Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The New York Times on Monday had an article entitled “Plunge in CD Sales Shakes Up Big Labels,” talking about how the continued dip in the music industry is rearranging the landscape of music, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight: “Despite costly efforts to build buzz around new talent and thwart piracy, CD sales have plunged more than 20 percent this year, far outweighing any gains made by digital sales at iTunes and similar services.”

The article also shows that even the genres that used to sell well, are now in trouble: “Sales of rap, which had provided the industry with a lifeboat in recent years, fell far more than the overall market last year with a drop of almost 21 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.”

Also mentioned is that the industry, desperately seeking some revenue, is willing more than ever to peel back the DRM restrictions that have hindered digital sales. But others aren’t sure if even this is the answer: “Some music executives say that dropping copy-restriction software, also known as digital-rights management, would stoke business at iTunes’ competitors and generate a surge in sales. Others predict it would have little impact, though they add that the labels squandered years on failed attempts to restrict digital music instead of converting more fans into paying consumers.”

Idolator, the irreverent music blog, reporting on the same article had a, well, irreverent take on this. Yet I thought that their sarcasm had more than a little truth to it:

“Here’s another way to weather the storm, and while we’ve said this before, it bears repeating: Everyone in the industry has to get used to making less money. That goes from the execs at the top all the way down to the EAs at Rolling Stone. You can’t live like it’s 1985 anymore, with those Rumours and Thriller accounting statements coming over the Telex, and with the only competition for young kids’ dollars being the Pac-Man machine down the street. If everyone could get used to this concept, maybe there’d be less panicking about lower physical-CD sales and piracy, and more emphasis on A&R and talent.”

While publishing is not yet in a comparable situation in terms of sales, books now have much more competition than they used to. And I also think that how stubborn the record industry has been — and how badly this attitude has served them — should be an example to us in publishing because we’re going to have to, at some point, similarly change. We need to be ready to change not just ourselves, our products, and our various business models, but we also need to change our expectations. And, in a way, that might be the most difficult thing of all.

NY Times: Plunge in CD Sales Shakes Up Big Labels

The Condé Nast Traveler site has a blog kept by Mark Schatzker entitled “80 Days or Bust,” which is all about “one man’s attempt to circumnavigate the world the old-fashioned way.” It looks like he completed the trip last week, although I have to say that I don’t agree with the “old fashioned” bit since Magellan didn’t book a ticket on the Queen Mary 2. But what’s really interesting is that for the trip Schatzker, instead of taking a bunch of books along with him, took a Sony eReader loaded with titles. In writing about the experience with the eReader, he sets the stage of the “print is dead” debate perfectly: “Tech reviewers were less than whelmed by the eReader’s feature set — no backlighting, no search, no annotation, no wireless web streaming — and they considered the price, $350, to be way too high. Literary types, on the other hand, dismissed the eReader in a rather haughtier manner. They saw it not only as a poor substitute for a book, but as a threat to the hallowed tradition of ‘the book,’ another broadside from the over-stimulated, attention-deprived, caffeinated present on the deep-thinking and ever-threatened literary tradition.”

And what did he finally decide? “To these arbiters of judgment, I offer a single and uncontestable fact: My 80-day circumnavigation would have been much less pleasurable without my Sony Reader. Thanks to it, I was able to take part — whenever I wanted, and for long, memorable stretches — in one of my most favorite of activities: reading.”

This is, of course, the perfect example of the utility of digital reading. For hundreds of years people going on long trips had to deal with lugging around any number of books (in addition to carrying clothes, food, camera, etc.). But eBooks can finally get rid of all of that. For example, in his short story “The Book-Bag,” W. Somerset Maugham writes about a character who lives in fear of being without appropriate reading material close at hand, especially when on trips: “Since then I have made a point of traveling with the largest sack made for carrying soiled linen and filling it to the brim with books to suit every possible occasion and every mood. It weighs a ton and strong porters reel under its weight. Custom-house officials look at it askance, but recoil from it with consternation when I give them my word that it contains nothing but books. Its inconvenience is that the particular work I suddenly hanker to read is always at the bottom and it is impossible for me to get it.” As Schatzker writes on his blog, “[The eReader] is slender — a mere half-inch thin — and it’s dense. It can hold up to 80 e-books.”

