Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

There’s an essay on Salon this week entitled “The readers strike back,” which is about how — thanks to the Internet — more and more readers are writing to, and voicing their opinions about, writers. The subtext of the article is that they wished all of these troublesome readers would shut up and gratefully accept the manna from heaven that Salon writers deliver. And while Salon grudgingly acknowledges that some of its readers out there are sane individuals who send thoughtful comments and feedback, it also says that there’s a “large numbers of fools, knaves, blowhards and nuts” who insist on contributing to the discussion. While this may indeed be the case, if it’s the truth — and that this group is part of their readership — then of course nothing can really be done about this (as James Joyce said of his characters, “Here comes everybody”; the same goes, it seems, for Salon’s readers). Salon would love to not have to worry about (or listen to) their readers, opting for a more halcyon time when the information super-highway was a one-way street and their readers were page-viewed but not heard. But thanks to the tenets of Web 2.0 (such as interactivity, blogs, wikis, and user-generated content), the genie is out of the bottle — as is the audience — and there’s no getting it back in.

From the essay: “Until the Internet came along, actual readers barely dented a writer’s consciousness. Before the whole world got wired, the only way readers could respond to a piece was by writing a letter to the editor, or (much less frequently) to the author, putting it in a stamped envelope, and sticking it in a mailbox. As a result, the number of letters was a tiny fraction of what it is in the age of e-mail. And that number was further diminished by an editor who trimmed the few selected letters to meet space considerations and winnowed out the cranks. An article might have been read by 10,000 people, but the writer never knew it. A dozen letters constituted a deluge…Then Al Gore invented the Internet and everything changed. Pieces that in the olden days would have garnered five or six letters suddenly inspired more commentary than a rerun of ‘Gilligan’s Island’ in a cultural studies class. The floodgates opened, and in charged the masses — some filled with fulsome praise, others waving scimitars and dragging siege machinery into place, others ranting about their ex-wives.”
The readers strike back

The Financial Times looks at Microsoft’s launch of its new operating system, Vista, pointing out that the new release “also reflects a deeper change in how the software business works,” most notably that the new model is “software as service.” This means that software is no longer a physical thing that comes in a box and then gets loaded to your computer, but software is instead a web application (such as Google). This really does signal a sea change for the software industry, as well as for consumers. Personally, I remember my boss buying Pagemaker back in the early ’90s, and it came on something like six floppy discs that had to all be loaded onto the PC in the right order. It was a laborious process. But now, not only do CDs and downloading make getting programs much easier, but the programs themselves will disappear, leaving in their place websites which will perform the needed functions instead. In terms of the “print is dead” debate, it just goes to show that yet another physical product — software — is beginning to go away, and if you’ve ever been in a computer store looking for a computer program, the racks and racks of them look an awful lot like books. Those packages are going away the same way that books will go away in an increasingly digital future. What remains instead will be the “service.” Jeff Jarvis has already said that journalism isn’t a product, it’s a service, and soon we’ll be saying the same thing about long-form non-fiction or even novels.

From the story: “The moment also marks a turning point in the history of the world’s biggest software company, as Microsoft turns its attention more fully towards a future software industry that is likely to look very different.”

FT.com: Vista marks end of an era for Microsoft

Nintendo has just come out with a new cartridge named “Hotel Dusk” for their Nintendo DS system. What seems totally cool about this is that the game is actually an interactive novel in which the user holds the DS like an open book, and explores the world of the story, clicking on the screen and jotting down notes in order to advance the action and solve the mystery. There are similar games like this around, and I think this is a really great application of a device that’s usually not used for reading. Stories and games like this could end up being the Choose Your Own Adventure series of the new century, combining the elements of prose and graphic novels, not to mention interaction, creating an immersive experience that’s text-based and yet retains some semblance of reading a book. Bibliophiles will of course cringe, but it’s better than kids playing Grand Theft Auto.

From Amazon: “Players hold their Nintendo DS like a book and use the touch screen to grill characters, search for clues, and solve mystifying puzzles. Simple point-and-click touch screen navigation allows for players of any skill level to play.”

Nintendo Hotel Dusk website

Interesting post from Alan Rusbridger on the Guardian blog Comment is Free; he’s writing about the Davos 07 conference taking place right now in London, at which many newspaper and media types are trying to deal with an increasing online audience and their shrinking offline audience. Rusbridger uses climate change as a really apt metaphor for the new digital reality, saying basically that — the same way that everyone denied global warming for so long, for as long as they could until it got so hot they had to acknowledge it was real — media is now having a similar epiphany, finally coming around to the idea that more and more people are looking to their computers for content, and that less and less people are interacting with or buying traditional formats such as newspapers, magazines, and books. It’s an inconvenient truth for publishers to be sure, but doesn’t have to be a cataclysmic one if they take advantage of our electronic future by embracing digital reading.

From the blog: “There have been many such discussions over the years - but few with such a concentration of high-level engagement from the people running so-called old media organisations. The discussion was unfocussed and (as always) inconclusive. But it’s a bit like climate change. Five years ago a lot of time was wasted listening to the deniers. Now there are very few: The nature of the problem has dawned on everyone - and an industry which is notoriously uncollaborative is actually getting together to find some solutions.”

