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.”