Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Earlier today I was part of the annual We Media conference, which is put on by the iFocos organization. The conference is taking place in Miami, Florida, and I was honored to be part of the first day’s keynote address, which consisted of a conversation between me and designer Roger Black. The crowd was really smart, and the conversation flowed well and smoothly. In fact, the session after mine was called “Print Reincarnated.” And, of course, something can’t come back to life if it hasn’t already died. Because the conference was wired, there were people liveblogging the event, and I think there’s going to be video on my entire session, but for now here’s a good link. I’ll update this post as I or if I get more links.

Update: audio from the morning sessions.

Update: new photo.

Update: more blog coverage.

Update: yet more blog coverage.

Adrian Tomine (who, incidentally, way back in the day illustrated the cover of the third issue of my zine Our Noise) has a New Yorker cover this week entitled “Shelf Life.” It basically traces the trajectory of a book’s life, starting with the writer composing it and the publisher accepting it, then showing the book being published and someone reading it, until it finally ends up being tossed on a fire to keep homeless people warm. It’s a sad, but of course sometimes correct, depiction of what happens to books. However, the same thing could be done with cars, toasters or iPods. Every product starts out as inspiration, moves to the drafting board, the production line, and then goes into someone’s hands before ending up, finally, on the scrap heap. There’s nothing much out there that evades this fate, and books are no different. So what the Tomine cover needs is a few extra panels that show either the writer, or one of the book’s readers, sitting on a park bench with a thought balloon above their head that encloses the book. Because what the New Yorker cover conveys perfectly is that books are physical objects that have a life span. What the cover completely misses, however, is the fact that writing, words, and literature have a soul that transcends any physical object. So whatever was between the covers of the book that Tomine depicted will continue to live on, even after the book itself goes up in flames. In fact, the book’s the least interesting thing about the process. As William Burroughs said, “Language is a virus.” Well, in a way, stories are also viruses. We catch them when we read them, and then we pass them on to others when we talk about them, or else when their ideas infect us in a way that changes our behavior. Basically, words and stories leave their trace in us long after the book that initially spread the ideas in the first place is gone.

After posting a photo recently of a designer who suggested stuffing books into slats in the ceiling (printed pages being used as a form of ersatz insulation), Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing this week had another photo that shows how books are being used in some people’s lives; this time it’s as decoration for a staircase. According to the designer, “Limited by space, we melded the idea of a staircase with our client’s desire for a library to form a ‘library staircase’ in which English oak stair treads and shelves are both completely lined with books. With a skylight above lighting the staircase, it becomes the perfect place to stop and browse a tome.” However, it also becomes the perfect place to stick large amounts of a medium that is becoming increasingly unused in our everyday lives. I mean, knowledge may be power, but books are increasingly becoming lumber. And while scaling this staircase no doubt gives the owners of this Victorian row house a certain tweedy and nostalgic thrill — “Hey, sweetie, remember when we had time to read books instead of spending our time having a designer decorate our Victorian row house?” — I can’t help but think that they’re going to be doing a lot more treading the stairs than reading the books.

Alt-country music magazine No Depression, created thirteen years ago, recently announced that it’s going to cease printing a physical edition. However, the magazine’s website will continue to exist, and will be expanded with additional content. And yet, while the editors claim that the website “will in no way replace the print edition,” the fact that the website’s going to continue to exist while the magazine goes away speaks volumes.

In a note in the recent issue, the magazine’s editors cited numerous reasons for the decision to halt printing the magazine, such as the lack of advertising revenue and “the precipitous fall of the music industry.” But, of course, it’s more complicated than that; this is about publishing and paper as much as it is about words and music:

The decline of brick and mortar music retail means we have fewer newsstands on which to sell our magazine, and small labels have fewer venues that might embrace and hand-sell their music. Ditto for independent bookstores. Paper manufacturers have consolidated and begun closing mills to cut production; we’ve been told to expect three price increases in 2008. Last year there was a shift in postal regulations, written by and for big publishers, which shifted costs down to smaller publishers whose economies of scale are unable to take advantage of advanced sorting techniques.

So while it’s depressing to see yet another magazine bite the dust, at least the brand (and hopefully the archives) will continue to live online.

