Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The fifth and final installment of the Print is Dead podcast, as part of the book excerpt site, has just been delivered. The podcast features me reading the book’s afterword.

Here’s a snippet of the chapter:

Given everything we know, and everything we’ve been able to witness during the decades that have brought us the Internet revolution – a dozen tumultuous years that nobody could have predicted – all of these new inventions and ways of living will undoubtedly impact reading and publishing. Indeed, they already have; witness the massive layoffs in newspapers and magazines that can be directly attributed to the Web, not to mention the overall decline in reading and book sales. It would be foolhardy, if not terribly dangerous, not to realize this and see the connection. It’s simply not possible that the Internet is going to have an effect on every area of our lives except reading books. It has already had profound effects on the way people buy, write, produce and talk about books. So why not the books themselves?

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.

Over the weekend, in the “Books of Style” section (nestled within the overall Sunday Styles section) of the New York Times, Print is Dead was featured alongside Pierre Bayard’s recently published How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (which was originally published in French). The article was titled “Beyond the Cover, Who’s to Know,” and it starts off talking about Bayard’s book, which is about how people don’t need to read books in their entirety to get their meaning. The article then segues to my book, which more or less states that you don’t need to read the physical format of books in order to gain meaningful access to the content inside.

Here’s a snippet of the article:

“Today’s kids are not going to want to pick up a big book and spend hours in a corner silently, passively reading,” Mr. Gomez warns. Instead, he says, “They’re going to ditch the hardback and head over to Facebook.” Why shouldn’t the “boring bits” of “The Mill on the Floss” be expunged? he asks. Why don’t savvy publishers expand their market by “remixing Middlemarch and Middlesex?” Why can’t Dickens be as fun as World of Warcraft? And why would anyone write a travel memoir anymore, when “Google Earth has inventoried nearly every backyard on the planet?” (I’d pursue this further, but it’s time to update my Facebook status.)

To read the entire thing, click here.

There’s a Charles Bukowski poem that takes place at a reading during which someone asks him, “What do you think of Norman Mailer?” To which Bukowski succinctly replies, “I don’t think of Norman Mailer.” Well, seeing as how Mailer died today, I’m thinking of him quite a bit.

As a young reader, not much into my teens, I discovered Norman Mailer (almost because of his reputation more than his books). My friends and I collected and talked about his work, and I still remember getting into fights with my English teachers over him; they hated him, which only made me love him more. And even though there are many of his books I’ve still never gotten around to — for instance, I still haven’t read The Naked and The Dead — instead, it was more the force of his personality that attracted me. As a kid in high school who never got good grades and didn’t like sports, I was attracted to Mailer in a rebellious sort of way, kind of like how the Beats took up Kerouac as their idol and role-model.

And when I finally got around to actually reading Mailer, I loved almost everything I read. Even his almost inscrutable books, from Why Are We in Vietnam? to Ancient Evenings, made me admire him because he had the drive and power and vision to write books that no one else would risk (or think of) writing.

Plus, my favorites of Mailer’s never seemed to be anyone else’s favorites, such as The Deer Park, a book which cost him a publisher and almost his sanity, and Advertisements for Myself which, in its conversational asides, contains the best advice to writers that I’ve ever read outside of perhaps New Grub Street.

Later I read Mailer’s masterworks such as The Executioner’s Song and The Armies of the Night, and when I did I sat dumbfounded at the man’s total control over words (and his less than total control over his ego), not to mention the fact that any biography of Mailer (including Peter Manso’s oral biography, which cost him his friendship with Mailer) was better than most people’s fiction.

Yes, Mailer was often a jerk and a blowhard and overall a general loudmouth, but he was also an American original and someone who played a large part in who I am today. Not only that (indeed, what he has meant to me personally is dwarfed by what he has to meant to literature in general), but I think the battles Mailer fought are finally being won thanks to the Internet and the egalitarianism of a Web 2.0 world where consumers have more choice than ever. Today, the “wisdom of crowds” can often drown out the cranky, singular critic who no longer controls fates with the slash of a pen they way they did back in Mailer’s day. For instance, here’s a passage from one of the interstitial essays in Advertisements for Myself, where Mailer casts a cold eye on the literary landscape of his time:

The day was gone when people held on to your novels no matter what others might say. Instead one’s good young readers waited now for the verdict of professional young men, academics who wolfed down a modern literature with an anxiety to find your classification, your identity, your similarity, your common theme, your corporate literary earnings, each reference to yourself as individual as a carloading of homogenized words. The articles which would be written about you and a dozen others would be done by minds which were expert on the aggregate and so had senses too lumpy for the particular. There was a limit to how much appraisal could be made of a work before the critic exposed his lack of the critical faculty, and so it was naturally wiser for the mind of the expert to masticate the themes of ten writers rather than approach the difficulties of any one.

