Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Former Creation Records boss Alan McGee (AKA the guy who signed Oasis) has a posting on his Guardian blog entitled “Do we still need record shops?,” where he asks that question in response to all the digital alternatives that currently exist for music. “All the music I want I can get off Amazon or go on MySpace to hear,” writes McGee. “There’s no real need for record shops any more.” And, indeed, the sales of CDs have reflected this, not to mention the fact that many records stores — including the giant Tower chain — have gone out of business because of the rise of the download and the disappearance of the CD. All of which goes to show that consumers, when given a viable digital alternative (especially younger generations that don’t/won’t feel the nostalgic tug of formats), will choose digital over analog, finding absolutely nothing wrong with either entertainment or art as a computer file. McGee also writes that he even doesn’t read music magazines anymore, instead getting all of his news online. In terms of the “print is dead” debate, McGee’s views on music — since he comes from the point of view of an ardent audiophile — could be easily compared with the booklover who vows to never give up physical books. “Nothing will ever beat vinyl for me,” admits McGee, “but digital technology has changed our world, and for the better…” In fact, with the eventual increase in digital delivery and consumption, a few years from now we’ll probably be reading blog posts entitled “Do we still need bookstores?” I won’t try to answer the question, but I’m sure it’ll one day be asked.

The Guardian: Do we still need record shops?

There was a story in yesterday’s New York Times about how most literary archives, including much of the Library of Congress, are not being digitized, and so important historical works of literature will either be lost or else will remain on view for only a very small group of people who are able to see them in person. For instance, the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, has a treasure-trove of John Steinbeck-related material available to scholars, but only to those who can travel to northern California and make an appointment for one of the three days of the week there’s an archivist at the center. “The center takes great care to preserve these relics of Steinbeck, a Nobel laureate,” says the NY Times, “yet it has no plans to take the collection a step further, to adapt to a digital age.” This is a shame. Imagine the kind of interaction scholars from around the world could have to these important papers if the archives were digital; they could be accessed 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. Because of this, Steinbeck’s reputation (not to mention his pool of readers, and thus the sales of his books) would grow dramatically. However, as the Times piece points out, “These Steinbeck artifacts are not the only important pieces of history that are at risk of disappearing or being ignored in the digital age. As more museums and archives become digital domains, and as electronic resources become the main tool for gathering information, items left behind in nondigital form, scholars and archivists say, are in danger of disappearing from the collective cultural memory, potentially leaving our historical fabric riddled with holes.” So while the “print is dead” debate usually revolves around new books appearing in a digital format, an argument could also (and should also) be made for preserving and making accessible archival print material in an electronic form. If not, then this material will both deteriorate and go unseen.

From the story: “To be sure, digitization efforts over the last 10 years have been ambitious and far-reaching. For many institutions, putting collections online, for both preservation and accessibility, is a priority. Yet for every letter from Abraham Lincoln to William Seward that can be found online, millions of documents bearing fine-grained witness to the Civil War will never be digitized. And for every CD re-release of Bessie Smith singing ‘Gimme a Pigfoot,’ the work of hundreds of lesser-known musicians from the early 20th century are unlikely to be converted to digital form. Money, technology and copyright complications are huge impediments.”

NY Times: History, Digitized (and Abridged)

Robin Steinberg (pictured above as her Second Life avatar) has an essay as part of Ad Age magazine’s MediaWorks column entitled “Is Print Dead? Not on Your (Second) Life.” Apparently Steinberg was at the recent 4A’s Media Conference, and was sitting on a panel when she was confronted with the question, Is print dead? Here’s what happened: “I took a breath and rallied myself: ‘Not on your life!’ I answered with passion. ‘Not on this life, your avatar life, or your Second Life. Print is not dead.’” She then goes on, in her essay, to state “I am certain that digital is not going to kill publishing.” To this I say, well, of course it’s not. In fact, not only will digital not kill publishing, but the two will merge and publishing will become digital (in terms of production and workflow, publishing has been digital for years; the only place where it’s still analog is at the final point, when the consumer gets his or her hands on it). What’s being talked about in the “print is dead” debate is something different than “digital killing publishing”; instead what’s happening is that the increasing habits of digital reading are leading to a decrease of physical reading. And this is happening by degrees in numerous areas, including newspapers, magazines, and books. Indeed, the death of books won’t be from an atomic blast of sudden reader disinterest, but instead will be a “death of a thousand cuts,” the first hundred of which have already occurred (for example, try telling the staffers of those magazines and newspapers who have recently lost their jobs due to electronic competition that digital is not having an effect on the publishing business). So Steinberg’s breathless defense of print seems misguided, as does her aligning the “print is dead” debate with the Second Life phenomenon. Digital reading is not an all-or-nothing alternative, where people exist as either a Norman Rockwell painting or an avatar that looks like Cory Doctorow. Instead, digital delivery and consumption of content is gradually seeping into all areas of our everyday lives, including the books, magazines and newspapers that we read. That is where digital is making an impact, and that is how digital will lead — not to publishing’s murder — but instead to its evolution.

