Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Yesterday Amazon announced that it would, later this year, open up a music download store where MP3 files would be sold without any digital rights management (also known as DRM). This would enable the files to be listened to on virtually any electronic device: iPods, computers, laptops, even cell phones (more and more I’m seeing people with headphones on, bopping up and down to music, but the headphones are plugged into a Razr and not an iPod). This is a pretty big deal, and while EMI announced a few weeks ago that it would be the first label to agree to sell its music without DRM, Amazon is the first retailer (of this size) to open a digital store where everything is sold sans DRM.

As reported in The New York Times: “The move could be another step toward the demise of the copy-protection systems that have frustrated some online music buyers and created confusion about compatibility between digital players and downloaded songs. Critics charge that the software has slowed the public embrace of legal digital downloads while failing to stop illicit copying, at a time when the music industry is desperate for ways to make up for declining CD sales.”

The CD, as has been reported on this blog and elsewhere, is dead; digital downloads could be the thing that saves the music industry. However, all downloads are not created the same. With songs swaddled in DRM, consumers can only play them on certain devices. But to have them be unencrypted means that consumers will truly own the music that they buy, and will be able to do whatever they want with it. And in terms of piracy concerns, to repeat Tim O’Reilly’s quote (which I seem to do every six weeks or so), “Piracy is not the enemy, obscurity is.” With all of the competition that music now faces in terms of the amount of attention consumers have to spare — due to the rise of Myspace, Youtube, blogs, RSS and podcasts — the trick is getting them interested in music in the first place. And if this is a success (for Amazon, consumers, and the music business) this could lead to the disappearance of DRM for movies, TV shows, and even books, that are distributed and delivered digitally.

NY Times: Amazon to Sell Music Without Copy Protection

Andrew Marr, writing on the Guardian website, has an essay entitled “Curling up with a good ebook.” The premise of the essay is that Marr, “who treasures his smelly, beautiful library of real books,” will spend a month reading on an ebook. From the outset Marr is — like lots of readers — skeptical: “If you are selling ebooks, I’m a hard sell. For one thing, my enthusiasm for traditional books is just this side of pervy. I live among mountains of them and always have, among the most beautiful mass-produced objects of all time.” And so even though Marr is an unabashed lover of books, even from a technical point of view (“books are such good technology, even compared with CDs or newspapers”), even he sees utility in electronic reading, and books existing as invisible computer files rather than physical things: “In our house, every day we get mounds of newsprint, much of it thrown instantly away. The stuff hangs around like intellectual scurf, and it’s depressing.”

For the experience, Marr is using an English eBook reader named the Illiad — similar to the Sony eReader — loaded with classics. He starts by taking the device to a number of locations, “reading some Tolstoy and then some Conan Doyle, in the garden, slumped in a chair inside, on a sofa in a dimmish room, and in the back of a car.” To his surprise, reading text on a screen is not as bad as he thinks: “In each place, it was easy to read; I have spent plenty of time reading it and so far, haven’t felt any eyestrain, or no more than I would have found with a book.” In fact, there’s an accompanying photo that shows Marr actually curling up quite comfortably with his eBook (in a manner that most critics say is impossible). After a few weeks, Marr is pleased by the experience: “I was surprised by how easy it was to use, and surprised by how much can be stored on it. I liked the rather elegant, retro design, more like a digital slate than a piece of flashy gear…” And even though Marr still has some issues, notably price and the experience of turning “pages,” in the end, Marr remarks, “I am reluctantly impressed with my ebook.”

All of which goes to show that if electronic reading can win over a bibliophile like this, then perhaps eBooks have a chance after all.

The Guardian: Curling up with a good ebook

After it seemed that Motoko Rich’s article in The New York Times last week would be the last word on l’affaire book reviews, this past Sunday The Los Angeles Times weighed in with an article by Josh Getlin entitled “Battle of the book reviews.” The article focuses mainly on what’s seen to be the contentious relationship between the critics who are losing their jobs and the literary bloggers who seem to be taking the place of critics by exposing books through online means.

“The quarrel, which got surprisingly nasty, spilled into newspapers, magazines and blogs,” writes Getlin, “amid concerns over recent cutbacks at other big-city newspaper book reviews, including The Los Angeles Times. The boom in books-related blogging, it seemed, was a slap in the face to more seasoned literary voices as they watched their own outlets shrink.”

The article quotes the usual big literary blogs and bloggers: Maud Newton, The Elegant Variation, and Laura Miller, book critic for online magazine Salon. Finally, though, Getlin announces that all of these warring factions may be ready to get along: “there is a growing sense that enough is enough — and that the friction between old and new book media obscures the fact that the two are in bed together now, for better or worse.”

I think this neatly sums up the current situation — that blogs and the mainstream media currently co-exist — but it doesn’t deal with the future, where a newly flattened world continuously plugged into online debate and constant Internet exposure will not only make print criticism irrelevant, but it will begin to drive it out of business. After all, the current discussion was spurred because this has already started to happen. So it’s not that the truce won’t be short-lived, but that the battle — one more of attrition than carnage; these are, after all, writers — will soon be over.

