Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Reuters yesterday reported on recent digital initiatives by Harper Collins and Random House that will allow users to search inside books from their respective websites and then consume — to various degrees — the content found within. As news goes this information is a bit old (Harper announced their initiative months ago), and in terms of functionality neither Harper or Random House are offering anything terribly different from what Amazon and Google already offer. (That being said, Random’s digital solution allows users to add material to their personal pages, which is pretty cool.) What I find more interesting is the tone in most of the articles, for example the first line of the Reuters piece: “The dusty world of book publishing has taken a step into cyberspace as Random House and HarperCollins [are] letting customers browse books online,” which only goes to show how out-of-step publishing is seen to be in terms of the Internet and digital delivery and consumption.

Reuters: Publishers allow book browsing on the Web

On the Good Magazine website, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter has an introductory essay to Good Magazine’s list of the “51 Best Magazines Ever.” Carter gets, I think, just about everything wrong in his essay, stating that “the essential strength of a magazine is its ability to amplify. An idea, or an image, or a story, set within the pages of a magazine and assembled by the right hands, can become the grist of breakfast chatter, dinner-party conversation, or elective body debate around the world.” That may have been the case before the Internet, but the explosion of the Web has shown that there is now a dozen other ways — besides magazines — to amplify ideas and spread information. Whether it’s through blogs or websites like MySpace and YouTube, our current breakfast chatter revolves most often around something we see online, not something we read offline. And in terms of delivery, when Carter writes “you can buy a magazine almost anywhere. Publishers will even deliver it to your door,” this is almost laughable. In our on-demand everything world, magazines are physical copies sitting in dark mailboxes, whereas blogs and websites are digital bits instantly flying through cyberspace. When Carter finally acknowledges the “print is dead” argument, writing that “magazines — or, rather, certain magazines — aren’t going away anytime soon,” he has a point. Not all magazines will become extinct in a future where people increasingly get their information online, but when Carter also says that magazines “have, so far, not perished at the altar of the internet,” he’s factually correct but intellectually wrong since magazines have recently taken several direct hits, and the upcoming generation of Digital Natives — for whom interacting with a computer in order to get information is now second nature — they will turn less and less to the newsstand, rejecting it for the already amplified ideas they find online.

Good Magazine: The 51 Best Magazines Ever

USA Today has an AP story about a factory in Nashville that still produces vinyl records. Of course — in a digital world — vinyl records are a rarity (records haven’t been a staple in the music industry for at least a decade, and their replacement, CDs, have even recently been replaced by digital files). The tone of the article is kind of we-can’t-believe-people-still-make-or-want-these-things, and yet there is indeed a market for vinyl records (albeit a tremendously small and specialized one). And in twenty or thirty years, when more and more people are getting their reading material via digital delivery and consumption, a similar newspaper article will be written about the fate of the increasingly rare printing plants where books are still produced. (The opening sentence, instead of yesterday’s “That dusty stack of records in your parents’ basement?” will be something like “That stack of books in your parents’ attic?”) True, there will always be a niche, collector’s market for printed books, and publishers will use printed books as a marketing tool the same way that record labels now produce vinyl records today, but books will indeed grow more and more rare as more and more people embrace digital reading.

From the AP Story: “The means of music delivery continues to evolve. Digital downloading has eroded CD sales. Some artists are skipping CDs entirely and releasing new music online for the casual listener and on vinyl for DJs and hardcore fans. But vinyl still accounts for a small percentage of music sales. Last year 858,000 LPs were sold, compared with 553.4 million CDs, according to Nielsen SoundScan.”

Record maker puts his stamp on music history

Here’s a photo I quite like from this years FOWA conference, taking place right now in London. FOWA stand for Future of Web Apps; looks like they’ve got lots of great speakers and panels. Wish I was there. And of course, in many ways books will evolve into a Web application the same way that previously physical things that used to come in boxes or containers — such as software or even CDs — are now either Web applications or digital files.
FOWA website

The website InfoWorld has a feature entitled “12 crackpot tech ideas that could transform the enterprise,” cataloging “technologies that push the envelope of the plausible [and] capture our curiosity almost as quickly as the would-be crackpots who dare to concoct them become targets of our derision.” eBooks are among the dozen crazy schemes that have a shot at changing the world, standing alongside things like quantum computing and quantum cryptography (er, while eBook formats may be confusing, I think they’re considerably less confusing than quantum computing and quantum cryptography). The overall tone of the eBook entry in the article is positive, with the subtext being “eBooks are an idea whose time may have finally come,” but the fact that they’re still categorized as a “crackpot” idea only highlights the fact that — more than six years after their debut — eBooks are not yet ready for prime time.

From InfoWorld: “Remember the paperless office? If so, you may recall a close cousin: the e-book, which promised access to entire libraries of documents in easily readable formats; an obvious boon to the enterprise knowledge worker on the go. As did many ideas debuting midway through the dot-com boom, it failed spectacularly.”

12 crackpot tech ideas that could transform the enterprise

The New York Times looks at one of the rare online successes in newspapers, Norway’s Schibsted, which has bucked all recent downward trends in journalism and now finds itself flourishing in an increasingly digital world instead floundering. Why? Because “while other newspaper companies tried to cling to their existing business model,” Schibsted kept an open mind and embraced new technologies, investing heavily in new media as early as 1995. What’s amazing is that Schibsted really didn’t do anything more than have the realization that its product isn’t as important as its service, and that it doesn’t matter how that service reaches people (as long as it does). This is of course a much different viewpoint from most publishers, from magazines to newspapers to books, who view their printed artifacts as their product.

