Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

As 2007 comes to a close, and newspapers and magazines are filled with year-end reflections and best-ofs (for the record, my favorite film of 2007 was Control and my favorite CD was Boxer by The National), I’m also pausing to think about this past year. Mostly what I’m thinking about is my new book, Print is Dead. Because even though it came out just a month ago, I’ve actually been working on it for the entire year (both in terms of writing and editing it, as well as working on this blog and the book excerpt site). And all of this, and especially the opportunities that have come out of the online exposure I created for Print is Dead, is making me think of a different book and a different time.

Ten years ago my second novel came out. It was called Geniuses of Crack, and it was a sequel to my first novel, Our Noise (which came out in 1995, and which had been a modest success). Geniuses was published by Scribner Paperback Fiction, a division of Simon & Schuster. While I was honored to have the backing of Simon & Schuster — a large and well-respected publishing house — the truth is that if you’re a small author at a big publishing company, it’s hard to get any attention. In fact, a friend of mine was published at Knopf the same month that a John Irving book came out, and he was disappointed to find that his book received only a fraction of the promotional dollars spent on Irving.

At the time I thought I’d written a decent book in Geniuses, and of course I wanted it to do well. I was living in New York, and even though there was a lot I could have done locally (staging readings and signings), I’d lived in the city for less than a year at that point and didn’t really know my way around. Plus, I’m just generally kind of shy (as most writers are; people who aren’t shy and wish to express themselves become actors), so introducing myself to the manager of St. Mark’s Books really wasn’t my style. And so as publication day approached, I found myself feeling both very excited and very helpless. I mean, I wanted the book to do well, but I felt that all I could really do was cross my fingers and hope for the best.

The book finally came out, got a smattering of reviews, and a couple of magazines called for interviews. But that was about it. My publisher did their part and got the book into stores, and while it was certainly nice to see it on the shelf of my local bookstore, I had hoped a little more would happen.

A few weeks after the book came out, I went to the Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side, just a handful of blocks away from my studio apartment, and just stood there as I watched people walk back and forth in front of my book. It was nestled at the bottom of the New Paperbacks display (coop dollars at work), and as people stopped to peruse other books on the shelf, I tried to mentally will them to pick up mine. (It didn’t work.)

To this day I distinctly remember just standing there, completely helpless, wanting the book to get some sort of attention and yet not knowing how to go about getting it. And while the Internet existed in 1997, it was hardly the ubiquitous presence it is today. Back then, the Web was more about tech-savvy geeks and early adopters. Whereas, today, almost everyone has an e-mail address and surfs the web at least a few times a week (not to mention that more people than ever have their own website or blog).

Anyway, that was then; this is now. It’s now a different decade and, for me, a new book. And it’s just amazing to me how different a feeling it is to be published in 2007 versus 1997. Back then being an author felt very much like being an awkward teenager hoping to get a date: all an author could do was stay near the phone waiting for the publicist to call. But now, with the Internet, I feel completely empowered. I don’t need to wait for my publisher to do something on my behalf; instead, I just need to sit down at my laptop, do a bit of online research, and from there I can do any number of promotional things for my book.

For instance, this blog. I started this blog long before I even completed the book. And in the past sixteen months, since starting and working at this blog, I’ve slowly built an audience and generated traffic, using this site to get to know the players in this space and letting them get to know me (and for a person who doesn’t like to knock on doors, it’s been an incredibly easy thing to do). Yes, it’s taken a lot of my personal time, but it’s also led to countless opportunities: interviews, conferences, writing assignments, not to mention it has put me in direct contact with my readers. Plus, just some of the comments the blog itself has received have been immensely helpful in shaping my thinking about the topic (not to mention that things that I originally wrote for this blog, I later turned into material that made its way into the final draft of the book).

Back in 1997, none of this was possible. And the only promotional activities open to me then, that I could have drummed up myself, would have been local. But now, I’m always amazed to check my Google Analytics account and see that I have visitors to this blog from pretty much every corner of the globe. And even if they never buy my book, it’s still feedback and a connection; it’s an audience.

So while we can debate the future of the book, there can be no doubt that the Internet has changed the face of publishing forever, opening up promotional opportunities that before were closed to everyone except the biggest and most popular of authors.

As James Joyce said of his characters, “Here comes everybody.” That’s how I feel about the Internet. And as R.E.M. said about the end of the world, “I feel fine.” That’s how I feel being an author today.

PS have a happy holiday; normal blogging will return early in 2008.

In the current issue of The New Yorker, Caleb Crain has an essay entitled “Twilight of the Books,” which — if that weren’t already moody enough — carries the apocalyptic subtitle, “What will life be like if people stop reading?” All of this is placed in the context of a (long) review of Maryanne Wolf’s new book, Proust and the Squid, which is a non-fiction account of the biological process of reading, going all the way back to its origins in ancient history. But Crain uses his to review to point out that perhaps reading itself is ancient history. For instance, he points to the overall downward trend in terms of Americans and reading:

In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year.

