Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Matthew Kirschenbaum, writing in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, had an interesting essay entitled “Hamlet.doc? Literature in a Digital Age.” The essay touches upon the fact that, even though most literature is consumed via physical products — i.e. printed books — most words are created digitally, with writers composing using computers and word processing programs. Kirschenbaum uses this idea to imagine what we could tell if perhaps Shakespeare had written his greatest play using a laptop instead of a quill: “We might be able to know, for example, the precise date on which he began composing Hamlet…indeed the precise minute and hour, time-stamped to the second. We would be able to know how long he had spent working on it, or at least how long the file containing the play had remained open on his desktop. We would very likely have access to multiple versions and states of the file, and if Shakespeare had ‘track changes’ turned on while he wrote, we would be able to follow the composition of a soliloquy keystroke by keystroke, each revision also date- and time-stamped to the second. We might discover the play had originally been called GreatDane.doc instead of Hamlet.doc.”

While this is of course just playful speculation (along these lines, I’d be more interested in what Shakespeare’s plays would have been like if the characters all had cell phones), it does look at a different aspect of the “print is dead” argument, namely that books of course start first with authors, and for most writers the “analog versus digital” debate has long been settled (with digital being the clear winner). As Kirschenbaum writes, “Today nearly all literature is ‘born digital’ in the sense that at some point in its composition, probably very early, the text is entered with a word processor, saved on a hard drive, and takes its place as part of a computer operating system. Often the text is also sent by e-mail to an editor, along with ancillary correspondence. Editors edit electronically, inserting suggestions and revisions and e-mailing the file back to the author to approve.” By the time a manuscript finally ends up in a printed format, the book is really an afterthought of the composition process (much the same way that Shakespeare’s First Folio was just a catalog of his stage work, a mere souvenir from the Globe).

Kirschenbaum also talks about the benefits that could accompany a world in which all writers compose digitally: “What if we could use machine-learning algorithms to sift through vast textual archives and draw our attention to a portion of a manuscript manifesting an especially rich and unusual pattern of activity, the multiple layers of revision captured in different versions of the file creating a three-dimensional portrait of the writing process? What if these revisions could in turn be correlated with the content of a Web site that someone in the author’s MySpace network had blogged?”

This is a great point, and it reminds me of the film The Mystery of Picasso, which featured Picasso painting on a sheet of glass that was filmed from the audience’s perspective (so that the screen looked like an Etch-a-Sketch with Picasso at the dials). As I watched the film, witnessing Picasso’s fevered creation, I remember being dumbstruck every time one of the painter’s forceful slashes of his paintbrush obliterated an earlier streak of paint, thereby changing — and in some cases, in my mind, ruining — the painting. I kept wanting to be able to get back to those earlier paintings that had existed during the process of creation, somehow hitting “undo” on Picasso’s canvas so that earlier versions of his painting would bubble to surface. Well, in some ways, digital collections of future writers’ works may allow us to do something similar. As Kirschenbaum sums up, “We may no longer have the equivalent of Shakespeare’s hard drive, but we do know that we wish we did, and it is therefore not too late — or too early — to begin taking steps to make sure we save the born-digital records of the literature of today.”

Last week I blogged on the recent survey about the decline of readership in America, a study that revealed one in four Americans didn’t read a book in the past year. What I found interesting was that some commentators tried to turn this depressing statistic on its head, saying that it meant that at least three out of four people did read a book. I understand the attempt to have an “accentuate the positive” mindset, but the fact that a quarter of our population didn’t even attempt to read a book in the last twelve months is indeed cause for major alarm.

A company who seems to be trying to reverse these trends is the cable channel BET, who recently produced — according to the LA Times — an “edgy video campaign promoting literacy and black pride.” The video is entitled “Read a Book,” and looks to me to be a cross between a Schoolhouse Rock segment and a 50 Cent video. The result is profane, catchy, and pretty humorous (and, I must add, not safe for work).

The video has incited a storm of protest, with some commentators on the BET website (as well as on Youtube, which is where I found the clip) either shocked by the video’s content or else amused by its satire. Greg Braxton, writing about the video last week in the LA Times in an article entitled “BET brouhaha,” writes that “Denys Cowan, senior vice president of animation for BET, said in an interview Thursday that he was ‘a little surprised’ that ‘Read a Book’ has elicited such a strong reaction. ‘We were doing it from the point of this being a fun, profound song,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know it would take on this life.’”

Whether or not the “Read a Book” video ever gets anyone to actually do so will remain to be seen, and whether or not the entire enterprise is in good taste is of course in the eye of the beholder, but at its very core this is yet another admission that large swaths of the American population are increasingly turning away from books and reading.