In the future, people will be able to carry one small device that contains dozens (if not hundreds) of books, and the character from Maugham’s story can go back to actually carrying soiled linen in what used to be his “book bag.” And of course what used to “weigh a ton” now weighs less than a pound. I’d say that’s a pretty big achievement.

The Condé Nast Traveler: Gear Review Sony Reader

The online magazine Slate recently had an article in which they “revealed” the favorite font of a number of writers. This was tied into a Slate article about a new documentary about Helvetica (which I think I’ll skip, waiting for the epic mini-series about Times New Roman). To kick off their survey, Slate “asked a number of prominent writers to tell us what font they compose in and why.” Well, I have to say that, after reading the article, learning about writers and their favorite fonts is probably just about as interesting as hearing film directors on their favorite kind of film stock (Kodak or Fuji? Tell me more!). It makes me think of the Joseph Heller quote, “Never mind the trick, what the hell’s the point?” Because a font is just a vehicle for the transmission of ideas, the same way a printed book is only a vessel to carry words. Of course, whatever it takes to get a writer going is fine by me, but I couldn’t really care less that Richard Posner “composes” in Century Schoolbook.

This reminds me of Raygun magazine, a painfully hip music magazine from the ‘90s. Raygun had some amazing design and layout, mashing up fonts and typography into a stew of print that was a visual feast for the eyes. The only problem was, you could barely read the damn thing. More than once I’d bought it, looking forward to an article on a band I liked, only to not be able to make out half the words because the designer had done some weird thing in the design (like using backwards R’s or substituting 3’s for E’s). At a certain point, if the aim is to clearly transmit ideas, the look of something has to take the backseat to its content. After all, isn’t the old saying, “You can’t judge a book by its cover”? So I don’t really think you can judge a sentence by its font.

Now, I realize that these writers aren’t insisting that their books be published in these fonts, but the fetishism they show for them I find disturbing; I would hope they cared more about the words they were typing, rather than the font those words appeared in.

Slate: My Favorite Font

For any publishing types who are attend BEA this week, I’m giving a presentation entitled “The Role of Book Publishers in the Real Digital Age: An Insider’s Perspective.” The presentation takes place Wednesday, at 11:30AM, in room 1E04.

Here’s a description of the presentation from the BEA website: “In a time when the discussion over the future of the book is less a debate and more of a cautionary tale (with newspapers and magazines going out of business left and right, or else laying people off, as they scramble to adapt their financial models and products to a digital world), this presentation will discuss the current changes occurring with books, writers and readers by highlighting the imminent rise of digital reading and what that will mean for traditional publishers who for years thought of themselves as being in the book business. A quick history will be included in terms of the decline of traditional reading and the rise of digital reading, touching on how and why eBooks failed to take off six years ago (and why digital reading today is not the same thing as eBooks were back then), putting this into perspective in terms of Web 2.0 tenets such as the Attention Economy, user-generated content, and on-demand everything. And now that we’re all sure that printed books have to change, what’s a publisher to do? What does the future look like, and is it a scary thing or a good thing? What does this mean to the backlist, let alone the frontlist? What are the opportunities that shouldn’t be missed, and the pitfalls that had better be avoided? This session will touch on all of these subjects.”

I guarantee that it’ll be the only BEA presentation that quotes Victor Hugo, Nietzsche and Elvis Costello.

Drop by if you’re interested, and if you’re a reader of the blog be sure to let me know.

BEA Website

As reported by USA Today, “CNN will give away access to an online video service that now costs $25 a year, becoming the latest news organization to revamp its revenue model on the Web.”

This is pretty interesting since it’s yet another media company changing its mind from a paid-subscription model to a free one. This is both good and bad in terms of the “print is dead” debate. One of the main problems facing eBooks since the beginning has been pricing. No one’s been quite sure what to charge for something that doesn’t really exist. A few bucks? Full price? And in the midst of this confusion, not to mention loads of DRM, competing formats, and less-than-elegant technological interfaces, consumers have — for the most part — stayed away in droves.

