Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

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