Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal’s “The Weekend Adviser” column by Sam Schechner had a story entitled “Harry Potter and the Deluxe-Book Gambit,” which is about the trend by publishers to create elaborate, limited edition collector’s items of novels.

The Journal calls this “part of a renaissance in an old publishing practice: expensive special editions, often bound or boxed in materials like leather or wood, sometimes with special illustrations, added text or authors’ signatures. The deluxe gambit has been used successfully by music labels and DVD publishers, which have put out higher-priced special editions, often with additional songs or deleted scenes, to wring extra revenue from dedicated fans. Within the struggling book industry, these efforts are intended to deepen fan bases for popular authors while ginning up extra profit.” I would say this has less to do with the Renaissance and more to do with the Middle Ages and its hand-crafted illuminated manuscripts. Because as content increasingly becomes digitized in a future when most reading is done electronically, books will transform from a mass-produced commodity back into what they originally were: an art form.

In their 2004 book The Fall of Advertising and The Rise of PR, Al Ries and Laura Ries discuss how candles became an art form after electricity effectively removed them as a necessity for creating and sustaining indoor light. What happened after Edison invented the lightblub, wrote the Rieses, could be described as “the fall of the candle and the rise of the lightbulb.” They continue:

Yet every night all over America millions of candles are burning. No romantic dinner is complete without candles on the table. Individual candles are sold for $20 or $30 each, much more than a lightbulb. Unlike an electric bulb, the value of a candle has no relationship to its light output. Like the fireplace and the sailing ship, the candle has lost its function and turned into art.

The same thing will happen to books, and this new trend in creating elaborate, collector’s editions of novels — that sell for four or five times the price of a regular editions — is the first step in this direction.