Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

When I was in high school, twenty years ago, I put together a literary magazine that featured poetry, stories and artwork from my friends and other people at the school. One of the poems was my own, but I signed it using just my initials. It was a love poem titled “To L.B.” This caused a minor scandal for about ten minutes as people tried to figure out who the writer was and who the subject was (it wasn’t too hard). This and the stories I wrote for the school newspaper were the extent of my media exposure in high school. At the time, though, it felt like a lot. But in terms of today’s generation of Digital Natives, I would have been considered a hermit. New York Magazine’s cover story this week, entitled “Say Everything,” takes a long look at this new computer-powered generation who began living their lives online at an early age — usually pre-teen — and who have only shared more and more from there. And this goes well beyond the occasional Myspace page; these are lives documented on a daily basis almost from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed, digitally preserved in the amber of pixels and mouseclicks. Remember that high school yearbook photo that you hate? Well, these kids will remember a lot more than that.

In New York Magazine’s listing of the various changes between this generation and previous ones, the first one is “THEY THINK OF THEMSELVES AS HAVING AN AUDIENCE.” This is pretty different than previous generations who considered themselves an audience. In terms of publishing and the “print is dead” debate, today’s kids are not going to want to pick up a big book and spend hours in a corner silently, passively reading. Why in the world would they do that? It’s not interactive. They can’t share the experience with their friends. There’s no way to change the book to suit their own tastes. Instead, they’re going to ditch the hardback and head over to Facebook. The publishing industry needs to realize this, and it needs to also find a way to get to these kids by making content available in a way that will first reach them (i.e. digitally) and then will give them the tools to interact with it and share it (post excerpts on their Myspace pages, e-mail chapters to friends, IM paragraphs across class, etc.). If not, there are dozens of ways this generation will choose to spend their time, and none of them will involve books.

From the story: “Right now the big question for anyone of my generation seems to be, endlessly, ‘Why would anyone do that?’ This is not a meaningful question for a 16-year-old. The benefits are obvious: The public life is fun. It’s creative. It’s where their friends are. It’s theater, but it’s also community: In this linked, logged world, you have a place to think out loud and be listened to, to meet strangers and go deeper with friends. And, yes, there are all sorts of crappy side effects: the passive-aggressive drama (’you know who you are!’), the shaming outbursts, the chill a person can feel in cyberspace on a particularly bad day. There are lousy side effects of most social changes (see feminism, democracy, the creation of the interstate highway system). But the real question is, as with any revolution, which side are you on?”

New York Magazine: Say Everything

There’s a story in the LA Times about the sad plight of California independent bookstores; most of them are going out of business in the face in increasing competition from web-based retailers (namely: Amazon) and general decreasing interest in terms of consumers (namely: kids). This resonates in terms of the “print is dead” debate, which is one wherein print’s most vocal adherents rhapsodize about the beauty of books themselves and yet never talk much about actually reading; their notion is almost always romantic, never practical. Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, has a great quote in the LA Times article which reflects this: “A lot of our affection for bookstores is based on a romanticized notion. The fact that we’re not patronizing them speaks more loudly than our words.” I think that’s a great point; everybody loves the idea of bookstores, but fewer and fewer people actually spend their money in them.

From the story: “Technology changes behavior, which reshapes the physical landscape. The era of repertory movie houses playing ‘Casablanca’ and ‘High Noon’ ended with the VCR. The telephone booth was replaced by the beeper, which was made obsolete by the cellphone. And the newspaper is under siege by the Internet’s ability to recombine and distribute news without leaving ink on your hands. ‘The bookstore as we know it is in dire straits,’ said Lewis Buzbee, a novelist who spent many years working in the local shops.”

LA Time: Bookshops’ latest sad plot twist

Arthur Sulzberger’s recent comments to an Israeli newspaper on whether or not The New York Times will be printed on paper in five years time has received extensive Internet coverage, but one of the headlines I liked best was the above from New York magazine. Interestingly, Sulzberger’s comments ring with both weariness and pragmatism, that he truly believes that it doesn’t matter how people receive content, and also that he’s frankly tired of the entire discussion. But I’m just glad that the Times acknowledges the growing consumer trends in terms of digital consumption, and is trying to alter its product and business model accordingly.

From Haaretz: “‘I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care, either,’ [Sulzberger] says. He’s looking at how best to manage the transition from print to Internet. ‘Internet is a wonderful place to be and we’re leading there,’ he adds. The Times has doubled its online readership, and now has 1.1 million subscribing to the print edition - and 1.5 million readers online, each day.”

