A victim of the economic slowdown due to the global
financial crisis, Clay Jannon is an unemployed marketing graduate. His one
career job was design and marketing for New Bagel, a company run by former
Googlers who developed a machine that would make perfect bagels that were
completely identical every time. When it turned out that the market didn’t want
perfect identical bagels, the machine was refigured to produce burnt irregular
ones. New Bagel went under, the Googlers moved on and Clay started looking for
another job.
With his job search hampered by the myriad distractions
offered by the internet, Clay starts printing out job applications and walking to
the park to read them. One day while walking home, Clay sees an ad for help wanted in the
window of a 24-hour bookstore. He enters, applies, gets the job and immediately
begins work as a clerk at Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore. Mr Penumbra’s is a
bookstore made in two parts – the used bookstore in the front of the shop and
the Waybacklist, a collection of old books that have never been registered on
any official book database, that go up the walls of the odd, tall space. In his quest to digitise the store, Clay uncovers a
secret society that has been searching for answers for 400 years and, with his
friends who each have their own quirky technological specialities, goes on a
quest to find the answers.
These two instances, where the new (perfectly identical
bagels, the internet, technology) is compared and contrasted with the old
(imperfect bagels, the printed page, a bookstore) and then integrated is the
key theme of this book and I think whether or not you like Mr Penumbra's will
depend on how well you think this theme was executed. I am honestly not sure if I liked this book
or not. I think questions about the integration of technology with publishing
and the book industry are interesting. I think the digitisation of books is
good because it makes book more widely available, often much cheaper and has
much less stress on the planet because we’re not chopping down trees to print
them and then shipping the printed book all over the world. However, I worry
that the models used by Amazon and Google mean that authors aren’t getting
enough of the royalties for the book industry to remain sustainable (not a lot
of use having models to sell books if no good books are being written!). I also
recognise that a shift to a largely electronic book marketplace will result in
changes in the labour market in that some jobs will be lost (printers, probably
some designers and typesetters) and some will be created (digital
distribution). I think this book acknowledges this tension and explores it to
some extent but, by reducing it to a question followed by an unrealistic and
cheesy conclusion, it dismisses the complexities of the argument in favour of a
Hollywood ‘let’s all just be friends’ happy ending.
This book is very computer driven. I am certain that I
missed a whole bunch of references to computer stuff that probably affected how
much I enjoyed the book. I didn’t know which of the computer language/design
things were real and which were invented for diegetic purposes and I didn’t
care enough to look them up. Also interesting with this book were the
references to Google. Clay dates a girl, Kat, who is a Google employee and
devotee and the book is quite critical of the role Google play in the digital
world. I was surprised that Google allowed their name to be used, especially in
such a negative portrayal. In the digital/analogue binary that this book
divides the world into, Google is just a digital modern-day cult; a more public
version of the secret society that funds Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore.
I’m going to reluctantly give this book three stars. I would
be hesitant to recommend it to anyone I know (bad) but it has given me food for
thought (good), so I’m placing it right in the middle of the star scale. If
you’ve read it and have thoughts, I’d love to hear them but don’t let this
review in any way influence your decision to pick it up.
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