Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Yesterday, the San Francisco Weekly’s Nathaniel Eaton had an interview with neo-beat writer Alan Kaufman. Entitled “The Beat Goes On,” the interview was mainly about how Kaufman and others are trying to keep the beat spirit of the ‘50s and ‘60s alive in modern day San Francisco. And while I’m always glad to see the criminally underrated Richard Brautigan’s name in print (I hunted for his books all over Southern California as a teenager), Kaufman makes a few comments regarding the future of books which I think are pretty silly. A few weeks ago, in D.T. Max’s profile of Tom Staley (the curator of the Ransom literary archives at the University of Texas), Staley defended his decision to not digitize the library’s collection by saying that to do so would sacrifice some of the aesthetics of the physical item, namely the smell. Well, Kaufman goes even further than this. After saying that he doesn’t “believe writers are going to be content having their works published on the Internet,” Kaufman expands this idea by explaining that “I was looking through a book of mine from years ago and it had little pieces of food on it and I remembered the meal that I had eaten.” So I guess that, in addition to curling up in the bath with a book, if there’s enough food in the margin you can also treat yourself to a little snack (try doing that with an eBook).

All of this is in answer to the interviewer’s question, “Do you think writing’s in collapse?” Kaufman answers, “No. Writing will never be in collapse.” He then follows this up with a prediction: “What’s going to happen, I believe, and I’m very excited by this prospect, is that writers will form their own collectives, as was done in the Sixties [and publish their own books]. I don’t think I’m a dinosaur in thinking this way.”

Kaufman’s completely correct that writers will create their own collectives. But what will make these collectives different from what happened in the ‘60s is that — because of the global interconnectedness of the Web — these scenes will no longer have to be centered around one geographic location (or, in the case of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene, a couple of city blocks). Instead, writers from all over the globe will be able to meet and interact with other writers, trading ideas and swatches of prose and verse. What’s also different, I think, is that books will be the least interesting aspect of this; it will be about the exchange of ideas and the feeling of community (and, as Second Life has shown, virtual communities can feel — for many people — just as authentic as the real thing). As I wrote earlier in the week, blogs have now replaced zines. But the zine movement itself, at the time, was simply a new version of the mimeographed chapbook scene of the ‘70s. Technology always plays a part in edging forward artists, and the Internet is simply the latest iteration of this. The same way that San Francisco’s iconic City Lights bookstore was, as Kaufman reminds us, “the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States,” new websites and Internet communities will shatter the literary boundaries and rules that the beats similarly exploded fifty years ago.