Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Annalee Newitz had an essay last week in the San Francisco Bay Guardian entitled “The future of paper.” Newitz begins her essay by painting what many in journalism and publishing see as a doomsday scenario: “Twenty years from now, paper will no longer be a tool for mass communication. Instead it will be a substance akin to plastic, a mere fabricated building material with industrial and consumer applications.” But while Newitz doesn’t think this will come to pass, she acknowledges that “Print communication is dying out, and with it goes the paper industry. Over the past few months, I’ve witnessed the two biggest daily papers in my area, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, announce budget cuts that will slash their staffs by one-quarter.” Newitz then charts her own evolution through words in the past couple of years, showing how she has segued from a physical to virtual product: “I’ve gone from a print zine to an online zine to a weekly newspaper to print magazines to running a blog.”

Finally, though, Newitz captures a slice of the current situation perfectly, summing up certain communities and companies who are unreasoningly behind the drive to save paper instead of writers: “I live in a world where corporations care more about the future of paper than the futures of people who have made their living turning paper into a massive network of vital, important communications. This is not how technological change should work. You cannot discard a person the way you discard a market niche.” Newitz here is paraphrasing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman: “You can’t eat an orange and then throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit!” God help writers when they start getting compared to Loman, the starry-eyed dreamer whose life ended in tragedy because he was too stubborn to give up his dream. But in terms of an industry in which many refuse to concede that big changes are around the corner, many will suffer a similar fate, with the heavy bags that Willy carries into the next life stuffed with the manual typewriter and printed books that they’re unwilling to give up.