From the story: “At a time when other newspaper companies lament a loss of readers and advertisers, Schibsted is thriving. Its earnings rose 28 percent in the fourth quarter. Online operations will generate about 20 percent of the company’s revenue this year, according to analysts at Kaupthing, a bank based in Reykjavik, Iceland, even as many other big newspaper publishers struggle to reach the 10 percent mark.”

While Others Struggle, Norwegian Newspaper Publisher Thrives on the Web

In C.P. Snow’s controversial 1959 speech “The Two Cultures,” the British scientist-turned-writer described how the sciences and the arts and humanities were at that moment being increasingly segregated into separate camps by a growing and profound split in thinking and values. Each group distrusted the other, with the artists looking at the scientists as if they were boorish philistines, while the scientists regarded the artists as clueless Luddites. According to a new report from IBM entitled Navigating the Digital Divide — as reported last week on The Australian’s website — there is now emerging a new but different schism, this time between old media and new media. The report “warns that the conflict between traditional and new media is seeing the emergence of a media divide that could erase hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from the bottom line of the world’s leading media companies.”

(Of course, the significance of this coming from IBM cannot be lost; the computer giant, who looked untouchable in the 1950s and 1960s — their name was synonymous with computing — found themselves increasingly out of touch with the lucrative personal computer market of the 1970s and 1980s, playing catch-up to more nimble rivals like Apple. So if anyone should know something about ignoring important emerging technology, it’s IBM.)

The IBM report talks about how the music industry lost well over $100 billion in its transition to digital, noting that “television and film companies will be next if companies don’t systematically navigate the media divide. Now is the time to determine changes in business models, innovate and re-evaluate partnerships. Media companies must take action before it is too late.”

The publishing industry is not mentioned in the article, but of course it too will need to make this tricky transition, and if it doesn’t learn from the mistakes of these previous industries — music, television and film — then the cost to publishing’s bottomline may be so large it never recovers.

The Australian: Old v new may cost billions

The Newspaper Association of America recently unveiled a $75 million dollar ad campaign for 2007 which is “designed to ’surprise advertisers with the truth’ about consumer engagement with newspaper advertising as well as the strength and vitality of the audience delivered by newspaper media.” The way they’re going to do this is with ads. The print ads have a list of the variety of ways that newspapers are slicing and dicing their content for electronic consumption, never really mentioning that lots of consumers are bypassing traditional news outlets in general (not to mention newspapers themselves) and are getting their news from blogs and/or other online sources. In fact, the NAA seems to think that news was created so that newspapers would have something to fill its pages, when it’s actually the other way around. To make matters worse, the graphic that they’ve come up with to represent how news can be mashed into all kinds of electronic formats (pictured above) shows a person completely wired with all sorts of gadgets to his head and back. The subtext of a person carrying so much digital baggage (and junk) seems to subtly be — or really, not so subtly — “Hey, buddy, forget all those wires and cords, and just pick up a good ol’ fashioned newspaper from the newsstand.” I mean, in terms of that illustration, I almost expect to see steam coming off of the guy’s coal-powered jetpack. This to me seems to be the worst way, not the best way, for them to make their point.

From the NAA: “The creative focus of the 2007 industry campaign reflects the growing impact and importance of newspaper media in all its forms: From print and online to niche publications and wireless, newspapers are a vital and vibrant media choice for advertisers. The primary message in the 2007 campaign is the value of the engaged audience delivered by a medium with the brand power, content and credibility to effectively serve print and online advertisers better than any other medium.”

NAA Introduces 2007 Newspaper Value Campaign

The New York Observer reports on how Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The New York Times, is backtracking a bit from his comments last week to an Israeli newspaper about his indifference to newsprint. Many news agencies picked up on the story — too many, it seems, for Sulzberger’s comfort — so he has had to retract, or at least refine, his comments. He is expected to make a formal speech to Times staffers later today, but for now here’s what he’s saying: “So let me clear the air on this issue. It is my heartfelt view that newspapers will be around — in print — for a long time. But I also believe that we must be prepared for that judgment to be wrong. My five-year timeframe is about being ready to support our news, advertising and other critical operations on digital revenue alone…whenever that time comes.”

Times’ Sulzberger: Newspaper Will Be Around For a Long Time

Neal Hoskins, writing on the Guardian book blog, wonders where all the well-made books have gone. He doesn’t mean well-written books, but instead means literally well-made, like with nice covers and top-stained pages and elaborate dust jackets, etc. While I agree that a book can indeed be a thing of beauty, this guy really should be writing for either a design blog or a printing blog, because he’s missing the point completely — in terms of print — since he never once bemoans the recent content of books. He seems to prize physical beauty over literary merit (as in, “Don’t worry about all the words that fill the pages of those lovely books”). This entry — and idea — is unfortunately a typical one in the “print is dead” debate, with bibliophiles rhapsodizing about books while not acknowledging the larger issue: that reading is in decline. As Gore Vidal said last year, “I don’t think the novel is dead. I think the readers are dead.” The biggest danger books face is not from “smaller fonts” or “paper and binding.” The biggest danger books face is that the people who should be reading them are instead spending all of their free time online, on their computers, or with their iPods.

From the Guardian book blog: “I think I’m just yearning for a time when everyone walked around with those adorable little blue Everyman’s Library Classics printed on fine paper with hardback covers, and with that lovely blue bookmark tie. How beautiful those days must have been.”

Whatever happened to well-made books?