Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

A few weeks ago I read an essay on the Poynter Institute’s website by Roy Peter Clark entitled “Your Duty to Read the Paper.” Clark’s essay is basically a misdirected manifesto wherein he pledges to read newspapers everyday, and tries to rally others around the same idea. His argument is filled with all kinds of defensive declarations, such as “The future of journalism, not just newspapers, depends upon such loyalty [to read newspapers everyday]. And now I pose this challenge to you: It is your duty as a journalist and a citizen to read the newspaper — emphasis on paper, not pixels.”

This is a completely ridiculous notion. The future of journalism depends first and foremost on meeting the needs of readers. After this comes the need for better business models and for newsgathering organizations to embrace change and find a way to coexist with our digital age. But Clark’s blinded by the worthiness of his profession’s glorious past, writing that, “I owe it to hard-working journalists everywhere — and to the future of journalism — to read them. It’s no longer a choice. It’s a duty.” He ends his essay by saying, “So join me, even you young whipper-snappers. Read the paper. Hold it in your hand. Take it to the john. Just read it.”

This is completely the wrong approach to take. I mean, to force print down people’s throats as if it’s a vegetable they don’t want to eat is just about the worst strategy I’ve ever heard of. (Believe me, when I was a kid I hated lima beans, and my mom insisted I eat them; I dutifully shoved them down my prepubescent gullet, but as an adult I never touch them). So to try and guilt people to read print implies that to do so is a sacrifice; worse, that’s it’s a kind of punishment. It turns reading newspapers into a kind of penance for a digital life, a modern-day flogging in the form of papercuts and inky fingerprints.

Just because something’s on paper doesn’t make it divine; it doesn’t even make it good. But Clark’s just interested in cozying up with newspapers in his breakfast nook, feeling all warm and sanctimonious. Meanwhile, I’ll be reading The New York Times on my laptop, and doing just fine.

The third installment of the Print is Dead podcast, as part of the book excerpt site, has just been delivered. The podcast features me reading the chapter “eBooks and the Revolution That Didn’t Happen” from the second section of the book, “Totally Wired.”

Here’s a snippet of the chapter:

From the very beginning eBooks faced a steep battle in terms of generating and sustaining consumer interest. They were, after all, a whole new way of doing something that people had been doing fine for five centuries. Everyone learns how to read with physical books, and books have been a constant in society ever since. eBooks in the late 1990s were then the answer to a question no one was yet asking.

You can read the complete chapter here.

Subsribe to the podcast via iTunes, or use the XML feed.

Also, you can listen to the excerpt directly below:

Or else, download the MP3 here.

In order to create a kind of theme song for Print is Dead, yesterday I took a few snippets of dialogue from Ghostbusters, Time Bandits and 24 Party People, and dropped them into Garageband on my laptop. I then put the samples behind some drum and keyboard loops and, after a few hours of tweaking, came up with the song “Print is Dead.”

You can listen to the song using the audio player below, or else you can download an MP3 here.

Give a listen…

Farhad Manjoo, writing a column on the Machinist section of Salon, has an essay today entitled “Why I miss the dead-tree newspaper.” In the essay Manjoo laments the fact that, even though he realizes digital reading is the wave of the future and he has willingly given up his subscription to the daily edition of The New York Times, it’s just not the same. Manjoo writes, “Though I will never go back [to newsprint], more and more, these days, I find myself longing for the paper and the unique, perhaps irreplaceable role it played in shaping how I understood the news of the day.”

Manjoo goes on, stuffing his “paean to an antiquated technology” with a number of examples and reasons why he continues to long for newsprint in a digital world. And while I don’t agree with all of Manjoo’s reasons of why he misses print (for instance, he states that “The newspaper, first and chiefly, is easy to skim”; I myself find locating stories in a newspaper is like rifling through a dictionary to find a word), I certainly see his overall point.

