Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

David Carr had an interesting essay in the NY Times a week or so entitled “The Lonely Newspaper Reader” where he talks about how people don’t really read newspapers anymore, with newer generations getting all their info, and spending most of their time, online. For these “digital natives” print is indeed dead; they spend little of their time reading newspapers or even novels. Instead, they interact with the Internet.

From the essay: “Last Wednesday morning at my house, one of my daughters back from college was staying at a friend’s house in the city, no doubt getting alerts on her cellphone for new postings to her Facebook page. Her sister got up, skipped breakfast and checked the mail for her NetFlix movies. My wife left early before the papers even arrived to commute to her job in the city while listening to the iPod she got for Christmas. True enough, my 10-year-old gave me five minutes over a bowl of Cheerios, but then she went into the dining room and opened the laptop to surf the Disney Channel on broadband, leaving me standing in the kitchen with my four newspapers. A few of those included news about the sale of The Star Tribune, a newspaper that found itself in reduced circumstances and sold at a reduced price to a private equity group. I looked around me and realized I didn’t really need to read the papers to know why.”

NY Times: The Lonely Newspaper Reader

Wow, saw this think-piece from Garrison Keillor about how to read a newspaper. But before Keillor warms up to his topic, he feels the need to write a few pathetic paragraphs about how kids today are “missing something in their lives” and so they fill these gaps with all their new-fangled gadgets like iPods and laptops. Keillor’s answer to the millennial woes of today’s digital natives? The newspaper! Keillor’s defense of newsprint goes beyond stodgy (I mean, for a guy whose claim to fame is a radio show, I can see how he would be hostile to something like digital reading, but this truly borders on the ridiculous). In the end, I’d sooner take fashion advice from Andy Rooney than I would lifestyle choices from the man who wrote Lake Wobegon Days.

From the essay: “A man at a laptop is a man at a desk, a stiff, a drone. Where is the nobility here? He hunches forward, his eyes glaze, and beads of saliva glitter in the corners of his mouth and make their way down his chin as he becomes engrossed in the video of the fisherman falling out of the boat. A newspaper reader, by comparison, is a swordsman, a wrangler, a private eye. Holding a newspaper frees you up to express yourself, sort of like holding a sax did for Coltrane.”

Salon: Seven rules for reading the newspaper

New York Magazine this week has a really interesting article where it features “media diaries” of three New Yorkers, listing every bit of media that they read, look at, consume, etc. And of course what I find interesting is how digital their lives are (especially the woman who bought an episode of “Gray’s Anatomy” on iTunes and watched it on her laptop; that’s totally cool, and a great example of the “on-demand everything/Attention Economy” times in which we now live). Also, you don’t see many diary entries like “1PM-6PM, sat in a bay window and read Tolstoy.” True, these are New Yorkers, and so may not be representative of the rest of the country, but I think it’s not too far off the mark of how lots of young people are living in our increasingly digital world.

Article intro: “When Time magazine put a crinkly, vaguely toxic-looking fun-house mirror on its cover and named ‘you’ the person of the year for 2006, the Establishment weekly was more or less cheering on its own diminution. After all, like most purveyors of mass media, from TV (see the nightly news) to the music industry (Tower Records, R.I.P.) to daily newspapers (which have lost over 20 percent of their stock valuation in the past four years), Time is facing both a vexing shift in consumer behavior and the rise of self-generated content. Of course, amid all this apocalyptic hype, young people are consuming more media than ever. But what is it they’re reading, watching, and listening to, exactly? We asked three members of the coveted 18-to-34 demographic to keep a diary of their habits for a week.”

NY Mag: The Media Diaries

There’s was an AP story from last week about the continued erosion of CD sales, and the further ascendance of digital sales. Looked at in terms of the story from a few months ago where a music executive told a London business audience that the “CD as we now know it is dead,” I’d have to agree with him. Of course, numbers and trends like these have implications for the “print is dead” debate, most notably in the fact that the kids who are now eschewing records for downloads will one day also eschew print books for digital books.

From the story: “About 588.2 million albums were sold in 2006 — a 4.9 percent decline from 2005, according to year-end sales figures released Thursday by Nielsen SoundScan. But digital sales increased by 65 percent over the previous year, with 582 million tracks sold, and digital album sales more than doubled, with nearly 33 million sold.”
AP: Sales of albums plunge, but digital downloads soar

The Espresso print on demand machine gets a nice write up in Fortune Small Business Magazine as part of their “10 big ideas for 2007″ series. Described as an “ATM for books,” the Espresso machine is basically a vending machine for printed material, instantly producing a custom-made book from digital files. As the dominance of the huge bricks-and-mortar stores gives way in the clicks-and-mortar reality of a “print is dead” digital future, machines like Espresso could fill an extremely useful niche, turning any location into a bookstore. For instance, I took a couple of flights over the holidays, and I’m always totally stymied by the selection in an airport bookstore. Why do they only carry a totally narrow and commercial selection? Well, because of space, obviously. Imagine if you could choose from millions of titles, instead of from just a few hundred? Books could one day be distributed like hot food used to come out of a window at an Automat.

From the article: “The machine can print, align, mill, glue and bind two books simultaneously in less than seven minutes, including full-color laminated covers. It prints in any language and will even accommodate right-to-left texts by putting the spine on the right. The upper page limit is 550 pages, though by tweaking the page thickness and type size, you could get a copy of War and Peace (albeit tough to read) if you wanted.”
Forbes Small Business: An ATM for Books

There’s an article on the BBC News website today about a factory that’s being constructed by the UK firm Plastic Logic. The factory will be the “world’s first factory to produce plastic electronic devices.” This will be the first step in the manufacture of handheld electronic reading devices. And even though the device pictured in the article is the first Sony eBook device, the Japanese LIBRIe, I have to assume the UK factory will produce a variety of eInk-enabled products.

From the article: “Once built it will manufacture circuits crucial for the development of novel gadgets such as electronic paper. Unlike silicon, plastic circuits can be made using simple printing techniques and could dramatically reduce the price of consumer electronic goods.”

BBC News: UK in plastic electronics drive

The Los Angeles Times had an interesting article earlier in the week about how 2007 is going to be a year when big media companies finally integrate their offline products into an online presence. While the people being mentioned in the article are big players like NBC and Disney, smaller media companies — including book publishers — will have to increase their online activities in order to keep up with increasingly digital consumer interests, and that will include not only online marketing, but digital delivery and consumption.

From the article: “The scramble to keep up with the new medium — along with the threat of a Hollywood writers strike, the possible retirement of a handful of industry bosses and some high-profile mergers — will make for an exciting, if unpredictable, 2007 in the media, entertainment and technology businesses.”

LA Times: Putting more on the line online

A bookstore named Booksplus has taken out some ads showing a book giving a computer error message, along with the tagline “Books never let you down.” The point of course is that digital books have all kinds of potential technological pitfalls that good ‘ol printed books don’t have. Booksplus of course has a point, but their viewpoint is also a bit defensive and completely small-minded. Like, with that kind of mentality we’d all still be living in caves. It’s like saying, “Horses don’t break down by the side of the road, so let’s not invent cars.” And of course, what’s really interesting about these ads in the “print is dead” debate, is that it shows that the book industry is finally realizing that electronic reading is here and is a serious threat to the long-held status quo. When they start telling how good you have it right now, they know you’re looking over your shoulder at what’s coming next.