Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Last week the London Times reported on recent Nobel Prize winner for fiction Doris Lessing’s first post-award appearance, which took place recently in Britain. In Lessing’s Nobel acceptance speech she decried our current digital world, claiming that it has given us a “fragmented” culture. She then went on to speak about how writers in the past had discovered books and literature, and that kids today know nothing other than their computers. Well, Lessing used her most recent speech to talk about the plight of young authors in a media-saturated age, saying she “feels sorry” for modern writers who have to heavily promote their work in various media:

Now what happens is that if you are a girl who’s good-looking and has written even a passable book you can be earning enormous sums of money very quickly and are then sent on a promotional tour.

I’ve met girls who’ve said that this was the worst thing that could have happened to them. There are people who can’t write a second book because they are always on the telephone or having to do some TV thing.

But it’s not just what writers have to do (i.e. promotion), but it’s also what writers have become:

The writer has become more and more a personality. Literary festivals (for example) are enormously enjoyable but when you go into one it’s got nothing to do with your writing.

Of course, this attitude is nothing new; in the seventies Graham Greene didn’t approve of Anthony Burgess turning to TV discuss his work, and Charles Bukowski later (and rather poetically) said that going on a talk show was “like eating your own vomit.” But of course, in today’s online world, there’s more than just talk shows. In fact, many promotional outlets are now controlled by the authors themselves, and so rather than work within (or even have to rely on) the confines of the mainstream media, writers can now be in control of their own promotion.

Lessing, however doesn’t see it this way. Instead of viewing the glass as half full she doesn’t like the drink itself, succinctly summing up the current literary landscape by stating that “What’s happening is very bad for some types of new writers.” Which is of course true. However, the reverse is also true; what’s happening is very good for some types of new writers (and very bad for some types of old ones). But then again, that’s what makes it a landscape, and not a still life.

Photo above by Matthew Gold.

Over the weekend The New York Times had two stories about books, one that talked abut them in analog form and another that discussed their more recent digital transformation. Analog showed up in the form of a small piece on playwright Tom Stoppard, who lugs with him wherever he goes a box filled with books (pictured above). The article is drenched in nostalgia, describing a world of porters and ocean-liners. And maybe this is indeed Stoppard’s world (I can see him being like Owen Wilson in The Darjeeling Limited, traveling with a myriad of monogrammed trunks). But for most us having a forty or fifty pound “portable bookshelf” isn’t an option (or even something we’d consider). Which is where electronic books come in very handy.

Which leads to the piece on digital books. Entitled “Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless,” the article is mostly a review of Amazon’s eBook device, the Kindle. But the writer also gets at the heart of the future of the book debate, and how our definition of exactly what a book is is beginning to change:

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell. Kindle’s long-term success is still unknown, but Amazon should be credited with imaginatively redefining its original product line, replacing the book business with the reading business.

It’s not hard to connect the dots between Stoppard’s “portable bookshelf” and the Kindle’s ability to hold dozens of books at a time. And while Stoppard will probably never embrace an eBook device, there are thousands of other readers out there — drawn by the ability to carry one small device instead of all those books — who will.

Slate recently had a retrospective of their ongoing discussion concerning the decision of Nabokov’s son in terms of whether or not he’s going to destroy his father’s final manuscript. It seems that the elder Nabokov wanted the book burned, but the younger Nabokov is considering publishing it instead. There’s a long history of this kind of thing; sometimes for the best, sometimes for the worst. After all, Kafka wanted his good friend Max Brod to burn all of his unpublished work after his premature death at the age of 40. Yet Brod went against the wishes of his friend, and to this date pretty much every scrap that Kafka ever wrote has been collected between covers (and, I would say, the world is better off because of it). And yet Hemingway’s legacy has been somewhat tarnished by all of the half-baked books that appeared after his death (Islands in the Stream, Garden of Eden, and even the relatively recent True at First Light), manuscripts that Hemingway never truly completed and which were sewn together after his death. However, whatever happens to the Nabokov book, his reputation will remain intact. But still, it’s an interesting question. Because, after all, whose manuscript is it anyway? The guy who wrote it or the person who now has possession of it? Which, in a way, is part of a bigger discussion of books in general. I mean, whose words are they anyway? Once the writer writes them, they’re free; certainly we’re then free to read them in whatever formant we choose. (Of course, we also have the freedom to not read them at all.) Whether that means in print, or on screen, or in funny voices or while hanging upside-down, the choice is up to us.

Over the weekend, Virginia Heffernan had an article in The New York Times magazine about the TV show Friday Night Lights. She laments the fact that, even thought Friday Night Lights is a great show, it has never become truly popular and never received great ratings. Why not? Well, because it doesn’t have a Web component. It doesn’t offer anything online that gives people the chance to interact (let alone discover) the show or its content. And, in our online age, that’s a no-no. As Heffernan writes:

An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise.

