Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

David Kipen, in response to all of the recent discussion about the disappearance of book reviews from American newspapers, has a pretty silly essay on Salon entitled “Last exit to book land.” In the piece, Kipen (an ex-book critic, and thus hardly an impartial observer) somehow manages to come up with a theory that says if we save book reviews we can also restore “reading to the heart of American life.” However, before all the sturm und drang, Kipen first sets the stage: “[Newspaper] circulation is down. Newsroom paranoia, never exactly dormant even in the best of times, is up. And editors are cutting book reviews like they’re going out of style — which, if we’re not careful, they just might be.” Kipen then pulls back his focus, and tries to tie all of this into the declining numbers of readers overall: “Still, as important as the crisis in American book reviewing is, the underlying crisis in reading is practically sawing the country in half. Forget red states and blue states. The implications of a republic where half reads and the other doesn’t — not can’t, just doesn’t — are simply horrifying.”

Finally, Kipen sinks to the totally ridiculous, equating the absence of newspapers with the absence of readers: “But imagine a country where readers aren’t even a minority, but an aberration. Picture a country where newspapers gut book coverage and everything else that made them worth saving in the first place…” What Kipen either doesn’t realize, or refuses to acknowledge, is that this is still very much a country of readers. However, it’s just becoming less and less a country of newspaper readers. Because, really, what does Kipen think happens when users visit a website? They’re reading. After all, blogs are usually just words, most websites have more text than they do graphics, while the website that has changed pretty much everyone’s life is Google (a site where people use text to find what they’re looking for, which is usually more text). In addition to all of this there are numerous Internet-only magazines (such as Slate and Salon, where Kipen’s essay ironically appears) that people go to in order to, you know, read. So Kipen’s conclusion that, because book reviews are disappearing, we’re going to turn into an illiterate society where we communicate via grunts or semaphore, and can’t tie two sentences together, is insane.

Salon: Last exit to book land