Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

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?