Print is indeed a really great thing. People have produced and consumed it for centuries. In fact, nobody said a transition from print to digital would be easy. Therefore Manjoo’s reaction is natural and good. People love newsprint the same way they love books and magazines. But the fact that people will and do miss print has nothing to do with the efficacy of digital reading (not to mention to the inevitability of digital reading). It also doesn’t mean people are going to go down with the ship, and cling to their “antiquated technology” just because they can’t stand to live life without it.

In the end, Manjoo comes to terms with his loss, reflecting that digital reading is at the dawn of its evolution while newsprint is receding into the sunset: “The online newspaper is an infant; in time designers and engineers will surely find a way to give us a perfectly skimmable electronic broadsheet. Until then, there’s a lot I’ll miss — and mourn.” So not only is Manjoo stating that print is dead, but he’s been to the funeral and is now getting on with his (electronic) life.

The second installment of the Print is Dead podcast, as part of the book excerpt site, has just been delivered. The podcast features me reading the chapter “Us and Them” from the first section of the book, “Stop the Presses.”

Here’s a snippet of the chapter:

Not even the sleekest futurist who believes that one day all our food will be eaten in pill form and we will soon commute via buzzing hovercraft thinks that books should or ever will be completely banned or eradicated. Instead, what the proponents of digital reading are advocating is that literary content and text adapt to our increasingly electronic future and lifestyles. And, if it doesn’t, then people won’t only turn away from books but they’ll also turn away from the stories and ideas found inside books

You can read the complete chapter here.

Subsribe to the podcast via iTunes, or use the XML feed.

Also, you can listen to the excerpt directly below:

Or else, download the MP3 here.

Earlier in the week it was announced that seminal British hard rock group Led Zeppelin’s back catalog will soon be available digitally. The band’s eight records (including the one with the old guy carrying the bale of wheat on his back that EVERYBODY growing up in the ‘70s owned, but didn’t quite know what to call), plus other material, will be available digitally by Mid-November. And not only will the songs turn up in the usual places, like iTunes, but through a deal with Verizon Wireless there will also be Led Zeppelin ringtones and other mobile-friendly downloads (so get ready to hear those opening chords to “Stairway to Heaven” even more often).

Of course, this coincides with Led Zeppelin’s recent reunion and their decision to play their first shows in over twenty-five years. And what’s amazing is everything that’s happened since Led Zeppelin broke up back in 1980. Music, in 1980, usually meant vinyl if not an eight track cassette (good for listening to in your car), not to mention cassette tapes (good to use in a Walkman, which debuted in 1979). In ‘80, the personal computer was just getting off the ground and CDs wouldn’t make an appearance for another couple of years.

But now, upon Led Zeppelin’s return, the musical landscape has almost entirely changed. People no longer buy records or tapes and, increasingly, they don’t even buy CDs. Instead, people buy their music in a way that renders the music more or less invisible; they download songs in the form of MP3s.

And of course, while all of that has been happening in music, in the book world it’s been mostly status quo. True, in the ‘80s CD-ROMS gave a few people the shivers (some with excitement, some with fear), and then, a decade later, eBooks first appeared and didn’t exactly catch on. Then, in the late ‘90s, there was an Internet bubble, which shortly thereafter burst, and we now find ourselves in the midst of a Web 2.0 world which spreads its sinewy strands into every area of our networked lives.

Computers, electronic devices and digital content is everywhere. And now that Led Zeppelin will be on iTunes, it’s pretty much another signal that, when it comes to music, there’s nothing you can’t get digitally (except for, well, The Beatles).

We need to make similar strides in publishing. We need to digitize content and give people the choice of how they consume it. (I mean, you can’t even get Hammer of the Gods in eBook.) Until then, books will be stuck in their “eight track” phase, destined to follow all of those dusty vinyl copies of Physical Graffiti to garage sales. Meanwhile, the readers of tomorrow will move on to the realm of totally digital content, maybe leaving print behind.

Today I’ve launched a website featuring excerpts from my new book Print is Dead. The site can be found at www.printisdeadbook.com. At this site I’m featuring five excerpts: the book’s introduction and afterward, and one chapter from each of the book’s three parts. This amounts to about one-third of the book’s entire content. All of the excerpts are free, as is access to the site. There’s no catch; I just want people to learn about the book and to start talking and thinking about what I believe to be an incredibly important topic.