But today, with more and more mainstream publications cutting back on review space, and more and more readers and consumers trading their opinions via social networking sites and blogs, the power of the critic is beginning to slowly whither away. What’s replacing it is the power of the individual (which goes a long way toward restoring the power of the writer). And I kind of think that Mailer would have wanted it that way.

House & Garden, a magazine that has been around for more than a century, is going out of business; its December issue will be its last. Founded in 1901, House & Garden’s parent company, Condé Nast Publications, finally decided to pull the plug after the recent departure of the magazine’s publisher (of course, the fact that it wasn’t profitable probably also had something to do with it).

“The magazine had monthly paid circulation of nearly 1 million and about 800 advertising pages through the first 11 months of the year,” writes the New York Times. “Better numbers than many of its competitors. But Condé Nast, a privately held company with more than two dozen magazines, is known in the industry for having high operating costs.”

And while a lot of House & Garden’s troubles can be traced to things like the housing slump and the competition among other “shelter” magazines (the category that House & Garden fits into), another factor in the magazine’s downfall is our new digital, always-online culture.

Per the Times:

The closing of House & Garden “is probably symptomatic of what we might see more of in the magazine industry,” said Charlie Rutman, chief executive for the North American operations of MPG, a media agency owned by Havas. “In today’s hyperspeed ‘give me what I want when I want it’ world, the idea of waiting 30 days to get my information is out of sync.”

Thus House & Garden now becomes the latest in a number of high profile magazines to have bit the dust in the past couple of years: ElleGirl, Jane, Business 2.0, Teen People and Life (not to mention that Portfolio is not doing so hot either). Meanwhile, more and more people are consuming content online, choosing to subscribe to RSS feeds instead of magazines.

In last week’s issue of The New Yorker, Anthony Grafton had a long article entitled “Future Reading.” Subtitled, “Digitization and its discontents,” Grafton looked at how “the computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press,” with huge companies like Google and Microsoft embarking on massive efforts to digitize the world’s knowledge by breaking down the contents of books and pouring them into easily accessible databases which anyone can tap into. Grafton compares all of this, as most people tend to do, with the huge Library of Alexandria, which was founded in Egypt in 300BC. Back in the day, the Library of Alexandria housed the largest repository of human knowledge on earth, with more than 500,000 works. And now, or so it’s being said, major Internet companies like Google and Microsoft are looking to create Alexandria 2.0, digitizing every scrap of print and storing it in a database.

Grafton, however, is skeptical. While he admits that “we have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production,” he thinks that all of these efforts “will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.”

And while Grafton’s correct in stating that the argument is hardly as simple as saying Google Book Search=the Library of Alexandria, what Grafton fails to grasp is that an awful lot of knowledge these days is already digital. After all, to “digitize” something means that you turn it from being non-digital to digital, and yet — for the most part — knowledge now begins as a digital form. So while Grafton can talk all he wants about microfilm, or musty books being scanned, he makes no allowances (or concession) to the fact that a great deal of present and future knowledge will be digital from its conception. But, of course, since this is the New Yorker, Grafton’s really just slouching towards digitization, and not really embracing it. He finishes his article with the usual Animal Farm-esque bleating of “Digital good, print better,” implying that, while students with computers will get most of the picture online, for the real thing they’re going to have to go to a library: “The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.”

Grafton’s fetishism here for the trappings and mise-en-scène of an overly romantic literary life is embarrassing. And the idea that true knowledge is contained only in “dusty, crumbling, smelly irreplaceable documents” is anachronistic to the point of devolution. I mean, I read his piece online; would it have been better for me to have read a dusty, crumbling, smelly version in print? What would I have gained from paper that eluded me on the screen? The answer, of course, is nothing.

The fourth 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 “Writers in a Digital Future” from the third section of the book, “Saying Goodbye to Book.”

Here’s a snippet of the chapter:

The Internet, and the interconnectedness of its audience, is already proving to be a great place for growing and sustaining an audience online. Some authors today have huge and ravenous Internet constituencies, and in terms of their popularity the lines are so blurred between their websites and their books that it’s no longer clear which exists to support the other. And all of this comes at a time when the book business and authors are faced with more competition than ever in terms of consumer attention and competing fields of entertainment.

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.

This week I have the honor of being the author of the Soapbox column in this week’s edition of Publisher’s Weekly, which is a regular feature that appears on the last page of each issue. My column is entitled “Shock and Yawn,” and is about the reaction I often receive when I tell people I’ve written a book entitled Print is Dead.

Here’s a snippet:

Of all the ways to win a popularity contest, working in publishing and writing a book called Print Is Dead has to be at the bottom of the list. While the subtitle—Books in Our Digital Age—hopefully puts the argument in a bit more perspective, the title by itself always seems to set people off. In fact, it has earned me many a chilly reception (think Benedict Arnold, not Paul Revere).

You can read the rest of the column here.