Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Last week I was at Academy Records on 18th street shopping for used CDs (which is how I buy most of my music; sooner or later, Academy gets every CD that I’m looking for), when I saw a big blond guy with dreadlocks. He was wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt (it was hot out), which meant I could easily view the many tattoos he had snaking up and down his arms and legs. On his left calf I noticed he had a full-color tattoo of the record cover to Kiss’s 1976 LP “Rock and Roll Over.” This made me grin since that was the first record I ever owned; my aunt Carmen gave it to me as a Christmas present. To this day I still cherish the memory of that scratchy vinyl record, the stickers that it came with (which promptly went on the seat of my bike), and of course the songs (“They call me doctor love…”). But that was then, and this is now. Back then, when people were given records they put them in collections, took care of them, and kept them for years. Now, with most people listening to music digitally, physical formats are increasingly being seen as dispensable, disposal objects. Records used to be like handkerchiefs, which men would launder and use over and over again. Today, CDs are more like Kleenex, which people load into their iPods and then toss like a used tissue.

Writing about this in the New York Times over the weekend, in an article entitled “The Ballad of the Spurned CD,” Brooke Hauser writes “While some iPod owners are selling their albums to iPod-challenged friends and neighbors, others are simply dumping entire collections on the sidewalk. Either way, it’s almost impossible to walk down the street without tripping over the city’s aural histories. Call it CD roadkill.” As the recent book burning in Kansas City shows, books are also not as cherished as either they used to be or we think them to be. But in terms of music, people are still listening to the songs; it’s just a matter of format. In terms of books, some people are bypassing the experience altogether, choosing to spend time on other things, like YouTube and Myspace. So in a few years it may not be stacks of CDs we see in the garbage as we walk down the street; instead, it will be piles of books waiting to be taken to the dump. But if we can make the information in books available digitally, we at least have a shot at getting people to read the words. If not, it could very well be, “Goodbye bookshelf, hello landfill.”