluttered and hard to use, and it's also owned by Amazon. Here are some other choices. (Links below.) All are free to use, but some have paid premium features.
Zotero can grab bar codes from your books, start a catalogue, output a bibliography, and track research papers. Best for academic use, I like it because of its uncluttered design and price.
The Storygraph will connect you with a community of like-minded readers. You list the books you like, or books you've read, and it uses AI to suggest others you might like, and reading clubs you can join.
Literal.club puts the emphasis on reviews, whether you write them or read the reviews of other members. It has active reading clubs in all genres. You can follow members to see what they're reading.
LibraryThing catalogues your books, music, and movies, connects people who read similar books, offers reviews, and comes up with suggestions for what to read next.
Book Notification pulls information about new books from Amazon, Bookshop.org, and other sources to list books by your favorite authors. The founder takes pride in having real humans check all the stats and info on the platform—including publication dates, authorship, and book titles. You can track authors and get notified when their next book is coming out. (They just listed me.) Sign up, (link below) and they'll email you when my next book has been published.
I hope you find time this week to exercise some of your own coping strategies. Have a few that you'd like to recommend? Hit reply to share them, and I'll write them up for an upcoming issue of 500 Words. If you'd rather speak them, go here to leave me a message. (I can share your thoughts anonymously if that's better, or use your name if you like.)
Thanks for reading,
Lee
SOURCES
The Sun is Having a Moment - subscriber link
The History of Writing is the History of Humanity
This is a weekly letter about indie publishing from Lee Schneider. Author of the novels SURRENDER, RESIST and the forthcoming LIBERATION. Creator of the audio dramas MISSION OF THE LUNAR SPARROW, YOUR PERFORMANCE REVIEW, and PRIVACY POD. Working on many things. Nice to see you here. 500 Words is a publication of FutureX Studio.