As you can see from the above, our standards are slipping just as fast as the numbers. Whereas, seventy years ago, people were asked if they were currently reading a book, they’re now asked whether or not they’ve read a book in the past year. What had been, in the not-so-distant past, a daily event seems today like an annual chore (kind of like filing your taxes or getting your teeth cleaned). Crain ties all of this to the shrinking circulation numbers from newspapers and the stagnation of book sales, showing that average Americans are increasingly choosing to spend their time away from the world of words. And, for Crain, the stakes are incredibly high and could have huge, unforeseen consequences: “If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.”

Crain is here stretching for the “butterfly effect,” which is the notion that insignificant events can, through global amplification, have a huge influence (such as, a butterfly flaps its wings in India and causes a hurricane in Indiana). And, of course, Crain is right to some degree. These declining rates of book-reading mentioned above have a rising correlation somewhere else (such as in terms of movies or TV, not to mention new pursuits like the Wii and Guitar Hero 3). But Crain’s also preaching the usual doom and gloom, and I think he gives books way too much credit by implying that, if reading disappears, we’ll all be turned into either Philistines or CHUDs.

This kind of worry seems to me — instead of the “butterfly effect” — to be the “butterfly affectation.” Because it’s silly to think that, just because the butterfly that’s been buzzing around Eustace Tilley’s nose for the better part of a century will cease flapping its wings, that it will cause some kind of rip in the space-time-literacy continuum. In fact, as Wolf’s book seems to amply show, the act and art of reading has evolved over centuries, and it will continue to evolve. Just because tomorrow it may not look like what it looks like today, doesn’t mean that it’s not still reading (not to mention that one scenario is better than the other). But if Crain — along with Devo — happens to be right, and instead of evolving we’re all devolving, and reading is a skill we’re going to lose rather than adapt as something else, then I guess we’ll crawl back into that slime when we come to it. But in the meantime, with the invention of the Internet and all of the millions upon millions of pages of content that exists out there, people are indeed spending more time than ever reading, and I can’t ever see that totally disappearing.

Earlier this week, Doris Lessing delivered her acceptance speech for the 2007 Nobel Prize for fiction (though not in person; the speech was delivered by her publisher). The speech has now been published in its entirety online (you can read it here in four languages.) And while not as focused as some of the other great speeches that come to mind (such as Faulkner’s, with the rousing sign-off: “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail), Lessing makes some interesting comments.

Of course, she also makes a few curmudgeonly missteps. For instance, Lessing states that both writers and writing “do not come out of houses without books.” Lessing then goes on to relate the literary awakenings found in the speeches of past Nobel-prize winners:

I have been looking at the speeches by some of your recent prizewinners. Take the magnificent Pamuk. He said his father had 1,500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition.

Take V.S. Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write. And when he got to England by right he used the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition.

Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes: taught by that wonderfully brave bold mind.

In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the Tradition

And while it stands to reason that men and women who came of age during the period of what we may end up calling “Literature 1.0” will have a very print-based view of things, the “Tradition” as Lessing describes it is changing in real and profound ways. Indeed, she laments this in her speech, saying that we currently live in a “fragmenting” culture, and that “it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”

Here Lessing makes a huge mistake; she makes it sound like people who spend time with computers are all just staring at nothing but circuits, wires and plastic. Instead, people spend their time using their computers to learn about a variety of topics (including, of course, books). And they’re not just learning; they’re also contributing, interacting, and participating (things that were hardly possible in the world of Lessing’s “Tradition”).

Instead, today’s Digital Natives are forging and creating their own traditions. Indeed, as James Joyce (a great writer who never had the chance to win a Nobel; my mind reels wondering what his acceptance speech would look like) wrote at the end of his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” The same way that Dedalus and countless others like him created their own worlds and works of art, so too will upcoming generations shatter and remake our age-old Traditions to fit their new world. And, one day — perhaps soon — both writers and writing will indeed come “out of houses without books.” But, I guarantee you, they won’t come out of houses without computers.

Last week there were a pair of blog postings, by Leslie Johnson and Siva Vaidhyanathan, on what was being described as an “oversimplification” of generational tags. The main thrust of each argument was that many people — including me — were being too general when it came to classifying upcoming generations as Digital Natives (let alone, as I do in Print is Dead, naming them Generation Download and Generation Upload). This did not sit well with either Johnson and Vaidhyanathan. For instance, here’s Vaidhyanathan on the subject:

Invoking generations invariable demands an exclusive focus on people of wealth and means, because they get to express their preferences (for music, clothes, electronics, etc.) in ways that are easy to count. It always excludes immigrants, not to mention those born beyond the borders of the United States. And it excludes anyone on the margins of mainstream consumer or cultural behavior.

