Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

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.