Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

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.