Los Angeles Times: “Battle of the book reviews”

Clive Thompson, writing in The New York Times over the weekend, had a great article entitled “Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog.” The article talked about a new breed of music performers who have built huge fan bases (as well as modestly successful careers) by releasing their work on the Internet, in addition to keeping up with fans through blogs and encouraging them to become part of the experience by interacting with the music this new breed of musician creates. Thompson labels this new kind of entertainer “Artist 2.0.” Gone is the recluse, the moody dilettante who has no interaction with his or her fans; in a digital world musicians, and to a lesser degree filmmakers and writers, rely on their fans to not only buy their work, but also to offer advice, cover their songs, make their videos, and help them even book their tours and be a part of their live shows.

“In the past — way back in the mid-’90s, say — artists had only occasional contact with their fans,” writes Thompson. “If a musician was feeling friendly, he might greet a few audience members at the bar after a show. Then the Internet swept in. Now fans think nothing of sending an e-mail message to their favorite singer — and they actually expect a personal reply.”

In the seventies, as a young kid living in the California suburbs, I was a huge fan of the rock band Kiss. Kiss was one of the first bands to actively cultivate a rabid following of fans who flocked to their shows and bought their records. Labeled the “Kiss Army,” these legions of fans would apply make-up to their face before the shows, and knew all the words to Kiss songs by heart. And every Kiss record came with an insert which sold paraphernalia to the Kiss Army acolytes: t-shirts, headbands, patches, buttons, jackets, etc. The army had a uniform, but that was about it. The Kiss Army was all about consumerism and buying products; being, well, a member in an army and just another soldier blending into the crowd. (I myself was a proud member of Kiss Army, and despite this I never got closer to Kiss than an album cover.) Whereas today, the Internet is actually allowing interaction with musicians; fans aren’t just part of the act, they’re crucial to the act being there in the first place.

“This is not merely an illusion of intimacy,” writes Thompson. “Performing artists these days, particularly new or struggling musicians, are increasingly eager, even desperate, to master the new social rules of Internet fame. They know many young fans aren’t hearing about bands from MTV or magazines anymore; fame can come instead through viral word-of-mouth, when a friend forwards a Web-site address, swaps an MP3, e-mails a link to a fan blog or posts a cellphone concert video on YouTube.”

All of this goes a long way toward answering the recent question that has come up increasingly in the debate over the loss of book reviews: where will readers hear about new books if they can’t read a review? Well, they’ll hear about them the way a whole new generation is hearing about music: online. And not only that, but this new era will allow for more interaction between readers and authors. Because of this, the Internet will foster more literacy, not less. And while print may indeed be dead — with laptops and a wireless connection, who needs books? — writers and readers will be very much alive.

The New York Times: Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog

Todd Bishop, writing on the Seattle Post-Intelligencier website earlier this week, reported on Bill Gates’s comments at Microsoft’s recent Strategic Account Summit. The conference is an annual event, during which time Gates usually does his “vision thing.” And as maligned as he is, Gates’s views must have some validity since he’s the world’s richest man, because as much as I agree with the Citizen Kane quote of “It’s no trick to make a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money,” in Gates’s case I don’t think you could make that much money without being right about a few things.

What Gates talked about this year, in addition to a number of other digital topics, was the future of electronic reading. Needless to say, Gates had rather strong feelings on the subject. “Reading is going to go completely online,” Gates is quoted as saying. “Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links.” The case Gates is making is not techno-babble (usually the pro-digital reading side), nor is it purely emotional (usually the pro-book side); instead, he’s rather simply stating the case that the utility, in terms of digital reading, is far higher than it is for print reading. What it comes down to is this: computers can do things that books can’t; while the only thing a book can do, that a computer can’t do, is be a book.

Seattle Post-Intelligencier: Bill Gates: Reading to go ‘completely online’

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

Editor & Publisher this week announced the results of a Newspaper Association of America study which showed that “an average of 59 million people, or 37% of all active Internet users, visited newspaper Web sites each month” during the first quarter of this year. In addition, “During the same period, the overall Internet audience grew 2.7%.” What does this mean to newspapers and their websites? Well, according to John Sturm, CEO of the NAA, “The fact that [the] newspaper Web site audience is growing at almost double the rate of the Internet audience as a whole validates the industry’s investment in digital innovation, and the ongoing attraction consumers have to newspapers online.”

Adds Shawn Riegsecker, CEO of interactive agency Centro, “As [consumers] become more sophisticated in navigating the Web, they are turning to trusted sources of news and information, like newspapers, instead of aggregators or portals. This couldn’t be better for the industry, as [newspapers] control more of this information than any other medium.”