The same will someday be true for books (if it’s not already). The same way that DVDs come loaded with special features and CDs (when people deign to buy them) come with extra tracks — and now that TV shows also need some sort of added boost — literature will need to adapt as well. Because even if books don’t become digital, and stay analog, society itself has already become electronic. “This is an enormous social shift that coincides with the changeover from analog to digital modes of communication,” writes Heffernan, “the rise of the Internet and the new raucousness of fans.”

This ties into what I call Generation Upload in Print is Dead; the idea that Digital Natives are not content to merely consume content. But Heffernan describes it even better:

As the writers’ strike has made clear, art and entertainment in the digital age are highly collaborative, and none of it can thrive without engaging audiences more actively than ever before. Fans today see themselves as doing business with television shows, movies, even books. They want to rate, review, remix. They want to make tributes and parodies, create footnotes and concordances, mess with volume and color values, talk back and shout down.

What this will look like for books remains to be seen, but the idea itself will surely remain.

A recent episode of The Simpsons declared that print is dead (or at least is in trouble). This happened at a presidential debate that was being covered by a person from CNN and a writer from Slate. The final person introduced is from The Washington Post, and everyone seems embarassed to have him there (even he seems uncomfortable). Into this silence comes Nelson Muntz, who points to the guy from the Post and says, in his best nyah-nyah voice, “Your medium is dying.” Principal Skinner then upbraids Nelson, but not for saying something untrue, but for pointing out the obvious. “There’s being right,” Skinner says, “and being nice.” And if the clip above doesn’t work, you should be able to view the clip on Gawker.

Galleycat reports on comments made by Steve Jobs earlier this week at Macworld Expo. Basically, Jobs doesn’t think much of the Kindle design-wise (which, coming from the man behind the iPod, makes sense). But Jobs also makes some comments about people and reading (saying, basically, that they don’t read). And yet, while studies like the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” and “To Read or Not to Read” certainly point towards disturbing trends, when people go to a website, they’re reading. As “point and click” as the Internet is, you can’t get very far without doing a fair amount of text consumption. After all, the online world doesn’t look like a sheet of Ikea instructions, with nothing by symbols and diagrams. And while it may not be Wordsworth, it’s still words.

Engadget, reporting from last week’s Consumer Electronics Show, has some info on a new eBook tablet prototype that iRiver is developing. Details are hard to come by at this point but, according to Engadget, the prototype has handwriting recognition and a color display. In terms of its overall look and feel, it seems more Kindle than iPhone, but the advanced functionality it has (i.e. it does a lot more than just read books) points to what the Kindle should have been (and may still be). And, of course, something like this points to the integrated device of the future that will probably be what ends up being the final game-changer in terms of digital reading.

Hot on the heels of last Fall’s depressing NEA report “To Read or Not to Read” (itself a follow-up to the equally depressing NEA report “Reading at Risk”), which showed that more and more Americans are giving up reading, there’s now a report that states that reading is heading downhill in Britain, too. According to the website This is London, “A quarter of Britons say they have not read a book in the past year and nearly half admit to lying about their reading to appear more intelligent.”

In order to try and reverse these trends, the government is now urging “bosses to set up libraries in former workplace smoking rooms to transform employees’ reading habits,” not to mention that “parents are also being urged to spend at least ten minutes a day reading with their children.” Added to this is the insane notion that “more time would be set aside in the primary school day for reading as part of a review of the curriculum” (which means the Wii elective just flew right out the window along with the controller).

I find it pretty depressing that the nation that gave us the peerless geniuses Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham now has to scramble to erect libraries the way earlier generations built bomb shelters. And yet, funnily enough, books still have some cachet. Because, as the British study found, people had lied about reading certain books “just so they could join in with the conversation.” Which begs the question, I wonder if anyone taking part in those “conversations” had read the book in question, or were they all faking it?

Some clues as to why this is happening can be found in the website’s comments section, where one guy says that “I think people would be better of trying to think of ways to improve the world rather than wasting their lives reading any sort of book,” while another chimes in with “It’s not that we don’t want to read. It’s simply this drivel they publish nowadays and try to pass it off as bestsellers. There’s nothing to read! No thanks. I’d much rather read a good article online.” And, of course, none of this is relegated just to Britain. These depressing trends are being seen in lots of countries (mine included). Print is disappearing from our schools, parents spend less time reading to their kids, and your average “man on the street” found his way there via Google Maps.

