Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The following are some random notes and thoughts from my recent ten-day trip to France and Italy:

Paris has a lot of bookstores, including ones devoted to certain areas of interest (ranging from philosophy to books about the ocean). In fact, around the Left Bank I was stumbling upon bookstores every couple of streets (I started to take pictures of them all, but gave up after the fifth one). In fact, our hotel was right next door to a used bookstore specializing in English books, and while there I bought a Zola novel which I then read throughout the trip and finished on the plane. And in the book Zola mentioned the street of the bookstore in which I bought the book and hotel we’d been staying in.

The bookstores in Paris were divided by region, and I thought that was really odd. Because where would you put Lolita? In American or Russian literature? After all, Nabokov was of course Russian, but Lolita was written in English, and the story takes place in America. (Okay, maybe that’s an easy one.) But what about a writer like Josef Škvorecký, who is Czech, and writes in Czech, but who lives in Canada and often writes about Canada and Canadian characters?

Both Italian and French versions of various F. Scott Fitzgerald novels listed the author as “Francis Scott Fitzgerald.” Yes, I know that’s what the “F” stands for, but still, he never published anything under that name.

The Shakespeare and Co. Bookstore in Paris (which is where the photo above is from) was a bit of a let down; it looked a lot bigger in all of those photos of a grinning Hemingway. That being said, it’s still a nice bookstore, and I thought it charming that the resident dog was aptly named Collette.

Many Italian and French publishers publish books with practically bare covers; a lot of them looked almost like galleys. A friend of mine who is a librarian in a small French town said that the books with designed jackets get checked out much more than the ones without.

In a Parisian bookstore, when just sort of hovering of a table of books, I was drawn to a beautiful book by Julien Gracq. When I picked it up I saw something I’d never seen before: a book that had untrimmed edges at the top. I’m used to seeing those occasionally on American books (usually on John Updike novels), but when I do, the untrimmed pages are on the side. Upon closer examination, I discovered that the untrimmed pages were also uncut. Indeed, the top of each page was sort of webbed, and you couldn’t read the entire page. My two Parisian friends who were walking around Paris with me and my wife that day, knew the publisher — José Corti — and explained that the reader has to cut each of the pages in order to read the book. This seemed really odd to me, and like a lot of work (I mean, getting the plastic wrap off of a CD is bad enough; imagine having to do it for every song or bar of music).

The majority of the people sitting around me on my various flights (to Paris, to Venice, and back to New York) weren’t reading anything. In fact, a group of kids on my flight back to the States just sat in their seats for over eight hours, and not one of them that I could see (from about six of them) took out any form of reading material during the duration of the flight. Instead, they listened to their iPods, watched the movies, or talked to each other.

While staying with some Italian friends in Milan, I was surprised see them consult a phone book. We were looking up a pizzeria a friend of theirs had recommended, and instead of hopping online our host pulled out the white pages. This was shocking to me since I haven’t consulted a phonebook since the ‘90s. And then, in an age of Google Maps, as we were running out the door and someone asked if we knew where the restaurant was, once again our host consulted the phone book for the address instead of the Internet.

In Paris I was able to find wireless networks pretty much everywhere, which allowed me to find our exact location on my iPod Touch (not to mention check e-mail and read The New York Times). But in Milan and Venice, I came across practically no wireless networks, and our hosts in Milan had only limited access to the Internet via a pay-as-you-go model.

While the Italians didn’t seem very wired in term of the Internet, on a train trip from Venice to Milan I was sitting next to a teenage girl who spent the entire two hour trip glued to her cell phone. She used it non-stop to either text, talk, or play games. American teens are probably also this wired, and I just haven’t sat next to one for any appreciable amount of time. Still, I was pretty impressed with the amount of time this teenager spent using her phone. Also, while the rest of us in the six-person compartment read or listened to music, the only thing the teenager’s eyes were glued to was the screen of her phone.

And finally, the film European Vacation is indeed the masterwork I always thought it was. During the trip I kept thinking of it and referring to certain scenes over and over again, specifically the “Do you want to watch cheese or snow?” scene. This is because every time I checked into a hotel and turned on the TV, the cable had about six channels, each of them offering dubbed American shows (Happy Days in Italian; they call Richie Rickie) or else there was some weird documentary that made no sense to me. And, of course, any time I contemplated trying to speak French, I thought of this scene.