Book to the Future: I predict…
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 But that’s all been replaced by the Internet.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.
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Great points! However, the Man Booker prize highlights literary fiction. If you have read the NEA’s latest report, literacy fiction readership has been on the decline for years. It’s the popular fiction that is on the rise and that is where the turnover will come from. The Man Booker is like the independent film awards, great job at making your statement, don’t expect to make a buck. Look for big time authors like Patterson, King, and others to turn their readers over to E.
Indeed, the screen is dead in the sense that it’s no longer as vital or relevant as it once was. It used to be that the screen 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 which is increasingly enclaved into narrow interests and sectarian agenda.
The screen is also dead in its continued dead-end dependence on text and keyboards. The same tired restraints of literacy and language have been piled on the screen as if PowerPoint somehow makes what is spoken more effective. The promise of the screen for audio, video, musical and composite non-textual literacy has been retarded.
And screen connectivity is dead. The search engines and keyword prompts have less chance of delivering either social fulfillment or cultural adventure than a walk around the block. And finally, the screen is dead in the real sense that it is here today and gone tomorrow. No screen reading advocate ever imagines that a retrievable message can have a different meaning. The screen is a zombie of the present moment.
[…] Book to the Future: I predict…By Jeff(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 …Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age - http://printisdeadblog.com […]
[…] recent article from Print is Dead claimed that the low sales of Booker Prize nominees in hardback format and the decision by Picador […]
I searched your website (but perhaps I wasn’t
clever enough), and nowhere could I find
discussion of some of the less palatable
consequences of the death of print and the
digitization of everything:
* Dangers of the increasing malleability of
history
Need I even mention ‘Orwell’ in this context?
(No hits on your site, for that word, though,
so I can’t help but wonder). Rewriting
history gets easier as the raw materials of
history (documents and such) get more
ephemeral. Winston Smith would probably be
out of a job in a well-digitized 1984,
replaced by a few shell scripts. While I
doubt things would ever get to the extreme of:
rm -rf /usr/share/holocaust
the loss of permanence is a little unsettling.
* The environmental costs of all those server
farms, wifi networks and e-readers
Digital media requires a constant supply of
energy to keep it available. Downloading an
e-book to an e-reader is the merest tip of a
huge infrastructure iceberg that I never see
much discussion about (then again, maybe I’m
not looking in the right places). The supply
of energy isn’t infinite, nor is it always
going to be as reliable as we take it for
granted to be today.
(I’m well aware that the standard enthusiast
response to such misgivings is to assert that
‘new technologies’ will solve these problems
soon — magical hectares of solar panels,
microbial fuel cells whose only waste product
is distilled water, cold fusion using nails
and bell wire and a little masking tape — but
there’s still no such thing as a free lunch,
no matter how long we put off paying the
bill.)
There also the question of the treadmill of
disposability and the churn of constant
replacement associated with any consumer
electronics gadget. One twitch of corporate
whim, and we all need to upgrade to a new
widget because the old one won’t be
’supported’ any more. Vast exchanges of
capital and goods ensue, and after an
appropriate settling-down period, the whole
process repeats. But each iteration takes more
energy, and generates more junk that has to be
buried, burned, or boxed and sent to the third
world.
A book, on the other hand, extracts an
environmental cost when it is manufactured,
but after that initial cost, it is pretty
benign. When I read a 50-year-old book for the
first time, its brand new to me, just as it
was to the scores of people who read it before
me. But the book only had to be made once.
I’m sure you’ve got rebuttals to both of these
areas of concern — sinuously-reasoned arguments
that would just make be look like a goof. But I
can’t help but wonder where we’ll all end up
when books are awkward curiosities and everybody
blogs about everything, around the clock.
Perhaps some sort of topsy-turvey 802,701 A.D.,
where underground conclaves of skinny,
slope-shouldered Morlocks frantically tend their
servers and virtual grasslands of ever-shifting
blogs, relentlessly annotating and linking and
copying, too busy to pause because they might
fall behind in The Conversation. While topside
healthy, happy Eloi are reading books in the
sun. Books they cobbled themselves on
typewriters and letter-presses that only take
human power to operate, that they share and
treasure through the long, warm decades.
(There — that last scenario should have pretty
much cemented my status as a harmless
contrarian. Thanks for your time, though.)
Vance,
Thanks much for your thoughtful comments. You are correct in stating that neither on my site nor in my book do I go into some of the more harsh aspects of what a digital world will bring. However, in terms of Orwell, I have indeed mentioned his work on this site:
http://printisdeadblog.com/2007/04/04/farm-follows-function-%e2%80%9cthe-prestigious-inconvenience-of-print%e2%80%9d/
But to suggest that a book is permanent (as opposed to a digital file) is folly; books are no match for water and fire, or even old age. So in terms of your 802,701 A.D. scenario painted above, I have a feeling your “return to nature” society will be much less cozy than that; people will be too busy pumping water from wells to sit around and read Wells.
I finished the book over the weekend and I very much enjoyed it. I was particularly taken with the chapter “will books disappear.” I had an experience this weekend where I attempted to buy two books for my cousin’s daughter that were only available as Print On Demand volumes. They were not stocked by any brick-and-mortar stores, and even some online sources listed 3-5 weeks for delivery. Only Amazon had the capacity to get them out in a couple of days and on their way. Books as a concept won’t disappear. Until distribution for ebooks and POD books improves, print books will still reign in the marketplace.
Print is not dead, e-books are just cheaper. That is a fact. It costs less to edit, clean up and hack together an Adobe file with a .jpeg as a “cover” which is why online publishers like Ellora’s Cave pays authors higher royalties in e-book format over print. Paying a printer, cover designer and distributor is hell on a publisher’s bank account. And when it’s time for contract renewals… well regular folk don’t want to know. Working for a newspaper or magazine works similarly, I am a reporter and I should know. Outside of POD (Print On Demand- A SCAM to all aspiring authors steer clear of Authorhouse.com and Urbis.com for two examples) e-book publishing and small independent publishers are probably the best way for greenhorn authors to get into the business. FORGET about Penguin, Randomhouse, Rand-McNally and the rest- with the crap that gets put out (just go to your local bookstore and look on the new arrivals table and prepare to get pissed) they are clearly only looking for profit and keeping their investors happy. Research your genre THOROUGHLY (I am in erotica/romantica myself) and I know the ERA website backwards and forwards, read every single book available in my public library about editing and publishing and you know what, my MS after six years STILL isn’t ready and cover letters are HELL to write! While I don’t like e-book format and would rather see my books in print, I’ll take what I could get.