Mr. Magazine (AKA Samir Husni), in a recent blog entry written while preparing to debate his friend Bob Sacks at the upcoming Florida Magazine Association’s annual convention, declared that print is in fact not dead because of the fact that four recent fashion magazines recently had their biggest issues ever. For Husni, somehow, this is good news. As he posted to his blog upon seeing these four tomes sitting proudly on the newsstand, “I rubbed my eyes and took a second look. I asked myself how can this be true? I thought someone told me (actually a lot of someones) that print is dead. Well folks, guess what, print is not dead. Soon the prophets of doom and gloom will wake up from their nightmare.” No, I would say the fact that Vogue is growing in physical size while The New York Times is shrinking makes the nightmare not only true but that much more worse. Also, when the defenders of literacy and print start holding up copies of Harper’s Bazaar as a sign that printed matter is surviving, I can tell they’re really getting desperate.

Yesterday the AP reported on a new Associated Press-Ipsos Poll about American reading habits. The results were not good. For instance, the study showed that “one in four adults read no books at all in the past year.” While this is of course depressing in and of itself (four books in a year? I just read three during a 10-day vacation), what’s even worse is that this is part of an overall downward trend. According to the AP: “When the Gallup Poll asked in 2005 how many books people had at least started — a similar but not directly comparable question — the typical answer was five. That was down from 10 in 1999, but close to the 1990 response of six.” So while it’s pretty pathetic that a quarter of the American population didn’t read a book last year, what’s really sad is that — three or four years from now — someone who reads just one or two books a year will be instantly nicknamed “Shakespeare.” And a decade from now Bradbury’s world of Fahrenheit 451, where people didn’t care about books before they were banned, might actually arrive.

This mounting apathy is also felt in book sales. According to the AP, sales of books “have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way indefinitely. Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media, the unsteady economy and a well-established industry with limited opportunities for expansion.” Of course, statistics and trends like these go far beyond the “print is dead” debate, and have nothing to do with electronic reading versus traditional reading. Instead, these facts show that Americans are increasingly bypassing any kind of reading, choosing to do something else instead. Whether it’s watching a film in place of picking up a book (a construction worker is quoted in the AP story as saying “Fiction just doesn’t interest me. If I’m going to get a story, I’ll get a movie”), more and more people are bypassing a literary experience altogether. So, with conditions this dire, it’s ridiculous for booklovers or publishers to care about readers “curling up” with eBooks versus printed books; the real battle is to get present and future generations interested in words in the first place.

Elizabeth Olson, writing in The New York Times on Monday, had an article entitled “To Compete With E-Mail Greetings, Funny Cards Try to Be Topical,” which was about how greeting card companies are coming up with new products in order to attract Internet users. The reason for all of this is because — in an increasingly electronic world where more and more people communicate digitally via e-mail instead of physically via letters or greeting cards — people who in the past would have purchased a greeting card now send digital eCards instead. The digital eCards are often free and, in the eyes of many people, are much easier to use and personalize. And the impact of these digital consumers is now being felt by the greeting card companies. According to Olson, “American Greetings had a 10.6 percent dip last year over 2005 for sales of what it calls its everyday cards, which are mostly birthday cards and which make up 38 percent of total card sales.”

So while, in a publishing sense, people have been saying “print is dead” for years, it would seem — with so many people sending electronic greetings rather than hand-written greeting cards — that printing itself is similarly dying. Because why write by hand when you can type? True, as Olson points out in her article, the paper greeting card industry is still much bigger than the electronic version: “While the paper card market is declining, it is still five times as large as the e-card market, according to the Greeting Card Association, a trade group. Ninety percent of United States households still buy paper greeting cards, and the average household buys 30 a year, the association said.” But, the same as with eBooks and electronic reading, the trend is what’s ultimately important. From music to books and now even greeting cards, when it comes to the choice between a physical or a digital experience, consumer behavior is changing.

I’ll be on vacation for the next ten days or so, and will not be able to write new posts or update my blog while I’m away.

I’ll be back with new content and posts the week of the 20th.

Best,

Jeff

Writing in The Washington Post over the weekend, Mike Musgrove had a story entitled “Tote a Small Library to the Beach.” The article is ostensibly tied to the whole phenomenon of “summer reading” (which is strange since it’s almost mid-August, and Musgrove says he’s been using the Sony device all year), with the author using the warm weather as an excuse to review Sony’s eReader which came out last Fall.

Musgrove is mostly positive about the device, mentioning that it’s a good experience for reading and downloading books, as well as being handy for traveling: “Instead of carrying just one book on the plane you can now lug about 80, stashed in the Reader’s memory.” These are the kinds of things that booklovers never seem to mention; in all of the arguments about book being the “perfect” technology, it’s never talked about how — if you want to carry around three or four books at a time — you’d better have a big backpack and a strong back.

Musgrove then describes the world of eBooks, writing that “the ‘e-publishing’ revolution has supposedly been on the way for a decade, but it’s never quite hit the mainstream. This is a market that still exists in an uncertain area, embraced mostly by a small audience of early adopters — sort of like the MP3 player market before Apple entered the scene with the iPod.” Putting all of this in context. Musgrove decides that the Sony eReader is more a step in the overall digital book evolution, rather than a revolution: “All in all, I’d say the publishing industry’s digital revolution has turned a page here, but we’re still early in the first chapter.” I can’t wait to see how it ends.

