Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Gary Kamiya had an essay earlier this week on Salon entitled “Let us now praise editors,” in which he talks about the idea of editing in an Internet age. And while everyone has of course heard of editors — including the rare few who have themselves become literary stars, such as Maxwell Perkins and Gary Fisketjon — most people aren’t quite sure exactly what an editor does. As Kamiya writes, “It’s not an easy question to answer. Editors are craftsmen, ghosts, psychiatrists, bullies, sparring partners, experts, enablers, ignoramuses, translators, writers, goalies, friends, foremen, wimps, ditch diggers, mind readers, coaches, bomb throwers, muses and spittoons — sometimes all while working on the same piece.”

Having been through the editing process myself many times (including recently on Print is Dead), I can say that it’s almost never an enjoyable process but I’m always much better for it in the end. In that regard, it’s kind of like going to the dentist. You don’t want to go, but later you’re glad you did. Wait, no; that’s too passive. At the dentist you just sit there and endure the drill; good editing is more interactive than that (but sometimes not much more pleasurable). It’s more like going to boot camp, or to the gym with a stern personal trainer. Because a really good editor is barking at you to find the real story, to dig deeper, to try harder, to not repeat yourself and say something new. And it’s a tough thing to, when you think you’ve painted a masterpiece, go back and get out the brushes yet again.

In terms of the actual words, and how an editor touches and shapes them, years ago a writer I tremendously respect said to me some wise words about editing. Using the metaphor of pruning a tree, he said there were two kinds of editors: one that makes small trims around the entire tree, plucking off various leaves; while another kind of editor looks over the tree with a saw and just cuts off a entire branch here or there. I think that’s a great analogy, and I’ve thought of it often over the years.

But now that the Internet has arrived, with everyone living digital lives that are awash in online content, Kamiya and others see the art of editing as increasingly becoming a lost art: “The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It’s about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It’s a handmade art, a craft. You don’t learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.” And yet while I wouldn’t compare editors — for all that they do — to Stradivarius, I agree with Kamiya’s overall point.

In our digital age, editors will be needed more than ever. The instantaneous communication afforded by e-mail, texting and, well, instant messaging, means that most people lead — in a typographical way — unedited lives. Indeed, most text messages are a combination of stream of consciousness mixed with telegram-speak, where three-letter combinations stand in not only for words (LOL, WTF, OMG) but also emotions (why write a sentence when an emoticon can speak for you?). So not only do most people not edit their words, but they don’t even bother to type them out. And this Internet short-hand is now everywhere; it’s even become semi-acceptable in business e-mails to forgo punctuation and use large amounts of abbreviation. We can only imagine — with dread — how long it will be before the novelist’s trade is invaded with the language of LOLCats. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” will likely segue to something like IZ WRITING UR BUK.

Which is all to say that, in a digital future where a lot of tools are available to “prosumers” (look it up) that give them some of the powers once solely in the hands of publishers — the ability to reach a mass audience, print and design books — publishers and editors will still be needed. Perhaps now more than ever.

Earlier in the week Ben Vershbow from the Future of the Book Institute blogged about LiveInk, a company that provides “an alternative approach to presenting texts in screen environments, arranging them in series of cascading phrases to increase readability.” What LiveInk does is offer software that interprets/translates prose into short bursts of information that is then displayed on a screen in a staggered layout. The reason for this is “to promote the dynamic perception of word groups in a sentence, and to augment comprehension with multidimensional syntactic cueing patterns.” What this means to the reader is that blocks of words and clusters of sentences — all of which used to form paragraphs — become instead splintered into idea-trees that are more fractal than formal (the screenshot above is the first couple of lines of Moby Dick, as presented by the LiveInk technology).

I think this is a really great application, and would be a boon to not only adoption of electronic reading on small screens, but it would also boost comprehension of electronic reading (not to mention reading in general). Of course, since LiveInk is in essence distilling a writer’s words into a new form, erasing in the process the original construction, this will probably rub many authors and critics the wrong way. And yet, while certain writers indeed sculpt the shape of their paragraphs and sentences with the same care as an artist who works in marble or clay — not to mention that concrete poets use precise word placement on a page as not only an aesthetic element but also to convey something of the nature of what they’re writing about — for most writers paragraph and sentence construction is simply a means to an end; the size or length of these literary constructs mean no more to them than the shade or texture of the page they’re printed on.

