Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The New York Times reviewed Sony’s new eReader last week, giving it a fairly muted review (which seems to be the kind of reviews it’s been getting from nearly every media outlet: everyone thinks the screen looks great, but that the device isn’t very intuitive). The overall verdict seems to be that this is indeed not the iPod of books, but that it’s better than previous devices. Another thing faulted is the integration with existing platforms, which shows that — the same as with downloaded music — users want as much flexibility as possible when it comes to reading purchased and free content.

Excerpt: “The Reader, which lists for $350, is clearly an advance over the old technology, but not so much that bookstore owners have to worry yet. If this is all Sony has come up with, you have to wonder just what they’ve been doing for 10 years.”

Can’t Judge an E-Book by Its Screen? Well, Maybe You Can

Saw two stories today which are interrelated; the first is an article in Business Week entitled “Time to Rename the Cell Phone?” The story talks about how today’s smart phones are increasingly being used for pretty much everything except making phone calls.

Excerpt: “Amid the rise of so-called smart phones that do everything from browsing the Web to downloading and storing pictures and music, there’s a growing concern that what today we refer to as a cell phone, isn’t quite the right description for these new do-all gadgets.”

The second story is an article which proves the point of the first article; it’s from the New York Times, and is entitled “YouTube Coming Soon to Cellphones.” This story talks about a few cellphone carriers which will soon be allowing users to download YouTube videos onto their cellphones (which makes perfect sense since some of those clips were shot using cellphone video cameras in the first place).

Excerpt: “‘Everybody carries a phone with them, but they may not have a computer,’ said Steve Chen, chief technology officer and a co-founder of YouTube. People can ‘take the phone out of their pocket while waiting for the bus’ and watch a video, he added.”

So, whatever it is we call “cellphones,” it’s obvious that they have become much more than just communication devices. Or rather, the borders of what we call communication have become — in our flattened, vertical world — much more broad; it used to be that the only way you could directly communicate with someone was by picking up the phone (before that you’d have to send a telegram, but that meant getting a third party involved; the invention of the phone was the invention of true personal connection across a distance). But now you can call someone, text them, IM them, send them a video, or even post to a blog using a cellphone, and thus communicate with a whole lot of people at once. Instead of reaching out and touching someone, you can now touch the entire world. So who really cares what that’s called?

Time to Rename the Cell Phone?

YouTube Coming Soon to Cellphones

In an article with Reuters, Steven Spielberg discusses a number of things, including the rise of watching movies on handheld devices such as an iPod video. He’s fairly dismissive of this, and defends the traditional practice of going to the movies. Spielberg is quoted in the article as saying, “I don’t think movie theaters will ever go away,” and on this I completely agree. However, in a world of on-demand everything, the need for people to go to movie theaters will decrease significantly because it’s very expensive, quite often is not an enjoyable experience, and people have shown they don’t mind waiting three months for the DVD. Looked at through the “Print is Dead” prism, I see this as being analogous to books and bookstores. Books and bookstores will never completely go away, either, but their significance will certainly diminish — with the rise of digital reading and delivery — as will their popularity, and large numbers of consumers reading books and going to bookstores will be the exception rather than the rule. In fact, it reminds me of a line in a very early Hitchcock film (Rich and Strange, from 1931), where a bored married couple are looking for a way to spend their evening. The wife says to the husband, “Do you want to go to the pictures or listen to the wireless?” The way she says this makes it sound as if those are the only two choices for entertainment that exist. Well, that may have been true seventy-five years ago, but for a couple today, with Tivo, Netflix, satellite radio and the Internet which acts as a portal to just about any form of entertainment that exists (music, film, literature, television, not to mention the ability to Skype anybody on the planet), and which makes this material available immediately, the opportunities for entertainment have exploded. The days of having only one or two choices are long gone.

Spielberg calls for responsible TV

The MediaBistro website has an article in their Media News section which asks the question, “Is Print Dead?” The scope of the story is the magazine business, and not trade publishing, but of course there are certain similarities. The tone of the article is that things are definitely changing, and that the Internet is certainly wiping out some forms (and formats) in the magazine world, but ultimately notes that “there’s something special and unique, even luxurious, about reading a big, glossy magazine.” Of course, whether anyone is going to have time to still read those big, glossy magazines is another thing. The last time I was in a doctor’s office, not one person was reading the big, glossy magazines; instead, every single person was playing with their small, portable digital devices: Blackberry, cellphone, iPod.

MediaBistro: “Is Print Dead?”

Found a blog posting today through a publishing e-mail newsletter from last month by writer Matt Briggs, that had a couple of really interesting points to make about the decline in reading and the slowly creeping death of the independent bookstore (Briggs is an author who was spurred to write the post because he’d recently had a reading at a bookstore where no one showed up, and was wondering why). Putting this through the “Print is Dead” prism, it shows that reading is on the decline, and that books are moving away from the center of most people’s lives.

Here the last paragraph, which talks about the inevitable change to come:

“A bookstore as a physical repository of books is a place. A place, paradoxically, become a valuable commodity in a partially virtual world. Eventually virtual people and audiences want to converge and meet in the flesh. Books themselves I suspect will remain tactile objects, and just as the vinyl record has survived the Eight Track, Cassette Tape, and CD — the book will survive as a retail/fetish object despite or maybe because of digital media. Books have not been the central object of cultural production for some time, but I doubt they are going to disappear nor will the physical retail structure. Doubtlessly though it will change. I’m excited to see what it looks like.”

Death to the Bookstore, Long Live Books and Stores

The Nation’s website has posted a story entitled “The End of Times,” talking yet again about the current crisis occurring in journalism, mainly about how newspapers are losing regular readers to the Internet and how younger ones aren’t bothering to pick up a newspaper in the first place. If print is indeed dying, then newspapers is where it first started to die.

Excerpt: “What is staring everybody in the face is the evaporation of journalism’s financial foundation into Internet air, where information is supposed to be ‘free’ and ad rates are a fraction of those in print. Young people don’t buy newspapers or watch the evening news–even, or perhaps especially, with cute Katie Couric reading it to them. Blogs are more fun to read and sometimes more reliable. Traditional revenue streams have been diverted by craigslist, eBay, Yahoo! and, of course, Google.”

The Nation: End of Times