The other day I came across the clip above on Gawker, which is taken I guess from David Lynch’s introduction to his film Inland Empire, but here it has been Youtubed into a parody of an iPhone ad. Needless to say, Lynch is not too happy with the idea of you watching Eraserhead on your cell phone. In the clip, Lynch says that “You will never in a trillion years experience the film…you’ll be cheated.” He then goes on to call the situation, “Such a sadness.”

First of all, a trillion years is a really long time. Second of all, it’s not really up to him anymore, is it? I mean, is it better to see the movie in a crowded theater when the film is preceded by twenty minutes of previews and commercials, only to have people sitting all around you talking and chomping on popcorn the entire time (not to mention getting, and actually answering, calls on their cell phone?). This versus maybe watching it on an iPhone at home, in a comfy chair, curled up and cocoon-like. Which is the more intimate experience?

Yes, a big screen is great, but to think that true cinema can only be experienced inside a theater is going to lead people like Lynch locking us immobile into seats a la Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, forcing us to watch movies with our eyes pried open (heaven forbid we blink and miss something). Instead, Lynch needs to realize that, as a filmmaker, he has lots of control behind the camera, and none anywhere else. Where and how people watch his films is not up to him. Like when a Woody Allen character years ago joked about reading Finnegans Wake on rollercoaster; hey, it’s our choice to do so. And if Lynch, or other directors (Spielberg has been similarly dim and caustic when it comes to things like this), think that it’s not, then they’re going to limit their audience wildly, and this is going to only hurt, and not help, their careers.

In the end, a big screen is not going to make a bad movie good, nor will a small screen make a good movie bad. True, it might add up to a different experience, but so do a dozen other factors (all of which are out of the control of the filmmakers). Maybe this is just a knee-jerk reaction from directors since they get pushed around so much by the film companies (even boy-genius Orson Welles saw pretty much every post-Kane movie recut to some extent by his studio bosses). But the truth is that the control, in a digital age, is in the hands of the consumers. And if Lynch or anyone else doesn’t like that, they’d better stop making films all together. If not, they can face the alternative: their film playing in a theater, but the theater is empty.

I was saddened by the news last week that Tom Wolfe had left longtime publisher Farrar Straus and Giroux for Little Brown, seemingly because Little Brown offered him more money for this new novel, Back to Blood. Wolfe is a writer I have long liked and admired, and when I first saw him speak in New York a couple of years ago I was as excited as when I saw Woody Allen (another hero) in the flesh walking through Central Park. I also used to work with FSG when I worked for their parent company, Macmillan, and during my time there I witnessed first-hand the amazing job they did with Wolfe and the commitment they had in general to literature. FSG is a storied company, and as Wolfe acknowledged last week to the Observer, “Roger Straus published my first book when absolutely nobody else was interested. An unknown newspaper reporter wants to publish a collection of magazine pieces, and he took a chance.” So I’m sad to see that Wolfe has decided to chuck a relationship built over four decades, and adopt a “take the money and run” attitude instead.

Not only that, but Wolfe seems to have turned into the kind of person he once used to satirize (not that a person who wears spats and custom-made white suits was ever too far from satire in the first place). With this move it seems that Wolfe is in full-on Master of the Universe mode, demanding big bucks and saying to the world that it’s all about the cash. Because there’s almost no way Little Brown can make back that kind of money. So what they’re buying, basically, is not Wolfe’s book but Wolfe himself. They want him as both an icon and a symbol of status, much the same way that the greed-obsessed characters from Wolfe’s best book, Bonfire of the Vanities, treated the Concorde as a clubhouse and complained that they couldn’t live on million dollar salaries (and those were, mind you, 1987 dollars). At a time when publishing is facing new challenges, not only to its bottomline but to its very existence (in the sixties you might have seen kids with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test under their arms, but now they have iPods in their ears instead), for Wolfe to make this be about money is extremely disheartening.

It reminds me of the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life where Jimmy Stewart is trying to convince the townspeople of Bedford Falls not to panic and pull all their money out of his Bailey Building and Loan, saying that their savings are never kept on hand but are instead invested in the property of their neighbors. But one grumpy old guy doesn’t get it (named Tom, by the way). Rather than be concerned about the town or the company, all he wants is his cash. ”I got two hundred and forty-two dollars in here,” he insists, not willing to listen to reason, “and two hundred and forty-two dollars isn’t going to break anybody.” Realizing it doesn’t have much choice, the Bailey Building and Loan hands over money it knows it can’t afford. So the old guy grudgingly gets his money, the same way Wolfe will get his. And of course later, at the end of the movie when Stewart is declared “the richest man in town,” it’s not meant literally. Instead, he has things that money can’t buy: respect, admiration and strength of character. Those bells at the end of the film signify an angel getting its wings, but right now Wolfe seems to be concentrating on the sound of a cash register.