Ad Age: “Is Print Dead? Not on Your (Second) Life”

Jeremy Leslie, writing on Business Week.com, reviews the new book The Last Magazine by David Renard. As Leslie writes, “Renard’s central theme is established with the opening sentence of the book. ‘Magazines, as we know them, are dying.’” Leslie then draws a picture of the how the future of magazine publishing could play out: “over the next 20 years, mainstream magazines will cease to be distributed as printed items, as a combination of pressures pushes publishers to move to digital distribution.” This sounds very much like the “print is dead” debate, with major consumption of printed material happening digitally online (rather than physically offline). However, most of the The Last Magazine seems to be about not the mainstream magazines which will disappear (in fact, just this week Premiere magazine folded), but rather the book highlights the smaller, more idiosyncratic magazines that have a chance to flourish in a digital future by flying under the radar. These “microzines” will be issued in limited editions, and will focus on specific niches, rather than today’s magazines and newspapers (not to mention books) that try to appeal to as many people as possible (which is why they are failing: because most people are now online, so that’s where the brands and authors must also exist). Sounds like an interesting read…

From the review: “While the process of designing and printing magazines has been revolutionised in a single generation of digitalisation, the financial model behind the making of magazines has barely changed. The model has been successful because of continued growth. But recently this growth has stopped.”

BusinessWeek.com: “It’s Not The End of Print”

One of the largest newspapers in the country, USA Today, relaunched its website this week, and is now offering many Web 2.0 tools which give readers more options than ever in terms of reading, sharing and interacting with the website’s content. New features include:

• User Comments: Every article now has user comments.
• Most Popular: Read articles based on popularity rather than in the order assigned by USATODAY editors. Articles are ranked by Most Read, Most Commented, Most Recommended (see below) and Most Emailed.
• Digg-Like Article Voting: Click “recommend” on an article and the vote tally increases by 1. Highly recommended articles appear under the “Most Popular” tab.
• Profile Pages: Registered users have their own page that aggregates their comments, recommended articles and other content.

The site is already getting good reviews, including this one from TechCrunch: “The website is no longer a simple hose spouting news at readers. It has become a full on social network, integrating user generated content in intelligent and interesting ways.”

In a letter to its readers, the editors framed the redesign as being part of “a mission recast for an era in which readers are inundated with information, have little allegiance to a single news source, struggle to assess the credibility of what they read and have the capacity to share their own insights with a wide audience.” This is a sober and brave realization, and I think it’s great that USA Today has come to this conclusion.

In terms of the “print is dead” debate, I think what’s important about all of this is that the editors are realizing that there are plenty of things the Web can do that a physical object can’t, and rather than resist the Internet, or else have their online brand merely mimic their offline product (the way so many print publications are currently doing), USA Today has instead decided to exploit the online medium. Imagine what would happen if other newspapers, magazines and book publishers had a similar revelation?

TechCrunch: Bravo to USA Today

USA Today: To Our Readers

The TED conference starts today in Monterey, California. No, not the Ted pictured. Instead, TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” and is an annual think-thank gathering of “icons, geniuses and mavericks” (the TED website features pictures of both Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, but I don’t think either have confirmed for this year’s conference). With sessions that include people such as Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann and NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (on the same panel!) it seems like a pretty good time. I’d love to attend one of these conferences, but they’re by invitation only (and to be accepted you have to be a “leading thinker and doer” and I’m more of a third-place thinker and at best a fourth-place doer), not to mention the cost is nearly $5K. For a lot less money I’ll take a few walks in Central Park, sit on a nice bench under a tall tree, get out a notebook, and do my thinking there. This may not make me a genius (not to mention an icon or a maverick), but I think saving five thousand dollars is pretty smart.

TED 2007 Conference Schedule

Jason Fry has a great essay on the Wall Street Journal website entitled “Mightier Than the Pen,” where he asks the question, “Will children still write in an era ruled by computers and PDAs?” He places this in context by talking about his son, Joshua, reflecting upon the fact that even though the author “grew up in a pen-and-paper world,” his son is “growing up with computers and PDAs.” This is of course happening all over the world as a generation gap turns into future shock, millions of digitally-challenged parents having a hard time communicating with their Digital Native children. But Fry’s more lamenting about the lost art (and lost hours) of childhood activities such as printing and drawing. But he finally concludes that, as wonderful as print is, along with hand-written words on physical paper, “writing words by hand isn’t what makes us human. And in worrying too much about form, we risk forgetting how adaptable the heart is at investing our communications with feeling.” In looked at in terms of the “print is dead” debate, the same thing could be said (and should be said more often) about books and the debate over the worthiness of digital reading versus physical books; it’s not the format that’s at issue, but instead it’s about the connection between the human and the material. And just because there’s a computer between the two, it doesn’t make the experience any less real or profound. And in terms of the upcoming generations of Digital Natives — like Fry’s son, Joshua — they will already be so used to communicating with their laptops and portable devices that what seems alien to us will feel to them like home.