In fact, I think LiveInk ends up doing something really amazing to prose; it turns it into poetry. Much of the writing in Thomas Wolfe’s novels was so poetic in rhythm and spirit that later editors boiled down passages of his books into poems, breaking down his long, unruly sentences into something new. LiveInk’s algorithm does something similar, and does it in a much easier way. Hidden in a lot of prose is the germ of poetry, the same way that a cynic could say that poetry is just prose with more line breaks. For instance, imagine the much anthologized poem “This is Just to Say” rendered in reverse LiveInk technology (one that turns poetry into prose); it’d come out like this: “I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold.” Instead, I can only imagine what the writing of Proust, Fitzgerald, Updike and Capote would look like rendered in the LiveInk technology. Where William Carlos Williams had the wind sucked out of him, these writers of lyrical prose would shine in new and unexpected ways.

And anyway, this already happens — to a degree — in audio books, where readers listen to a flow of words and never see the form or construction the writer used in his initial composition. In this case the actor reading the words — based on the clues found in the punctuation — performs his own algorithm in his head in terms of inserting pauses and dramatic effects. LiveInk will simply do the same thing, but utilizing technology to do so. And I think, if adapted, it could be a really wonderful thing that would end up promoting literature, and not hurting it. As Joseph Brodsky once said in terms of poetry, “The rhyme is smarter than the poet.” Maybe writers fear LiveInk’s algorithim will be smarter than them. But as long as someone is reading their words, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

The Wall Street Journal last week had a story by Emily Steel entitled “Newspapers’ Ad Sales Show Accelerating Drop.” The article is pretty much the usual newspapers-are-in-trouble story, with Steel writing that “The newspaper industry has been suffering from slow growth for years, of course, after decades of declining readership. In the past couple of years, though, competition from the Internet — big portals as well as free-classified Web sites such as Craigslist — and other media has transformed anemic growth into slipping revenue.” A chart accompanying the story (pictured above) shows the “inky depths” that newspaper revenue has sunk to. (While the chart’s information is relevant and informative, I also really love the phrase “Inky depths”; it could be a great band name or, at the very least, a White Stripes record).

Steel goes on to say that “publishers are putting initiatives in place to generate a larger portion of ad dollars through the Web. Still, analysts say that growth in Web revenue is beginning to slow and isn’t enough to offset the decline in print.” Which is another way of saying that the newspaper industry, after resisting change for so long — and trying desperately to hang onto both its product and its audience — is now trying to change themselves and their business model. As Steel writes, “The decline, which has sent newspaper stocks into a tailspin, has prompted restructuring and consolidation.” However, it just might be too little, too late. Recent downward trends don’t show any sign of reversing themselves, and new consumer traits — such as going to Craiglist instead of the Classified section — are hardening into habit. The same way that music turned the digital corner, never to go back, newspapers are now heading in a similar direction.

Paul La Monica, writing on the CNNMoney site last week had an article entitled “Disney tries to save the CD,” which was about Disney’s recent debut of a new compact disc format which they’re wishing upon a falling star will reverse the current downward trend of CD sales. As La Monica puts it, “The once mighty compact disc is slowly but surely on its way toward joining the cassette, 8-track and vinyl LP on top of the music format scrap heap.” And even those in the industry realize this; last year UK EMI chairman Alan Levy declared that “the CD is dead.” But now Disney’s trying to bring it back to life. How? By introducing yet another CD format. Named CDVU+ (“pronounced CD view plus,” not that I think consumers will really be asking for it), Disney’s Hollywood records is debuting the new disc on an upcoming CD from boy-band The Jonas Brothers. But what’s the difference between the CDVU+ and regular CDs? According to La Monica, “The CD will launch a digital magazine that features loads of exclusive content. Disney worked with Zinio, a company that helps magazine and book publishers deliver content online, to launch this service. The CDVU+ will also allow Jonas Brothers fans to check out videos and photos, get song lyrics and create posters.” What’s really silly about this is that fans of bands and music already have the capacity to “check out videos and photos, get song lyrics and create posters”; it’s called the Internet.