I’m also starting a podcast of me reading the excerpts; you can sign up using the RSS feed here:

http://www.printisdeadblog.com/print_is_dead_podcast.xml

Or you can listen to the first excerpt, the book’s introduction, here:

For now, here’s a snippet of the Introduction:

While print is not yet dead, it is undoubtedly sickening. Newspaper readership has been in decline for years, magazines are also in trouble, and trade publishing (the selling of novels and non-fiction books to adults primarily for entertainment), has not seen any substantial growth for years. More and more people are turning away from traditional methods of reading, turning instead to their computers and the Internet for information and entertainment. Whether this comes in the form of getting news online, reading a blog, or contributing to a wiki, the general population is shifting away from print consumption, heading instead to increasingly digital lives.

Enjoy.

Katie Hafner, writing earlier in the week in The New York Times, had a story entitled “Film Drop-Off Sites Fade Against Digital Cameras.” The story was about how, in an increasingly digital world, drive-thru photo kiosks — a staple for decades that, in the Southern California suburbs where I was raised, meant going to a Fotomat — are becoming an endangered species. “The rate of decline is apparent from film sales — since only people who buy film need to have it developed,” writes Hafner. “Over the last four years, the sale of film has been dropping at a rate of 25 to 30 percent each year. In 2006, 204 million rolls were sold, a quarter of the 800 million sold at the peak in 1999. ‘It’s pretty alarming,’ said Bing Liem, senior vice president of sales for the imaging division of Fujifilm USA.’

And yet, while these photo processing centers are closing down, and the sales of film are tanking, people are taking more pictures than ever. Not to mention that they’re sharing these photos in ways that had been all but impossible in an analog world. For instance, my sister-in-law who lives in another state had a baby last year. And while she occasionally still puts snapshots in an envelope and sends them to us in the mail, most often my wife and I chart our nephew’s growth by looking at the digital photos his mother e-mails us on a weekly basis. And when I got married last year, since our family and guests were scattered throughout the country, the way that most people saw our photos was on our website. And of course while most digital photos are sent via e-mail (or else directly from cameras), photo-sharing websites like Flickr make it incredibly easy to share entire photo collections, not to mention that websites like Blurb allow you to then turn all of those photos into a book (bypassing the need to collect prints in photo albums).

But in terms of Fotomats and the standalone kiosks that had been around for decades, how they worked was simple: you would drive in, drop off your film, go back to living your life, and a week or so later you’d drive by again to pick up your pictures. While that seems positively glacial now, it used to be even worse. In previous decades people had to the mail the film from their Brownies to processing centers that could be in another state; photos could take weeks or moths to get back (which is maybe when they started putting dates on them; so people would remember what they were looking at). So when those huge vinegar-smelling machines came along in the ‘80s that could get you your film in an hour, people were overjoyed (not to mention that it gave us a decent Robin Williams film).

Suddenly, the time from taking a picture to having it your hand was shrinking. And while instant cameras had been around since the late ‘40s, they were seen mostly as a novelty because their quality was not as good as regular film (and anyway, instant cameras were hardly “instant” since that gray square always took a few minutes to develop; and these days, even minutes are too long). But with the advent and now almost total domination of digital cameras, people are able to print photos at home within seconds, on professional-grade paper that makes them look like expensive prints. Not just that, but people these days routinely take a picture with their digital camera and then instantly turn the camera around to check if it’s any good, or to see what they’ve captured. They’re reliving the moment right there in the, well, moment. What used to take months — seeing what your camera sees — now takes mere seconds.

And because of all this, entire generations are getting hooked on the idea of an on-demand world that offers instant gratification at every turn. Want to watch last week’s episode of Ugly Betty in the middle of the night? Dial it up from your DVR (if not the network’s website). Want to buy that silly “You had a bad day” song that’s been in your head all morning since hearing it in the deli, but you’re nowhere near a record store? No problem; access iTunes from your iPhone and download the track that you want. And while watching movies on handheld devices or laptops hasn’t quite caught on, most people I know buy their tickets online (if not from their cellphone). People still may wait online like in Annie Hall once they get to the theater, but they no longer have to do that to buy tickets.

