Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

New York Times art director Steven Heller, on the design blog A Brief Message, had a posting on Tuesday entitled “An Inconvenient Truth?” The question that Heller’s asking is whether or not the “inconvenient truth” that print may be dead is actually true. As he skeptically states in his opening sentence, “I keep hearing from designers that print is dying.” (Note that Heller himself doesn’t necessarily think it’s dying; it’s just something he’s heard on the grapevine.) Heller then relates a recent incident that pertains to the subject: a young student has come to show him his thesis “printed out on clean, white paper.” The student had just come from a meeting with another well-known designer who had told him to forget about print; that it was dead and that “he should find an alternate means to reach the largest number of people.”

The confused young student then asks Heller for his thoughts. Heller responds Socratically, asking a question instead of giving an answer. “I asked how he reads the newspaper,” writes Heller. “The answer: ‘On the Internet.’” Heller, at first, chalks up the youth’s ditching of print to his age, thinking, “Okay, he’s under 30.” But then Heller remembers that “the other night I asked two friends, both over 60, the same question. The answer was the same.” Which makes me think that, if even designers, many of whom — as Cory Doctorow says — are “pervy” for paper, are eschewing printed products for the Internet, then I’d say that Heller can probably remove his question mark and declare that it’s true that print is dead. And what’s more important, there doesn’t need to be anything “inconvenient” about this truth.

Because the same way that previous generations played with different physical media — from Calder’s mobiles to Matisse’s cut-outs and Rauschenberg’s combines — new generations of artists and designers are using computers and programs like Flash in order to express themselves. In fact, what used to take a myriad of raw materials and a printing press or a silk screen, not to mention an artist’s spacious studio, now can take place within the microchips of a laptop. While select artists and artisans will continue to work with paper and other printed media, more and more artists and designers will choose electronic creation as well as consumption. And today’s thesis “printed out on clean, white paper” is tomorrow’s networked website, full of hyperlinks and comments, easy to share and to access.