Davos 07: ADD vs OCD

This past Sunday, the UK Times Online had two stories about digital reading and the future of the book. One is called “Google plots e-books coup,” and talks about Google’s recent Unbound conference, while the other story is called “Could this be the final chapter in the life of the book,” and this one talks in more general terms about the “print is dead” debate. Neither of the stories break much new ground, but together they show that there’s a growing momentum in this topic not seen in a long time, and that it’s much more firmly grounded than the eBook days of 1999–2000 when it was more about the technology and grand predictions rather than today’s sober idea of giving an increasingly digital society a choice about how to consume its content.
Google plots e-books coup

Could this be the final chapter in the life of the book

Interesting story today from The New York Times which talks about how record labels are beginning to be open to the idea of easing DRM restrictions on downloadable music.

The article cites slowing sales growth as one of the primary examples for the potential shift in thinking, as well as consumer complaints about format confusion and restrictions.

The implications for trade publishers and the “print is dead” debate are large; if major record labels decide to offer DRM-less music, it would put pressure on book publishers to do the same. And this kind of transparency of content, in terms of the ability to truly share and sample content, could be a real boon to digital reading and electronic text. Speaking of, when I was reading the story online, there was an ad on the page for the Sony eBook device.

From the story: “As even digital music revenue growth falters because of rampant file-sharing by consumers, the major record labels are moving closer to releasing music on the Internet with no copying restrictions — a step they once vowed never to take.”

Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music

There’s a story in the New York Times today about new turntables which easily convert vinyl records into MP3 files. People who have hung onto their vinyl collections will probably continue to keep them as a collection, but by turning them into MP3 files they can actually easily enjoy them, and shuffle them into the rest of their digital music libraries. Of course, the same thing could happen to books some day. People will buy inexpensive home scanners which will scan and convert all of their hardback and paperback books into electronic files. Or you could even do this with new books, the same way that people buy CDs but instantly rip them to MP3s and never listen to the physical CD again (I have done this dozens of times). For instance, someone heading off on a trip will buy three big books, scan them into digital files, and then go on vacation with the digital files of the three books loaded into their Tablet PC or laptop or iPhone or whatever. Meanwhile, the big, bulky printed books are sitting at home on a shelf as part of their collection. At this point, books truly will be just the “souvenir” that authors like Seth Godin describe them to be today.

NY Times: The Turntables That Transform Vinyl

Zadie Smith has a great essay in the Guardian entitled “Fail Better” which is about the quest by novelists to write great books. After a lengthy discussion of a novel’s various components, she then gets to the heart of matter, which is basically the affect that novels have on us:

“A great novel is the intimation of a metaphysical event you can never know, no matter how long you live, no matter how many people you love: the experience of the world through a consciousness other than your own. And I don’t care if that consciousness chooses to spend its time in drawing rooms or in internet networks; I don’t care if it uses a corner of a Dorito as its hero, or the charming eldest daughter of a bourgeois family; I don’t care if it refuses to use the letter e or crosses five continents and two thousand pages. What unites great novels is the individual manner in which they articulate experience and force us to be attentive, waking us from the sleepwalk of our lives.”

And what needs to be remembered — in terms of the debate over the future of the book — is that the animating power comes not from the page but from the words. How anyone reads and absorbs a great novel is just about the least important aspect of the process; what’s vitally important is that they read and absorb the novel. Whether that means through a printed book, an audio download, listening to it on a CD, or else reading it on a laptop or even a cell phone, to echo Smith’s refrain from above, I don’t care how you read it and long as you read it.
The Guardian: “Fail Better”

Article in the New York Sun from Monday about how, despite the dominance of the big chain bookstores in New York, and the fact that other venerable indie stores (such as Coliseum books) have recently gone out of business, five new bookstores have opened recently in Manhattan. What I find interesting about these new stores, however, is that they’re either niche bookstores (the Taschen store), or else they’re trying to be much more than just a bookstore, acting more as a book “lounge.” Reminds me of the New Yorker cartoon from years ago of a man in a bookstore asking an employee, “What do you mean you don’t have coffee, you’re a bookstore!” So even though these are not your standard bookstores, I think this is a great development, and actually points toward the bookstore of the future, which will resemble more of a local gift shop than the book superstores of today (Borders, I’m talking to you). In fact, the key to saving the bookstore, especially in an era of rising digital delivery and consumption, is the same thing that’s starting to save journalism: think local. Don’t try to compete with Amazon or Barnes & Noble (not to mention blogs and Myspace); instead, try to do what they can’t do.

From the article: “Yet while [bookstore] closings get attention, bookstores are opening, too. In the last several months, owners have cut ribbons on five new independent bookstores across the city.”
NY Sun: Booksellers Fight Back As 5 New Stores Open

Netflix announced today that they would be offering their users the ability to stream movies straight from the Netflix website. As a diehard fan of the service, even though it only takes movies a day or so to reach me, having the ability to log on to the website, and stream the movie right then and there, is pretty cool. Along with instantly accessible downloadable music, and now that more and more TV shows are available as downloads from iTunes or from the TV networks’ websites, this service is yet another step — for movies — towards an on-demand everything/Attention Economy mindset. That will leave publishing as the last of the entertainment mediums that has yet to really embrace the concept.

From the NY Times story: “In the case of online movies, two forces, one technological and one commercial, are keeping the market from developing more quickly. On the technological front, it is still difficult to deliver various Internet video formats to a TV screen. And on the commercial front, movie studios are leery of piracy and, more important, are fearful of cannibalizing their existing distribution businesses.”

NY Times: Netflix to Deliver Movies to the PC