And publishing needs to realize that it has to participate in this new mindset on some level. Because for a new generation, overnight shipping is going to feel as absurdly slow as dropping off film at a Fotomat. Why wait for words you want to read right now? And while I’m heartened by new devices that have wi-fi and a keyboard, the process for buying books online has to be made even easier, along with making sure there’s a wide-enough selection and a price-point that makes sense. And while I don’t think that the Barnes and Nobles of today will suffer the same fate as the Fotomats of yesterday, one of these days people will care a lot more about clicks than they do bricks.

As part of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, I was asked by a couple of UK publications to write pieces on the future of reading and the future of book fairs. The first of the two pieces, one about reading for The Publishing News, has appeared online (and is also part of a special publication they’re handing out at the fair). The piece is called “Left on the Shelf.” Here’s an excerpt:

Everything you can see happening in the reading process is not what’s important. Because the flipping of pages, or even the back-and-forth typewriter carriage-like movement of the eyes, doesn’t necessarily mean that words are being absorbed (much less understood). Anyone can pick up a book and repeatedly pantomime these movements.

In fact, scanning machines have been invented – in order to not have to destroy the books being scanned – that cradle a book and gently turn its pages while a camera takes pictures of the words and translates them into digital sentences. But no one would say that these computers are reading.

You can read the entire story here.

The brilliantly named Peter Kafka (my favorite tech writer aside from Todd Flaubert), writing on the Silicon Alley Insider website, had a story last week entitled “Music Decline to Accelerate in 2008 With Retailer Cutbacks.” The article talked about how, in 2008, the ailing music industry just might be delivered a deathblow due to the fact that a trio of huge companies (Best Buy, Wal Mart and Target) next year will drastically cut the amount of space they give to music CDs. As Kafka writes, “We are hearing predictions of cuts that range from 20% to 40%, with Wal-Mart making the most aggressive pullbacks.” Keep in mind that this is in addition to Tower Records going out of business, not to mention that a number of these chains have already reduced their music selection. And, of course, people can’t buy what’s not for sale.

So while music has been under assault for years now (Kafka opens his story by writing, “The music business has seen sales drop for seven straight years. Next year will be worse.”), the news of these huge retailers jumping ship is adding up to even worse news than usual. Kafka continues: “But a retail cutback could be much more damaging than any single year revenue decline. In a worst-case scenario, and one we think is quite likely, a cutback sets off a self-fulfilling prophecy: Retailers stock less music, so consumers have less to choose from, and then buy even less, causing retailers to stock even less. Repeat.”

Of course, at the same time, Apple is releasing new iPods and Amazon and Microsoft are each starting or renewing their commitments to selling music online. So while the lack of CD sales won’t be replaced by digital sales (not by a long shot), it’s still the best chance that music has to at least hold on to some market-share in an online world. And some labels, and some bands (i.e. Radiohead), are trying new things and doing all that they can to not only keep their music interesting, but are also trying to reinvigorate the way that they get their music into the hands of their fans,

Meanwhile, via another story on the Silicon Alley Insider website, you get a story about people waiting in line to watch short film at an Apple Store. At the same time, Starbucks is now a music label, Amazon’s commissioning fiction, and last week — after missing the season premiere due to a DVR mix-up — my wife watched an entire episode of Desperate Housewives the next day (for free) on her laptop.

So to think that the former rules or concepts about media still applies is now officially an illusion; this goes beyond even the facile name-checking of Bob Dylan songs about how the times are a-changing. Instead, the previous commercial boundaries have been turned into porous borders that allow for the intermingling of content and business models, the refashioning of existing ideas and the birthing of entirely new ones. Music is in serious trouble, but if print can learn from music’s lessons, maybe we will be spared music’s fate. Because that’s just not a bell you hear tolling for thee; it’s also a ringtone and an MP3. And they’re all playing the same tune…