Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The website of The Los Angeles Times recently launched a collaborative writing project entitled Birds of Paradise. This is going to be a sort of “wiki novel,” with professional writer Steve Lopez writing the first chapter but — as the Times’ website states — “It will now be up to readers to write the next chapter and the next and so on.” This is a pretty interesting idea, and I’ll be curious to read the results. Of course, Penguin UK already dabbled with this a few years ago with their own wiki-novel A Million Penguins. And while the results in that case may not have been stellar in terms of literary value, the experience showed how just how ready and willing readers are to be writers. In an age of Youtube and Wikipedia, more and more people aren’t content to just sit and consume content; they also want to play a part in creating it.

What I also find interesting about Birds of Paradise is that, a 150 years ago, Dickens had his classic works serialized in newspapers (as did many other writers at the time). And so it’s now fascinating to see, on the website of a newspaper, novelistic serialization again appearing. Of course, the difference this time is that the readers of the newspapers are now writing the book, rather than a professional writer. The Internet, the rise of user-generated content, and the trend of “crowdsourcing” has shown that we’re all professionals now. Or rather, the idea of “amateur” and “professional” is fast flying out the window.