Of course, what Disney’s probably going to do is make a lot of the content made available on the CDVU+ exclusive, so you have to buy the disc to experience it, which is probably the dumbest thing they could do. Why lock a video or some song lyrics onto a proprietary format CD when you could put it on YouTube or your own website and have nearly anyone in the world discover your band (and brand)? In terms of new bands and music, people will probably buy CDVU+ discs if they like the band and that’s all that’s available to them. But in those cases, they won’t be choosing CDVU+ per se, they’ll be choosing the music itself. For instance, I plan on buying the new Flaming Lips concert movie At The Zoo - The Legendary Concert In Oklahoma City, which is being released in the new CD MVI format (which is kind of a cross between a CD and DVD). But the only reason I’m buying it is because I want the content. Faced with another choice in terms of something less expensive or that I was more technically comfortable with, I’d take it. So I think that the CDVU+ will be a short term novelty, not unlike the Dual Disc which is a CD on one side and a DVD on the other side, or the Super Audio CD (SACD) which is basically the same thing. Because the more formats and standards that exist the more complicated it’s going to be for consumers, who increasingly face of all of these choices with wariness. It reminds me of the line in a Charles Bukowski poem about Van Gogh, where he writes,”Van, whores don’t want ears, they want money.” The music business should — by now — realize that consumers don’t want new formats of CDs, they want music.

Earlier in the week the Broadcast & Cable website had an article by Marisa Guthrie entitled “Survey Says: More People Watch TV Online,” which reported on a recent survey completed by The Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing. The survey found that “More consumers are accessing television and movies online. An estimated 81 million of the 129 million people who access the Internet via a broadband connection watched TV or movies online, according to a new study from Nielsen.” The good news, for the television networks, is that it seems “broadband viewing does not replace traditional television viewing.” This means that new viewers are found viewers; they are new viewers in addition to the regular viewers. The top network, in online terms, was ABC, which makes sense since they’ve had a really smart online strategy (whereas both NBC and CBS have made missteps, such as suing YouTube).

In addition, “The study also posits (rather obviously) that better navigation interfaces and increased availability of popular television series online will drive even more consumers to broadband.” In terms of the “print is dead” debate, this could mean that — if/when publishers make more of their works available electronically — it won’t cannibalize their existing sales, but will instead add to them.

Of course, this kind of thinking usually just leads people to say that books are different; that books are, well, books. And because of their print-based nature (as if words were invented to fill pages instead of it being the other way around), the content of books must remain shackled to the page. I think this is completely incorrect. Words — like water — can cover any surface, be poured into any vessel, and be consumed in a variety of ways. After all, water can also be liquid, ice or steam; why can’t text similarly shift shape and take on new forms? And, more importantly, because people have less and less time these days for entertainment, in addition to the fact that there are more and more options in terms of the ways people can spend their time (Youtube, Myspace, iPods, Wii, etc.), if we want people to read words and ideas and stories, we’re going to have to give them more choices than just books.

The same way that TV networks are branching out to the Web in order to find new consumers, and please existing ones, publishing will have to follow suit. But many people in publishing, from critics to authors, are resisting this change. Which reminds me of that Saturday Night Live sketch from the ’70s of the diner that sold nothing but cheeseburgers and chips (along with Coke, “No Pepsi”). What made that skit funny was that the guys who worked there were so rigid and clueless. People could only order the three things on the menu, and if you tried to get anything else they’d get annoyed and throw you out. Moreover, they couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t satisfied with just cheeseburgers, chips, and Coke. A lot of the literary establishment is much the same way: ask for words in anything other than a book, and you get either a blank stare or a hostile response. In terms of the restaurant in the skit, people would often walk out and go to another restaurant. In terms of books, people might just pass them over for something else entirely.

Jon Fine, writing on the Business Week website in an essay entitled “When Do You Stop The Presses?” asks a hypothetical question: “Which major American newspaper should be the first to throw up its hands and stop publishing a print product?” (I assume the question is hypothetical; who knows, maybe somebody asked him.) His question arises from the current state of the newspaper industry, which has taken numerous hits due to the Internet. Writes Fine: “This could be the worst year for newspapers since the Great Depression. The double-digit revenue declines long forecast by doomsters have arrived. While nearly all the major papers still post profits, albeit smaller than before, a few prominent ones are losing boatloads.”