Haaretz: Arthur Sulzberger, on life in the Internet age

In a pretty stunning move, Steve Jobs — writing on the Apple website — has acknowledged the various problems that music swaddled in DRM poses, and asks the technology companies and record labels to embrace a DRM-less future. This is a pretty incredible move, and even though a lessening in DRM restrictions (not to mention getting rid of DRM itself) has been called for by a number of people and organizations, this is the first time it’s been said by someone as powerful as Jobs. And it could mean a lot for publishing because, if the four major record labels/companies agree to release music without any form of DRM, then it could mean that big publishing companies might one day do the same. And of course once consumers have the ability to share their legally downloaded texts, not to mention read them on any device or computer or access them from anywhere in the world, it would be a huge boon to digital reading and the large-scale adoption of electronic books. In terms of the passage below, every time you read MUSIC think BOOKS, and that’s how much it would mean to consumers and readers.

From Steve Jobs: “Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.”

Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Music

On the Guardian book blog, Kathryn Hughes has a post entitled “Cut classics,” talking about how perhaps the great novels of previous generations should be trimmed down in order to suit the tastes of modern readers. Hughes is up for a bit of judicious cutting here and there, but of course there are many that contend that these books are works of genius and shouldn’t be reworked or touched at all. The latter is of course a silly view since readers “rework” these books all of the time by skipping whole sections as they read, the same way that people rarely listen to the entirety of The White Album in one sitting. We each make our own personalized version of an art form whenever we choose to experience it; I may rent a movie and watch only half of it, or else listen to only eight out of ten songs on a CD, or else dip in and out of a novel as I read it, skipping entire sections along the way. This is the way it’s always been; consumers are in charge of something once they get it into their hands, and it’s ridiculous to think that they’re not. In terms of reading material, once these books become more widely available electronically it’ll just be a matter of time before a generation raised on the user-generated content of YouTube, mash-ups and machinima, starts to similarly interact with its text. Whether that means cutting out the boring bits of The Mill on the Floss, or else remixing Middlemarch and Middlesex until the hermaphroditic saga of Eugenides is transported to the 19th century world of Eliot, remains to be seen. But there’s going to be no stopping upcoming generations from mixing and matching — and then sharing — the words that they read, and writers and publishers need to start to get comfortable with that fact (not to mention that they should acknowledge that this will be a positive development). Or would they prefer that future generations not read this material at all?

From the blog: “If any of these books arrived on a publisher’s desk today, chances are that an editor would be dispatched to wield a very sharp scalpel before the book was considered commercially viable. What, then, is so wrong about … deciding to do just that, albeit 100 or so years later?”

Cut classics

Last week J.K. Rowling and her publishers announced that the seventh and final installment in the Harry Potter series will be published this July. A few days later, the Associated Press announced that, same as with the previous six books, the new one would not be made available as an eBook. The snide undertone in the AP story (here’s the first line: “Sorry, e-book fans, whoever you are”) is matched only by Rowling’s own snide insistence that paper is the best and only way readers should experience her books. Of course, for someone who writes long books in longhand, not to mention spends all of her time in a fantasy world, her viewpoint is understandable if not predictable. However, if the Harry Potter books were made available as eBooks the sales for them would be huge and it would put a stop to the widespread — and meticulously coordinated — piracy efforts which are always put into effect seconds after any Harry Potter book becomes available. What Rowling doesn’t seem to realize is that people who want to read this book electronically are going to do so anyway, so why not let them do it legally? People would never bother to pirate something that already exists (which the success of iTunes has proven). But Rowling seems to be desperately (and obstinately) clinging to some Victorian notion of a writer as a scribbler of hand-written tomes, with noble ink-stained fingers making delicate row upon row of script on foolscap. Meanwhile, study after study has shown that — despite the crazed interest in the Potter books — the reading habits of kids are in serious decline; they’re spending much more time with computers than they do with books. If we could get them to read the Harry Potter books electronically, it could begin to get them into the habit of merging the reading of text with the use of computers, and it would at least be a chance at reversing some very serious trends in terms of youth illiteracy. But instead, Rowling would rather complain about not being able to find a pad of paper in an iPod world.