WSJ: Mightier Than the Pen

The March/April issue of Mother Jones has a feature entitled “Breaking the News,” which is a package of stories looking at the recent downward spiral of newspapers, but coming at it from a different direction: “It’s not the Internet that’s killing newspapers. It’s the equity-chasing investors and their friends at the FCC who have put outsize profits before a free press.” The story “Don’t Blame the Internet for the Media’s Woes” by Eric Klinenberg most directly addresses aspects of the “print is dead” debate, putting all of the trends and numbers in perspective, and offering a unique analysis on the problem I’ve not seen elsewhere. “What’s really at risk here is not the future of newspapers but of the news itself,” writes Klinenberg in a sober assessment of what’s really happening; he alone seems to realize that this isn’t about paper, but is instead about news. It’s not at all about the format.

From the story: “Obviously, the newspaper business is changing. The Internet has made it harder to sustain high profit margins, not because readers are abandoning news but because publishers have not yet figured out how to make more money from their websites. Until now, papers sustained themselves by selling a physical product and the ad space in it. With online readers refusing to pay for what they read and web ads generating pennies on the dollar, the old model is collapsing. As Jay R. Smith, president of Cox Newspapers, told Editor & Publisher, newspapers are ‘finding whole new pockets of audiences for which they get no credit,’ clocking record-breaking readership figures if online traffic is included. But online advertising will account for just 6 percent of newspapers’ $50 billion in ad revenues in 2007, the Newspaper Association of America predicts.”

Mother Jones: Don’t Blame the Internet for the Media’s Woes

The new issue of the Columbia Journalism Review has a really long, and pretty interesting, essay on its website by Robert Kuttner entitled “The Race,” which talks about the future of newspapers and journalism in an increasingly web-centered world. More than just the usual think-piece, Kuttner has also talked to editors around the country, getting their take on everything from bloggers to the “print is dead” debate. The aim of the essay is to “[explore] whether newspapers as we know them are likely to endure, and why we should care.” Kuttner makes several good arguments about what’s currently happening, how many newspapers are indeed adapting to a digital age (while several more, unfortunately, are not), and Kuttner ultimately concludes that it’s not about the physical format but that it’s instead about — as Jeff Jarvis calls it — the “service” that journalism provides.

From the essay: “Despite the seeming anachronism of paper in a digital age, however, the economics of the business require newspapers to persist as partly print media for at least another generation. Some Americans still want to pick up a daily paper rather than read content on a screen. And as a business proposition, the average monetary value of a visitor to a newspaper’s Web site is only 20 to 30 percent of a newspaper’s print reader; Web ads command lower rates because of the greater competition among Web sites. So even if a newspaper shut down its print operation, published only on the Internet, and somehow managed to keep its entire circulation, the revenue loss would exceed the cost savings.”

CJR: “The Race”

More than five years after Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich became the most hated man in music after he teamed up with the Recording Industry Association of America when it sued Napster users (and Metallica fans in particular) for trading music, the RIAA is once again flexing its legal muscle and leaning on the one consumer group who — more than any other — controls its future: college kids. The new pressure is being shown in a just-launched website which allows college students to settle their lawsuits concerning the peer-to-peer sharing of music. Entitled “P2P Lawsuits,” the site is surprisingly amateurish, but still a bit creepy (the ability to settle court cases online with a credit card feels very drive-through). And yet, while this seems fairly benign compared to past efforts (if still misguided), the RIAA is also announcing that this is just the overture of what promises to be a rock-opera of measures intended to crack down on piracy. This is, of course, ridiculous; the RIAA should be mending fences with students, not trying to put them behind bars. College kids, as they have shown in the past (Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster, was — after all — a student when he invented the software that started all of this) are incredibly adept at getting around what they consider restrictive (not to mention unjust) rules regarding DRM and anti-piracy, and they’ll no doubt be staying up late in dorm rooms across the country in order to find ways to circumvent anything the RIAA puts in front of them. In terms of the “print is dead” argument, publishers should be watching this scenario very closely, with an eye towards avoiding the mistakes the RIAA seems to be serially committing.

From the NY Times: “The recording industry’s trade group will give hundreds of college students suspected of illegally sharing music online a chance to reach settlements before being sued for copyright infringement. The move announced Wednesday comes as the industry seeks to stamp out what it says is rampant music piracy on campuses.”

NY Times: Industry Pressure on Music Piracy