Because of this, Fine thinks that enough is enough and — with no upward trend in sight — at least a couple of major American newspapers (“not today, but within the next 18 or 24 months”) should cease printing a physical edition. His prime candidate for printhanasia? The San Francisco Chronicle. Why? Fine thinks that Chronicle’s website, sfgate.com, would be better served if it didn’t have the print counterpart. “With [an] unassailable market position, excellent editorial, and massive traffic—[the website] will be worth more as a solo digital play than attached to a print newspaper.”

Of course, in the magazine world, many media companies already have killed the magazine but kept the website. (However, last week Jane Magazine — aimed at young women — was killed all together, both the print edition and the website.) But this model, in place for the past few years in terms of magazines and some smaller publications, may now be spreading to the world of newspapers. Such moves would prove that, in the “print is dead” debate, printers have the most to fear. After all, Fine and others aren’t saying that newspapers, magazines or books should go away. Instead, what’s happening is that the physical products which are too costly to produce, and some times difficult for people to obtain, should be killed off in favor of less expensive, more interactive websites.

The New York Times, along with a few other places, is reporting that the new, and last, Harry Potter novel is already beginning to surface on the Web. Writes Motoko Rich in yesterday’s Times, “Photos of what appeared to be every page of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the breathlessly awaited seventh and final installment in the wildly popular series by J.K. Rowling, were circulating around the Web today, potentially upsetting the most elaborate marketing machine ever mobilized for a book.” And this is just the beginning; right now you have lo-fi photographs of pages on Photobucket. By Sunday the entire text will be online thanks to the efforts of a very motivated group of readers who want to read and share the book electronically and, because there’s no official eBooks version, they have to create their own. (The same way they’ve done in the past with the other books.)

True, this is one of the most anticipated books of all time, but you don’t see people going out and recording their own audio editions, or trying to steal the typesetting files and pressing their own books. That’s because the Potter book will indeed be made available via print and audio. But because of Rowling’s obstinate refusal to have any of the Potter books produced digitally, she’s practically egging on hackers and would-be pirates, daring them to make eBooks out of her pBooks. She does all of this because she’s a fervent lover of books, but these days it’s getting impossible to be a lover of books but be against piracy, since this is all about the “attention economy.” Because if people want to read this book electronically, they’re going to do so; the only thing Rowling is doing by restricting access to eBooks — in what I feel is a misguided paean to Gutenberg — is making sure that all digital reading of her book will be done illegally. Crime may be a disease, but in this instance an official, Scholastic-sanctioned eBook would be the cure.

Among all of the recent Harry-Potter-isn’t–leading-to-more-reading stories, Heidi Benson of the San Francisco Chronicle had one over the weekend entitled “Kids reading fewer books despite Harry Potter hoopla.” Benson leads off with the typical kind of stuff, referring to the upcoming NEA study which will show that kids aren’t reading after Harry: “Despite what has been dubbed the ‘Harry Potter Effect’ — which credits J.K. Rowling’s blockbuster book series with turning Game Boy addicts into lifelong readers — reading is in serious decline among teens nationwide, according to a forthcoming federal study.” She also talks to NEA chairman Dana Gioia, who says that “The power of the electronic, commercial entertainment media seems to be taking teenagers away from reading.”

This is interesting because, in the 2004 NEA report, Reading at Risk, Gioia and the NEA was more circumspect in where the readers were actually going. At that time, the NEA concluded that “Literature [in 2004] competes with an enormous array of electronic media. While no single activity is responsible for the decline of reading, the cumulative presence and availability of these alternatives have increasingly drawn Americans away from reading.” Three years after the last study, it seems that Gioia is drawing a clear line between the rise of the Internet and the decline of reading.

What’s also interesting is what Stanford education professor Michael Kamil has to say on the subject of kids spending their time online: “You have to be careful when you say kids are reading less. It doesn’t mean they are incapable of reading. It means they choose to do other things instead.” This is of course key, and should not be undervalued. Because while a lot of time online is spent being passive, watching stuff on Youtube, etc. much more of it is spent interactively, reading and contributing to blogs and social networking sites, discovering and engaging all kinds of content.