So while big media companies begin to give away more of their product online, while that’s of course good for information that yearns to be free (if you believe in that argument), it makes it more difficult for publishers charging consumers for digital content. In terms of why CNN made their change, a company spokesperson is quoted as saying, “People don’t like to pay for stuff on the Internet.” This is unfortunately true. And even though the success of iTunes has shown that consumers are indeed willing to pay for digital content — provided the price point makes sense, and it’s easy for them to do so — publishing has yet to figure out what to charge for the virtual computer file of a hardback book that costs $27.95.

USA Today: CNN.com dropping fees for live video

As a child of the seventies who grew up alongside the original Star Wars trilogy (I was seven when the first one came out, and just getting into girls when the last one finally appeared six years later), George Lucas’s space epic has always held a dear place in my heart, second only perhaps to Atari. And Star Wars, while not only immensely popular in terms of revenue, was immensely inspirational as well, with devoted fans over the years dressing up as their favorite characters for conventions or Halloween, or else drawing scenes from the movie in hours of wasted art classes. But now, in this new digital age, fans not only pay homage to the Star Wars universe (i.e. Chad Vader), but they can actually interact with it (for instance, the version of The Phantom Menace in which a fan erased Jar Jar Binks). However, these have always been illegal enterprises which, more often than not, have led to either lawsuits or pressure from Lucas to remove them from circulation. But now, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, “Lucasfilm plans to make clips of Star Wars available to fans on the Internet to mash up — meaning to remix however they want — at will.”

The 250 clips will be taken from all six Star Wars movies, and will be paired with an editing program that will allow fans the ability to “cut, add to and retool the clips. Then they can post their creations to blogs or social-networking sites like MySpace. More clips will come out from time to time over coming months.”

This is totally the right thing to do, and I’m pleased to see that Lucas realizes that the creativity of his fans are an asset and not a liability; for years all he wanted was their wallets, but now he wants their minds as well. And at a time when so many big companies and directors are taking an “us versus them” mentality when it comes to things like Youtube and mash-ups, it’s nice to see that someone of Lucas’s stature (and former views) is changing his mind. As the Journal puts it: “While Lucasfilm could fight what amounts to the theft of its property, it has now decided to take the opposite tack. In doing so, it is tackling an issue that faces all media companies today: how to keep some semblance of control over intellectual property in the digital age.”

Wall Street Journal: Make-It-Yourself ‘Star Wars’

The LA Weekly this past week had a cover story in their literary supplement section entitled “The Bookish Set,” which profiles a number of independent Los Angeles booksellers, including the owners or staff of places like Book Soup, Dutton’s and Skylight. Having previously lived in LA for years, I’m familiar with all of these places. In fact, I remember being in Book Soup one time when someone asked for The Celestine Prophecy, and the guy behind the counter talked them out of it. I also did a reading from my first novel at the Brentwood Dutton’s in 1995 that Patricia Wettig, who had been shopping in the store when I started — I’ll never forget — walked out of.

The Weekly story highlights the fact that, even though all of these stores are going through changes and publishing’s not what it used to be, this book-loving cadre of “wise, savvy, and by turns funny and tragic” misfits are here to stay: “Despondent at times about the future of their industry yet determined to see it through in some as-yet-unknown fashion, they and their workplaces are gloriously idiosyncratic in a culture veering precariously toward sameness.”

But what I find most interesting about the story is that I live in New York and yet I can still read the LA Weekly. I left Los Angeles in early 1997, right when the Internet was starting to become the phenomenon it is today (when I was looking for a roommate that January, one of them said they’d looked me up on Amazon because I said I’d had a book published, and I distinctly remember thinking, “What’s Amazon?”). And yet now the LA Weekly website touts itself as “The Essential Online Resource for Los Angeles.”

What was a decade ago just printed words on paper, distributed in kiosks around town that were sometimes full and sometimes empty when you went to get a copy, now also exists as a completely electronic, interactive multimedia experience. What was ten years ago just a free newspaper that came out once a week, dropped off on street corners where it sometimes got soaked by the rain or bleached by the sun, now lives eternally online in a pristine, Dorian Gray-like state. I used to make it a point to, every Thursday, get a copy of the Weekly. But now readers, anywhere in the world, can get its info any time they want. That’s a huge positive, and a great leap forward. Print may be dead, but instead of mourning we should be celebrating what it’s being replaced by.

