Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Last night I saw the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” And as I watched it, absorbing the story about how super-efficient electric cars — which could have solved a host of problems, from our dependence on foreign oil to the rise in global warming — were in effect killed by the oil and car companies, it made me think of electronic books and the fact that they have not yet taken off. First, going back to the electric car: even though GM produced them, it never really got behind them; GM never made selling them a priority. Why? Well, because if they were successful, it would then drive down the profit or need for their other products and services. This has happened before in numerous industries. For instance, why won’t the cigarette manufacturers produce the more healthy, smokeless cigarette that they’ve long been developing? Because to do so would point out how unhealthy their regular products are. Why doesn’t McDonalds have at least one low or non-fat burger on their menu? Or make a kind of French fry that won’t clog up your arteries with grease? Because to do so would mean that everything else that they’re selling is bad for you. The bottom-line is that auto manufacturers, tobacco companies, and fast food franchises have each already made billions of dollars off of consumers who purchase things that are either bad for themselves or bad for the environment, and the production of an alternative would be a tacit admission that these companies had known all along that what they were doing was wrong. Now, to put this through the “print is dead” prism, it struck me that, while publishers have indeed participated in eBooks over the past five years, none of them really whole-heartedly jumped into it. Why? Perhaps because they have so much staked on print-on-paper books, and that if eBooks succeed — on almost any level — then their entire way of doing business will be jeopardized, from in-house production to marketing and advertising. And of course the same way that oil companies were wary of electric cars — since, if people could charge them at home, there’d be no need for gas stations — so too are bookstores reluctant to promote electronic books, afraid to be cut out of the ever-shrinking consumer-loop. I realize that most of this argument is a stretch (electronic books are quite different from electric cars), but it did strike me that, in big business — and books are indeed a big business — there is often intense pressure to keep things as they are, to not rock the boat and to keep the status quo. And I think that a lot of the resistance to electronic books, from the book industry, has to do with just that: trying to keep things the same. Meanwhile, of course, things are changing all around us…