Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Oliver Bullough, writing the Guardian’s Book blog, lask week lamented the recent news that Powells Books is producing a series of short movies starring authors that will serve as promotional features for their books. The first person to “star” in one of these is the British writer Ian McEwan. Bullough seems to bemoan all this, titling his blog entry “prepare for all-singing, all-dancing book promotion.” To this I would say, Yes, exactly, and follow this up with, Why not? If you subscribe to the notion of the “attention economy,” and agree that books now compete not only with films and television for cultural relevance and interest, but now must also beat out new media such as blogs, MP3s, Myspace and Youtube for human bandwidth, then why shouldn’t authors use every marketing tool at their disposal? People criticize this because it will, of course, change the landscape of the world of literature. These short films will be posted all over the Internet, embedded on blogs and traded on file-sharing websites, and all of the sudden a charismatic but not-very-talented writer will find himself more popular than a wonderful writer who freezes up in front of a camera. But this is nothing new; writers like Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe were the first writers to regularly appear on television talk shows, becoming as famous (or, in the case of Mailer, as infamous) as rock stars. Later generations of smart, attractive writers such as Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis continued in this tradition, appearing in newspapers and magazines as the cover stars of a new literary generation.

Now the Web will take this even further. And writers who are unskilled in the ways of the Internet, or just don’t want to play any part in the online discussion and want to write their books and be left alone, will be like movie actors at the end of the silent era who were forced to acquire new skills when talking pictures were suddenly the brand new thing. For some actors, the advent of sound allowed them to shine in a way that silent films never did. For others, however — those who didn’t have good voices or couldn’t act in the way that talking pictures demanded — they found themselves suddenly without a career. Many modern day writers will find themselves in similar circumstances, unable to deal with the ramifications and changes that a new technology has brought to their art form. But this is, unfortunately for some (though not McEwan, who I’m sure will be fine), the new truth of our current literary age, and nothing can bring us back to the era of Grub Street.

Prepare for all-singing, all-dancing book promotion