Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

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.