WLS: The Bookish Set

Writing in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend, book and film critic Richard Schickel has an opinion piece entitled “Not everybody’s a critic” in which he excoriates bloggers and declares that an atmosphere in which everyone can contribute to the literary conversation is a “wasteland.” Fun, right? Wait, it get’s worse…

To start with, Schickel comes out swinging: “The most grating words I’ve read in a newspaper recently were in a New York Times report on the shrinkage of book reviewing in many of the nation’s leading newspapers.” Mind you, we’re at war, people are dying, the Middle East is once again lighting up like a Roman candle, but what really gets Schickel’s goat is the fact that the world may no longer be able to know what Michiko Kakutani thinks of D.B.C. Pierre.

After this apocalyptic opening, Schickel doesn’t waste any time — or many words — in getting straight to his point: “Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object).”

I would now be making fun of Schickel if he weren’t already so profoundly making fun of himself. His words are truly the worst kind of snobbery, and his logic is so twisted the inside of his mind must look like spin art (done in black ink). He’s so concerned with who is bestowing the judgment that he doesn’t care about the judgment itself; he only cares from whose lips the words are issued. To him, all bloggers are just hoi polloi with HPs.

Schickel also writes: “The review’s highest business is to initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries.”

Again, I would be ridiculing Schickel for being a pretentious snob if he weren’t so intent on saving me the trouble by heaping ridicule upon himself. Not since Milli Vanilli declared that they were “more talented than any Bob Dylan” has an artist or critic so overstated their own importance.

Even the title of his essay, “Not everybody’s a critic,” is totally wrong. These days, in a flattened Web 2.0 world, where the notions of so many things — television, music, communication, and now publishing — have been shattered, more people than ever have a voice. But Schickel just wishes everyone would keep it down; can’t they see he’s speaking?

LA Times: Not everybody’s a critic

After all of the talk — originating most recently from Margaret Atwood while on a panel at the London Book Fair — about how print books are superior to electronic books because you can’t read electronic books in a bathtub, Chris Steib recently set out to see if this was really true. How did he do this? Well, he performed an experiment where he compared the two experiences “by pitting my new Sony eReader against a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 in the environment Ms. Atwood so boldly claims is the true domain of paper — NOT digital — books.” The result is an entertaining and quasi-scientific experiment, all of which is documented in photographs which are pretty damn funny. Along the way Steib keeps score, rating each reading experience on its bathtub virtues; the winner may surprise you…

The Ultimate eBook Experiment: Reading in the Bathtub

David Blum, writing in The New York Sun, had an essay earlier this week entitled “How Not To Write a Best Seller.” The essay takes a look at Joshua Ferris’s recent debut novel, “Then We Came to The End,” which received rave reviews earlier in the year (including a front page review in The New York Times Book Review, which is just about as good as it gets). But the book — while the publisher has shipped 50,000 copies, going back to press four times — never became a sensation and never really caught on, and this makes Blum curious: “Why does the reading public not know Mr. Ferris’s life story the way it so often becomes familiar with young literary lions? Why have comparatively few people heard of his novel, read it, or embraced it as the discovery of the season, if not the year?”

In terms of reviews, since Ferris’s book did just about as good as a novel, first or otherwise, could hope to achieve, Blum then ties the book’s only respectable reception to “the industry’s recent hand-wringing over the elimination of book-review sections in newspapers.” Because if book reviews are so important, and without them no one will know what to read (as recent supporters of book reviews have stated), how come they don’t work? Why didn’t Ferris’s book sell even more? Why isn’t it a spectacular success? In the words of Blum, “Something doesn’t compute.” What doesn’t compute is that reviews, in and of themselves, don’t automatically make a book a smash. Instead, reviews are only one part of an equation that adds up to success. And, as we may be discovering, reviews may be a smaller part of the equation than we previously thought.

NY Sun: How Not To Write a Best Seller