From the AP: “‘Why is it so difficult to buy paper in the middle of town?’ the author, a resident of Edinburgh, Scotland, lamented in a diary entry posted at the time on her website. ‘What is a writer who likes to write longhand supposed to do when she hits her stride and then realizes, to her horror, that she has covered every bit of blank paper in her bag? Forty-five minutes it took me, this morning, to find somewhere that would sell me some normal, lined paper. And there’s a university here!’ she wrote.”

AP: Rowling: No e-book for Harry Potter VII

There’s an article in The New York Times today about the world’s oldest newspaper still in publication, Sweden’s Post och Inrikes Tidningar (or PoIT, as it’s known), which will stop producing print editions choosing instead to live exclusively as an online brand. Founded by Queen Christina, who was a just a teenager at the time of her coronation, the Times says, “If only the paper were online then, she could have blogged about it.” Sure, it’s kind of a cheeky remark and yet it shows that most teenagers today aren’t reading print newspapers, and even print magazines; online brands are increasingly the way to go in order to reach a myriad of demographics. And I think when the world’s oldest newspaper transforms itself into a Web-only brand, that it marks both a sad end and an important beginning.

From the story: “The Swedes, who jumped into the newspaper game back in 1645, are taking another great leap forward: what is said to be the oldest newspaper in the world has gone digital and is now available online, and online only.”

A Distinctly Modern Demise for the World’s Oldest Newspaper

Slate has an essay this week entitled “Will the Web make film festivals obsolete?” which talks about how the major film festivals — such as Sundance — have turned into unwieldy behemoths, and that maybe filmgoers getting together online will put film festivals out of business or else make them less relevant. The essay mentions how the Web is amazingly adept at putting people in touch with content, as well as acting as a filter for people looking for certain kinds of entertainment. And now that everyone is downloading music videos and TV shows onto their iPods and laptops, why not movies? The article then goes on to pinpoint a few of the problems standing in the way of large-scale adoption when it comes to people watching movies on small or portable devices, bringing up the inevitable old chestnut which often rises to the surface — the same as it always does with digital reading and electronic books — “the ‘people won’t do X on their computer’ explanation.” I think that’s a great way of putting it, and it’s something I’ve heard over and over. “People won’t listen to music on a computer,” or “People won’t want to look at their photographs on their computer.” And yet time and time again people have shown themselves to be incredibly adept at using new technology and embracing change. In terms of the “future of the book” debate, it’s always “People won’t read books on a computer.” Wanna bet?

From the article: “Many people speculate that no one wants to watch a movie on his or her computer. While that may be a part of the story, the ‘people won’t do X on their computer’ explanation has been wrong so often that it cannot be the full answer. The last decade has demonstrated that people are surprisingly willing to put up with lower quality or discomfort to get the content they want or to get stuff for free, whether it’s telephones (cell phones and Skype), music (MP3s), and even video (YouTube). We just aren’t that picky.”

Slate: Will the Web make film festivals obsolete?

There’s a pretty long but pretty interesting essay by Eric Harvey entitled “Priming the Pump” on the Stylus website. The article is about how, in a Internet/Myspace world where record promotion has been redefined by the web, what record companies — big and small — can do to ensure that their bands get noticed online (especially when there’s so much competition and noise from other bands and other sites). The author makes a number of really good points, but in terms of the “print is dead” debate, I thought what was most pertinent in terms of publishers were the kinds of things that publishers will have to offer consumers in the future as add-ons or extra features. What the “added value” could be from publishers could range from author interviews to deleted chapters, excerpts from past or forthcoming books, or annotations or commentary from the author or editor. But whatever these extra features end up being, in the future books will have to be more than just books.

From the article: “As long as the consumer locks into a purchase before the street date, the label ‘rewards’ him or her with a myriad of incentives—full album streams, live show downloads, rare B-sides, and so forth. According to Farrell, it’s the label’s effort to acknowledge the reality that leaks occur, and digital copies of music will inevitably end up on hard drives well in advance of the actual release date. It’s also a bottom-line capitulation: ‘We need to give them more than just some music on a plastic disc; rather than fighting this phenomenon, we’re really trying to tap into it and use it to sell some records.’ But is the move a concession to consumer desires, or simply another clever mode of offering ‘added value’ with a purchase, a tactic that has been around since the earliest commercial transactions? During an era when they can express their opinions within the same venue that sells them their music, the time-worn cliché ‘the customer is always right’ has been exponentially, perhaps infinitely, expanded; perhaps even to the extent that it actually gains meaning.”

Priming the Pump