Kamil is also the chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, described by Benson as “a group charged with updating the way reading is judged by the federal government.” The Board has defined three different contexts of reading: reading for literary experience, reading for information, and reading to perform a task. According to Benson’s article, “Kamil believes that ‘reading for literary experience’ has been overemphasized and that today ‘reading for information’ is the most crucial skill.” So just because kids won’t be picking up those paperbacks of the “great classics” that nourished previous generations, all hope is not lost. However, in terms of publishers who have content they would like new generations to buy and consume, these new habits will have to be kept in mind. And because of this, maybe books of the future won’t look very much like books as they look today; maybe they’ll be more like blogs or videogames. A horrible thought for previous generations, I’m sure, but then again they’re not the ones the NEA is focusing on or worrying about. Besides, they’ll be able to keep their books. Meanwhile, we need to create a new format and reading experience for the kids who are already on their way to forgetting books.

Following up on last week’s post about how the upcoming NEA study will show — despite everyone being, er, wild about Harry Potter — that kids aren’t reading more, The New York Times today reports that apathy in terms of teen reading isn’t restricted to just books. Teenagers aren’t reading newspapers, either. Juston Jones, in a story entitled “Young Adults Are Giving Newspapers Scant Notice,” writes that “With the United States military fighting a protracted war in Iraq and a wide-open presidential campaign already making headlines daily, Americans of all ages are interested in current affairs and are consuming news like never before, right? Not so, especially not teenagers and young adults, according to a report released last week…”

The report, entitled “Young People and News” (click here for a PDF) was “based on a national sample of 1,800 Americans that included teenagers, young adults aged 18 to 30 and older adults.” What the study found (among other things) was that “only 16 percent of the young adults surveyed aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did. That compared with 35 percent of adults over 30. Furthermore, despite the popular belief that young people are flocking to the Internet, the survey found that teenagers and young adults were twice as likely to get daily news from television than from the Web.”

Of course, the fact that teens get their news from TV doesn’t mean they’re not flocking to the Web; it’s now the place where they spend most of their time. It shows that — while they’re online — news is not something they care about or seek out. Instead, they’re spending hours upon hours on MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. Towards the end of the article, Thomas Patterson, “a professor of government and the press at Harvard who conducted the survey” says “My sense is that, like it or not, the future of news is going to be in the electronic media, but we don’t really know what that form is going to look like.” So if the future of news is going to be in the “electronic media,” I think that many other areas of publishing — including magazines and books — will be similarly digital. And if it’s not, we just might lose an entire generation of readers.

The Guardian reported earlier this week that the magazine The Economist has just announced that “From this week listeners will be able to scroll through the Economist and download audio versions of articles by section or in its entirety.” I think this is a thoroughly great idea; content is content, and whether or not it’s listened to or read, what’s important (especially in journalism) are the words. It doesn’t matter if the words are ingested via the eyes or the ears (or the fingertips, for anyone reading Braille); the only thing that matters is that someone is consuming them.

But why are they doing this? According to the Guardian: “The idea of giving Economist readers news and features to digest while they are on the move follows a move by all the major newspapers into podcasts, quasi-radio programmes that can be downloaded to a computer and transferred to a player.” What’s not explicitly said, and yet is implied (in terms of the Economist reader being “on the move”) is that a person is probably going to do both: read some stories in paper form, while listening to others as an MP3. In fact, a subscriber may start reading a story in the magazine over breakfast, get halfway through it, and then listen to the rest of it while they’re commuting to work. That situation would be a perfect example of “the attention economy” (or, in this case, “the attention Economist”). Because the battle The Economist is facing is not the facile battle of the formats (printed paper versus electronic delivery), but rather it’s getting people interested in their content in the first place; getting people to subscribe to and read their magazine.

Books, in a lo-fi way, already exist like this since people can listen to an audio book or read the print book. Of course, the selection in terms of audio books is not nearly the same as it is for print books, and most people choose one or the other: print book or audio. But what if they were given both, for one price, and they could then switch back and forth as they wanted, when they had time and when the situation called for it? For instance, you read the print book in bed, but listen to the audio book while you’re working out. During his keynote speech at last month’s O’Reilly TOC conference, Chris Anderson suggested that the buyer of his next book might receive a code that would allow him or her to a free MP3 download of the audio book. To stretch this concept a bit, if a book was also made available electronically it would be a third way to consume the content: read a few pages of the book, listen to the audio version a little, and then read the electronic one for a while. In chapter three of Ulysses a character says “Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh?” So why not read seven pages a day in two or three different formats?