Here’s Johnson:

I often take part in discussions about services for faculty and students, and sometimes hear ageist comments about how older faculty are completely non-digital and all students are automatically all digital. Hah! Just like some folks have an interest or skill in languages or math or art and some folks don’t, it’s the same with whatever “digital” is.

In fact, Johnson goes so far as to claim that “Being digital is not generational.” Well, I might agree that being digitally adept maybe isn’t generational, but there’s no way you can say that kids today aren’t Digital Natives. It’s a fact. From the moment they’re born (under the watchful electronic eye of digital cameras and camcorders, not to mention the bevy of beeping medical equipment nearby), to every aspect of their ensuing lives (electronic baby monitors, video games, cell phones, digital watches, TVs, MP3s, the Internet, etc.), they will exist in an electronic milieu.

A hundred years ago, kids who were born were Generation Victrola; today they’re Generation Download. To argue against this is to swim against the tide of not only history but common sense. Because generations are defined by the world in which they’re born and nurtured. Whatever surrounds that generation is later what comes to define it. Because of this, someone could be said to have grown up in the era of Vietnam even though they didn’t fight in Vietnam, or never even gave it much thought. But the influence that Vietnam had on the books and music and movies of the time is resolutely inescapable.

Vaidhyanathan points out that just because someone was born within the accepted timeframe of what constituted Generation X, it doesn’t mean they had the same experience. With that I completely agree. Just because you were born in 1972 doesn’t mean you’re a carbon copy of Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites. Instead, stating that someone was born at that time simply means that they were exposed to the prevailing attitudes and influences which were omnipresent during those years (whether they were part of those influences or not).

But there are also more important and subtle shifts, generational gaps that both envelope and separate us without us even knowing. And, in many ways, these are the most important developments of all. For instance, last week’s tragic mall shooting. As I watched the news reports, most of which described the mall as a growing place of danger and paranoia, it caused me to reflect upon my own life and childhood. As a youth growing up in suburban Southern California in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, most of my weekends were spent at the mall, hanging out in the arcade or at the pizza place, or just wandering around for endless hours (during any of the mall scenes in either Valley Girl or Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I could have been an extra). In those days, the worse thing that could happen to you in a mall was that Asteroids might eat your quarter. Today, people go to the mall and get gunned down as they shop for Christmas presents. For today’s teenagers, malls (not to mention their own schools) can be a dangerous place. For me, they weren’t. So the meaning and length between my experience and theirs is indeed a generational gap. And its exists all around us in ways that far outshine the surface differences in music, fashion, or even anything necessarily cultural.

The bottom line is that no generation marches in lockstep; no era can be defined completely (the ‘20s weren’t roaring for everyone nor did everybody swing in the ‘60s, and surely someone was pissed off during the Summer of Love). Instead, the tags we give to generations are shorthand; they’re always just signifiers. To treat them literally is to mistreat them.

On his 1988 concert record The Off-White Album, comedian Dennis Miller has a fake routine where he imagines what the Civil War would have been like if, instead of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union army had been under the command of Cary Grant. But, of course, it’s just a ruse; Miller (at least, the Dennis Miller of the ‘80s) would never stoop to such a comedic low. He explains that what he likes to do is ”get right up to the precipice, pivot and then jete back to Coolsville.”

Well, this is exactly what I hoped was happening when I read a blog entry by Shirley Dent on the Guardian book blog earlier this week. Entitled, “Tolstoy and Dickens. Who’d win in a fight?,” with the subtitle, “War and Peace and Our Mutual Friend are literary heavyweights in more ways than one. This one’s going to go a few rounds,” it sounds pretty silly, right? Well, I guess all of this was spurred by something known as the Bookshop Barnies’ Balloon Debate. Dent describes this spectacle as an “annual event [that] involves half-a-dozen terrified pundits arguing terrifically for two minutes for the book they think is the best EVER, before being interrogated and voted out by an ever-so-merry, ever-so-up-for-it, ever-so-informed mob.” And what’s the literary death match that will be debated this year? Tolstoy versus Dickens.

Now, of course, discussing the merits of various literary figures has a modicum of worth (and Dent, at least in her blog posting, has some intelligent things to say: “Dickens grasps the story, squeezes and twists it into shape. Tolstoy lets it flow through his fingers, his touch on the characters barely perceptible”), but with all the challenges and changes facing publishing, literacy, writers and writing, is this really how booklovers choose to spend their time? Coming up with insular and inane competitions between long-dead writers that most of the general public couldn’t care less about because they’re all too busy spending their time on pretty much anything except Tolstoy and Dickens?

