Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

When I first attempted to write novels almost twenty years ago, I did so in a vacuum. Neither parents, roommates or girlfriends knew what I was writing. All they knew, as I locked myself behind closed doors, was that I was furiously typing away on my Mac Classic. I worked in secrecy, never showing my work to anyone. When I felt my stories were ready to be seen by eyes other than my own, and after scrapping several attempts, I started a zine in 1993 named Our Noise. It was sold for $2 via mail order, and I placed ads for it in the back of tiny magazines that had some national exposure (Maximum Rock and Roll, etc.). I also sent a dozen or so copies to other zines to get mine reviewed. The big review I was waiting for was from Factsheet 5, which back then was the bible of zines, as well as sort of a lo-fi Google (in terms of indexing and exposing zines). According to the NecroKonicon site, “Even though each issue of [Factsheet 5] was very out of date by the time you got it … getting your zine reviewed and listed was a mark of honor. It also meant you’d get a ton of mail from people all over the place trying to order your zine, send you their crappy poetry, or sell you a book on high colonics or how to legally evade taxes.”

My zine finally got reviewed in Factsheet 5, and for the next couple of months I had a great time trading zines and mail with people all over the world. Of course, this took weeks and weeks to happen, forcing me to make daily visits to my post office box (not to mention numerous trips to Kinkos to Xerox new copies, and to the post office to buy mailing supplies). And while the zine heyday of the early ‘90s was fun, all of this activity has since been replaced by websites in terms cataloging all of the new content that’s out there, in addition to redefining the way that people create content in the first place. So while it may be incredibly banal to say that blogs are the new zines, that doesn’t make it any less true. And in terms of fiction, an emerging set of online tools has led to new ways for young writers to create their works and shape their incubatory talent. Websites such as Glypho, Ficlets and Portrayl use the interconnectedness of the Internet, as well as the interactive tools of Web 2.0, to create global communities where new authors can create, collaborate and comment on stories. So while the rise of the Internet is leading to the death of books, it’s also giving birth to a new generation of writers.