One of the side effects of having been a teenager in the ‘80s is that I now often associate classic songs with old commercials that either featured them or else completely rewrote their lyrics in order to suit the ad (e.g. “Sittin’ on the dock of a bay drinking Hires”). Because of this, the first time I heard the song “Turn, Turn, Turn” by The Byrds it wasn’t on the radio or a stereo, but instead it was on TV in a commercial for Time Magazine. (If I’d had hippie parents, this of course would not have been the case.) Anyway, as the lyrics to that song state (that is, as Pete Seeger adapted some words from the Book of Ecclesiastes):

To everything - turn, turn, turn
There is a season - turn, turn, turn

I thought of this yesterday as I read an article on the Folio website about comments made by Time Magazine’s managing editor, Richard Stengel, that he delivered earlier in the week at the Direct Marketing Association’s 22nd annual Circulation Day event. Stengel, in addition to talking about how Time needs to remain a vital brand, acknowledged the challenges and opportunities that a digital world presents. In fact, he went so far as to admit that, if print’s not dead right now, it will be one day, saying “Someday there will be people who don’t know there’s a print product.” Of course, for all of the readers that the Web has siphoned away from Time Magazine, whether it’s because of RSS readers that collect headlines from various sources, or else online-only outlets like Salon and Slate, this fate — for many publications — has already arrived. Or rather, people know that there’s physical product but they eschew the printed item for its online equivalent. And as this happens, like in that song by The Byrds, yet another thing turns, changes, and ends.

Illustration: Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Bird Box)

During this morning’s opening keynote sessions of the second O’Reilly Tools of Change conference, which is being held this week in Manhattan, a number of the speakers did their best to kill the age-old (well, maybe not age-old, but certainly decade-old) notion that “content is king.” Instead, Stephen Abram, in a great talk entitled “Information 3.0: Will Publishers Matter?” stressed that context is king, not content. He then went on to describe different aspects of what’s becoming known as a “sharing economy,” where people don’t trade money in a typical transaction but instead give their time to create or share something with a community (e.g. Wikipedia, which was mentioned a dozen times in the morning sessions alone). One sessions later, author Douglas Rushkoff, in a speech entitled “Whose Story is This, Anyway? When Readers Become Writers,” doing his own bit to kill the idea of content being king, said that “contact is king.” Rushkoff’s idea is that the main point of content is to offer people the opportunity to socialize. And it’s that socializing, or socialization, that’s the real point; it’s the contact that’s important, not the content in and of itself. He summed up his point by saying that “Content is an excuse for people to interact.” I think both ideas, that it’s either “context” or “contact” that is king — instead of content — are really interesting and, in their own ways, revolutionary (and this might be the only time in histroy when a revolution will be good for a king).

Next week I’ll be moderating a panel at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference. The session is entitled, Literary Bloggers: The New Online Insiders. Here’s a description:

While traditional publications such as The New York Times and Publisher’s Weekly continue to cover the book world, an entirely new (and, in most cases, totally independent) breed has sprung up online: literary bloggers. These bloggers not only cover the art and process of writing, but also the industry itself and its various players.

From web sites that trade in publishing industry gossip, to blogs that teach you how to get published, literary bloggers have created a whole new world online that is quickly proving as indispensable as its traditional print-based counterparts. And now that they’re here to stay, what can we learn from literary bloggers? How are they not only participating in the publishing discussion, but changing it? And what effect are these bloggers having on the industry (not to mention its content)?

This panel will examine all of these questions and more, putting in context the hype and the facts, showing how bloggers are helping to usher the book industry into the era of Publishing 2.0.

I have four really great panelists, Ron Hogan, Mark Sarvas, Kassia Kroszer, and Maud Newton, so come by and check us out if you’re attending the conference.

Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing recently had a post featuring a new storage idea for books. And while this is, as the website Apartment Therapy describes it, an “ingenius book storage idea,” it is also yet another sign that books may no longer be about ideas that fill minds, but are instead becoming just props to fill our space. After all, if you’re going to stick something where there’s normally only spider webs or insulation, then it must not be a big part of your life.