So to waste valuable energy with this kind of academic minutiae seems like a crime. (Like, I wonder if Gogol could beat Chekhov in a sprint?! I think it’d be Gogol, by a nose.) This kind of thing reminds me of how the band kept playing while the Titanic sank. Except, in this scenario — while literacy rates are tanking, and books become more and more marginalized in society — booklovers aren’t just enjoying the music while the waves start to lap at their feet, they’re also spending these last moments playing “name that tune.”

The other day on the design website A Brief Message, designer Chip Kidd had a short essay entitled “Notify the Next of Kindle.” In the essay, Kidd disparages Amazon’s new Kindle eBook reader by bestowing upon it the usual kind of narrow-minded bibliophile dismissal that culminates with the rather Proulxian declaration that “PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN.” This is, of course, news to all of those people out there who DO ACTUALLY WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN. (Not to mention that Kidd doesn’t really seem to comment on the fact that both his words and my words are BEING READ ON A SCREEN RIGHT NOW.)

Anyway, Kidd is obviously a brilliant and talented guy, but he’s coming at this from the point of view of a designer and, dare I say it, he has a chip on his shoulder when it comes to discussing the topic. First of all, here’s how he explains away the success of the iPod: “The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a ‘thing’ in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to.” This is pretty ridiculous. Kidd is failing to realize that, yes, music used to also be objects. In fact, when you think of the elaborate packaging of something like The Beatles White Album, with its embossed gatefold sleeve, fold-out poster and full-size color portraits, it was very much a “physical object,” a “thing.” And yet, after being downgraded to flimsy CD packaging a dozen years ago, it will soon be available as a completely digital download, meaning all you’ll get for your $20 is the music and an invisible package. And it will still be a great record.

So why won’t it be different for books? As Kidd sees it, “Books were always physical objects, and the printed book as a piece of technology has yet to be improved upon.” I completely disagree with this. Books were always physical objects, yes, but that’s because they were, well, books. What Kidd fails to realize is that books have a marrow and a DNA that go far beyond the paper they’re printed on. In fact, as I’ve said many times, the “book” aspect of a book, meaning its physical structure (pages, ink and binding) is always the least interesting thing about a it. (Unless, I guess, you’re a designer.) I mean, the reason Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite writers is because he’s an amazing storyteller who takes me — through his words — to different and wonderful worlds. And while Kidd’s jackets (on Murakami’s books and others) are nice, they’re just part of the package (think of them as icing on the cake; nice, but not essential). I could read Murakami’s novels with different covers, or plain covers or no covers, or as a series of cocktail napkins, and they would still be chilling and amazing stories. So while Kidd can insist that the Kindle changes nothing, I think he’s dead wrong. And I also think the time for the snobbishness of saying no one wants to read books on a screen, when we live in a digital world and plenty of people do, has got to end.

Now that Print is Dead is out, I have a number of friends and relatives sending me their best wishes for my efforts. But what’s interesting about all of these kind words is that almost all of them add that they hope my predictions for the demise of books doesn’t come true. I guess they think I’m predicting that print’s going to die, but what I’m really saying is that print’s already dead.

Indeed, print is dead in the sense that it’s no longer as vital or relevant as it once was. It used to be that print was a broadcast medium, a way to convey knowledge and information across long distances and to all ranges of social and economic groups. But that’s all been replaced by the Internet. (If Jerry Maguire wanted to distribute his manifesto today, he wouldn’t go to a Kinko’s and have copies made; he’d start a blog, which of course means he’d end up get Dooced in addition to being fired.) So the point isn’t to debate whether or not print is going to die, but rather the question is, What do we do with its corpse?

In hundreds of small ways print is already giving up the ghost. Yet more proof of this is the fact that Picador UK is going to stop publishing hardback books, except in special limited editions. Instead, books will be published directly in paperback format. As Nicholas Clee wrote in the Guardian Book Blog a few weeks ago:

Until now, a small market has just about upheld the other arguments for literary fiction in hardback. But that market has almost reached vanishing point. The paucity of sales of novels even by acclaimed authors was an awkward book industry secret until this summer, when it was broadcast that eight of the novels on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize had sold fewer than 1,000 copies.

So it seems that the invisible hand of the consumer has been quietly brushing books aside for years, to the point where even the most feted novels in the UK won’t escape print’s ultimate fate. In fact, Clee’s blog entry is titled “Cover story: hardbacks have their uses,” to which I would reply, “Yes, of course hardbacks have uses; so do horses, even though we’ve stopped riding them around for transportation.” Books will always exist, but they will be produced in much smaller numbers than we may have been used to in the past. And it won’t be technology companies that do either the pruning or the killing; indeed, the fact the Booker Prize nominees have sold in such small quantities shows that the public has been silently — with its very apathy — killing books for years. So with Print is Dead I’m not predicting that print will die; instead I’m drawing chalk around its edges.