Keeping in mind that this study was conducted by a industry group, and was presented at an industry conference (and really doesn’t mention all the other ways Web users are getting their news besides newspaper websites), this is still just another way of saying that, well, print is dead. After all, newspaper circulation is down, but traffic to newspaper websites is up. The only thing that’s in flux in this scenario is the paper. People still want news; the only thing that’s different is how they’re getting it. And this new study shows that, increasingly, people are going to the Web for their information instead of picking up a physical newspaper. And what this ultimately means is that the “print is dead” debate is really only a problem for printers; news organizations — like traditional publishers — will still exist; it’s really the product that’s going to change, or in some cases, disappear altogether.

NAA Study: Newspaper Web Users Above Average in Many Ways

Quick technical note; I’m glad to say — thanks to the help of web designer extraordinaire Mary Elkins — that I have finally had the comments on this blog fixed. For a long time they weren’t working, and I very much appreciate the people who contacted me because they wanted to leave a comment and add to the discussion. This has finally been corrected, and I would really love to know what people think of my blog posts in the future, as well as your thoughts on the “print is dead” argument in general. As Anthony Burgess says, “We arrive at values only through dialectic.”

Thanks, all.

–Jeff

The website for the PBS program Mediashift last week had an interesting interview with “Mr. Magazine,” Samir Husni. Husni is a journalist and journalism professor who is frequently quoted in media stories about magazines and newspapers. He also has a blog. Husni is a very intelligent guy, but I didn’t agree with a lot of what he said, for example: “As long as we have human beings, we are going to continue to have ink on paper.” Well, of course. Again, no one’s saying that print’s going to become extinct. Instead, it’s going to turn more into an artform than it is now. In the past it was used as utility (a means of conveying information from one place to another, since usurped by the Internet), but in the future it will be seen as an afterthought or an indulgence (people buying and reading physical magazines or newspapers because they want to, not necessarily because they have to in order to get the information). And where we find ourselves today is going through the transformation from one to the other. But no one is saying we’re heading towards Fahrenheit 451 where firemen start fires instead of putting them out, and paper is an endangered species.

For Husni, as it does for many others, it seems to finally come down to a technology joust: “But there are also ways that the new technology cannot compete with print.” Of course, what’s implicit in this statement is that there are indeed ways that technology can compete with print, and in fact, there are many things that technology can do that print cannot. In fact, when you take the emotional element out of the judgment of a book or newspaper or a magazine, technology has so much more to offer, especially these days. For instance, compare reading the website Pitchfork today to reading Spin magazine a decade ago. As the old quote goes, writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Well, reading about music wasn’t too fun, either. So reading Spin was a fairly listless experience: you could see the bands, but you couldn’t hear them. However, on Pitchfork — right now — you can not only read criticism of indie rock, but you can actually listen to it, and see videos as well as photos from last night’s shows (not to mention that, if you like what you hear, you can click on the album cover and buy the CD or even access the digital files to the entire record, instantly). But for Husni, he’s just hooked on a feeling: “There’s still a reason for that tactile feeling of holding something in your hand and having something you’re proud of.” But is he proud of the physical item or its content? Would Husni feel just as proud holding Us Weekly or People? Or would he rather read The Economist online?

Mediashift: ‘Mr. Magazine’ Believes We’ll Always Crave Ink on Paper

Okay, I promise that this will be the last post about the incredibly shrinking book review section, but I thought that The New York Times, on Wednesday, had a nice non-hysterical overview of the current situation. In an article entitled, “Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?,” reporter Motoko Rich sums up the current scene in a sane way, and then nicely summarizes both the dilemma and the opportunity: “To some authors and critics, these moves amount to yet one more nail in the coffin of literary culture. But some publishers and literary bloggers — not surprisingly — see it as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books.” Rich talked with a good selection of important bloggers, as well as publishing executives (who, somewhat surprisingly, thought that literary blogs were a good thing).

However, a writer who comes off very poorly in the piece is the novelist Richard Ford, who denigrates book blogs without ever having read one. He even goes so far as to state that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution should print reviews “as a public service.” This is I think the height of vanity. Garbage collection and paved roads are a public service; what Jay McInerney thinks of Ben Kunkel is not. Even within the world the words, this isn’t the loss that Ford and others make it out to be. I mean, to think that the world of literature will be worse off for not having a dreamy full-page photograph of Michael Chabon in the LA Times is lunacy; what we need is Michael Chabon writing intelligent and entertaining novels, we don’t need him to be a pin-up. Meanwhile, the NBCC is relentlessly staging their campaign to save book reviews as if this were a push for civil rights or an anti-war rally. They’re now staging “read-ins” and protests and circulating petitions that have the signature of people like Norman Mailer; next month I think they’re going to march on Washington and try to levitate the Library of Congress.

Unfortunately, I think all of these efforts are going to backfire, and only show how out of touch the literary establishment is in terms of knowing who readers are (let alone knowing what they want). So instead of reaching out to readers, the recent reaction of the literary establishment has the condescending whiff of “let them eat cake” combined with “father knows best,” while the critics themselves circle their wagons in order to protect the status quo. But readers are too busy, discovering books in dozens of ways besides a book review, to notice.

NY Times: Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?