Over the weekend USA Today carried an AP story by Josh Funk entitled “Cassettes linger long after expected demise.” The story talked about how, even though it’s been decades since they were seen as cutting-edge technology, cassettes not only continue to exist but in some cases are thriving (albeit on a modest scale). “The first obituaries for cassette tapes appeared more than 20 years ago when CDs hit the market,” writes Funk. “Sales of music tapes plummeted from 442 million in 1990 to about 700,000 last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.”

So even though the numbers are down, cassettes are still not out, and many people still buy them. In fact, just last weekend I was in a Barnes and Noble when I heard someone ask for audiobooks on cassette tape. (The bookstore had them, but they were not located in the general audiobook section, which featured titles only on CD). So while high-profile events like the debut of the iPhone may make it seem like everyone is a techophile yearning for the latest and greatest gadget, the truth is that many people just want something easy to use and that they’re already comfortable with (not to mention that they already own). Daryl Chapelle, general manager of cassette manufacturer Lenco-PMC Inc., is quoted in the story as saying, “The truth is new technology does not replace old technology for years.”

Statements like these, and the fact that cassettes are still around even though they have been considered “dead” for a long time, should be some kind a salve to bibliophiles and booklovers in terms of the “print is dead” debate. Because even though more and more people will read electronically over the coming years, leading to a reduction in the production and consumption of books, books themselves will never be extinct. The fear exists that any kind of substantial adoption of eBooks or reading on digital devices will lead to either books becoming extinct or even, in the more far-fetched scenarios, banned (Fahrenheit 451 anyone?). Instead, books will continue to exist, but just in much smaller numbers than they exist now. The same way that cassettes have weathered the threat of CDs, and now MP3s, books will continue to stick around for a long time. Of course, they’ll be seen as increasingly antique and anachronistic, but then again people are already beginning to look at them in that way.

Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing earlier this week blogged about Tank Books, a UK company that is “launching a series of books designed to mimic cigarette packs — the same size, packaged in flip-top cartons with silver foil wrapping and sealed in cellophane.” They’re launching the series with about a dozen titles, all of them classics. Their aim with the packaging is to pay homage to the “familiar” and “iconic” form of the cigarette pack (an item of resentment and horror, I’d also imagine, to people who have struggled to quit), not to mention they cheekily state that by equating reading with smoking they will get people addicted to literature. As the website says, “Try one and you’ll be hooked.“

While the Tank Books are of course a bit of a stunt, it does show that novels can be as silky and sinewy as mercury, and that no matter what vessel text is poured into — be it a pack of cigarettes or an iPhone — the words will always be the words and a novel is always a novel, even when the pages are smaller than usual or disappear completely. And frankly, if gimmicks like these get people to read Hemingway and Kakfa, then it’s all right by me. (Although, really, Celine’s Death on the Installment Plan makes the most sense to be transformed into a box of cigarettes.) Besides, if nothing else, reading these will give people something to do with their hands at parties.

In today’s New York Times, Janice Raspen has an article entitled “Your Cheatin’ Listenin’ Ways,” which is about the growing controversy surrounding the fact that some people in book clubs listen to the audiobook of the the chosen selection instead of reading a printed book. Raspen reports that many book club members consider listening to an audio book as “cheating,” or “like watching the movie instead of reading the book.” (At the thought of all these uptight book club members, I couldn’t help but think of that blonde in the book club scene in Little Children.) The story reports numerous incidents where book club members were made to feel ashamed, or were belittled, for listening to an audiobook instead of reading “the real thing.” As Raspen writes of this gaping divide, “the stigma persists that listening to books is Reading Lite.” To that I would say No, Danielle Steel is Reading Lite; everything else is just plain reading.

The entire argument is pretty ridiculous because literature got its start as an oral/aural form; does that mean that reading The Iliad is cheating? That the only way to experience Homer’s epic poem is to have some old Greek come over and recite it? The “reading lite” argument also points out the usual and inherent snobbery that surrounds print books. As if reading a book on a noisy, crowded subway — where there’s a constant assault on the senses — is just plain better than listening to an audiobook narrator whisper into your ear through noise-canceling headphones in a darkened room. I mean, going back to poetry, poems on the page used to be considered shackled; people ventured out to coffee bars and universities to hear it read aloud. And now people are being given a hard time for listening to someone read a novel?

The only thing that’s cheating when it comes to reading or listening to books is to not do either and say you have. Of course, the biggest sin of all is to ignore literary content all together, instead spending time doing nothing but watching soap operas and game shows. But to quibble between audiobooks or print books (the same way, in the “print is dead” debate, people quibble over print books or electronic books) is tremendously silly and misses the point. We want people to interact with and absorb literary content; why care about how it’s consumed? It reminds me of the line in a e.e. cummings poem that says that anyone “who pays attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.” So why worry about the syntax of formats? Why not just enjoy the experience no matter how it’s delivered? Life is too short to give people in book clubs a hard time; they should be congratulated for wanting to experience a book at all.