Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Via Galleycat, last week two new book blogs were launched by such august print icons as The New Yorker and Harpers. The New Yorker blog is named “The Book Bench,” while the Harpers blog is entitled “Sentences.” It’s nice to see these respected print brands enter the blogosphere, and I think it just goes to show how even the most tried-and-true company needs to embrace our increasingly digital age.

On Monday, Information Age columnist L. Gordon Crovitz had an essay in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Digital Future of Books.” The essay is ostensibly about the Kindle, but he also touches upon the general idea and nature of digital books. For instance, Crovitz writes that “perhaps a new digital device like the Kindle can help us regain the attention spans earlier devices helped us lose. If so, this could become a great era for books, or more accurately for the future of words that for centuries could be delivered only in book form.”

He also quotes a bit from my book, Print is Dead:

Much is at stake. As Mr. Gomez concluded, “what’s really important is the culture of ideas and innovation” books represent. But “to expect future generations to be satisfied with printed books is like expecting the BlackBerry users of today to start communicating by writing letters, stuffing envelopes and licking stamps.”

It’s a nice article, and I especially like its last line: “With innovations like the Kindle, digital media can help return to us our attention spans and extend what makes books great: words and their meaning.”

“They substitute the telegram with the fax machine.
What did you substitute me with?”

–”Chocolates”
The Aluminum Group

The Aluminum Group are one of my favorite bands. Every since their landmark 1999 record Pedals, I’ve been hooked on their blend of literary references, crooning vocals, and glitchy production techniques (if Burt Bacharach joined Tortoise, it’d sound like The Aluminum Group). The song “Wheat and Tare” from their last record, 2003’s Morehappyness, might be one of my top-ten favorite songs of all time; every time I hear it I kind of wilt. I have all of their records, and since their two previous releases were installments of a trilogy entitled “Happyness“ (with the first record named Happyness and the second being Morehappyness), I was of course looking forward to yet another record from them. In fact, each of the Happyness records have similar artwork and packaging, so while I wanted of course to hear the new songs, I also wanted to get the new record so I could add it to the shelf alongside its musical mates.

So when I read a positive review of the new Aluminum Group record on Pitchfork a month or so ago, I was excited and couldn’t wait to get my hands on the new record. The first thing I did was go to Amazon and search for the group. I was pleased to see the new record (entitled Little Happyness) listed alongside all of the other records I own, including the first two Happyness records. However, the new record was listed only as a bunch of MP3 downloads, not as an actual record. Not satisfied, I went to the record label’s website, Minty Fresh.

On the Flash-filled site I found a purchase page for the record (can’t include a link to it since the whole site’s in Flash, which is annoying), but — again — this was just for the MP3’s, and not the CD. Growing a bit frustrated, I went to the band’s website, which had an announcement for the new record as a splash landing page; from this page you could read the band’s bio, contact them, and listen to the new record. But I still could not find a link to buy the CD (nor any language saying “this is a download only release”). Finally, feeling a bit exasperated, I e-mailed someone at the label who promptly wrote me back saying that, at this time, there’s no plan for a physical release of Little Happyness.

This was a bit of a let down for me. Because, while what’s of course most important is the music, it does seems strange not to be able to have a physical product. I mean, the group itself is named after a line of furniture, and in their songs they name-check all kinds of artists and works of art (ranging from Tom of Finland to Erte). So while I’d just put CD instantly into my iTunes, I still want to own the actual product.

Even Radiohead augmented it’s digital release of their last record with actual CDs for people who wanted the physical items for their collections. So while I’m all for the instantaneous gratification that downloading an entire record with the click of a mouse offers, for the bands that I really like, and whose work I’ve been collecting for years, I’d still like to have — in addition to the MP3s — a physical copy of the record. For books, this will probably be the same. Books that people consume like candy — thrillers and murder mysteries; the kinds the airport bookstores are chock full of — will be similar; the content will be delivered digitally, and that’s where it’ll end. But for certain die hard fans, record companies and publishers alike need to realize that substituting CDs with MP3s may not always suffice. Yes, video killed the radio star, but digital delivery won’t completely replace physical goods.

This weekend the live-action version of the ‘60s animated series Speed Racer is hitting theaters. Or rather, given the overwhelmingly negative reviews the film has so far received, it seems more like it’s crashing into theaters. One of the reviews that caught my eye was Richard Corliss’s in Time Magazine. Entitled, “The Future of Movies,” Corliss seems to think that the multitude of computer-generated special effects in the film are a sign of things to come (for a long, long time): “Speed Racer announces the arrival of the virtual movie. If you watch the film overwhelmed by the assault of seductive visual information and wonder what you’re seeing, here’s the happy answer: the future of movies.”

I don’t agree with this, mainly because it doesn’t have to be as either/or as Corliss describes. Just because moviemakers now have computers to help them make films, it doesn’t mean that the ensuing movies need to be wholly computer created. (Even Tron, oh so many years ago, featured more of Jeff Bridge than it did the light cycles.) So instead of creating candy-colored worlds where human heads are the only real thing on the screen, while everything else is computer-generated, moviemakers will use computers to tell their stories, not be the stories.

For instance, I recently watched Charlie Wilson’s War on DVD, and during the movie Tom Hanks visits a refugee camp in Afghanistan where he’s horrified at the tens of thousands of people living in squalor. In the past, this scene would have been a David O Selznick moment: a wide-angle crane shot gradually revealing more and more bandaged extras; dozens becoming hundreds until you finally wonder where they could have even found so many people, not to mention get them all into costume and array them on the battlefield. But today, with modern technology, computers can help create just as effective a shot (without having to rely on hundreds of extras). In the refugee camp scene in Charlie Wilson’s War, as the camera pulls back, you see all the tents with all the people and even though you can slightly tell that the scene has been not only digitally altered but computer-created, it’s okay; the scene is using computers to do something easily (and cheaply) that would have been too expensive and painstaking to do for real. Besides, it’s just one shot in a movie filled with flesh-and-blood actors.

Yes, this is same technology the Wachowski brothers use in Speed Racer to create an entirely synthesized world, but the Charlie Wilson’s War example shows that special effects need not batter us upside the head. Instead, they can be used for accents and nuance, not as bread and butter. (Remember that in even the ultra-influential sci-fi noir film Blade Runner, the amazing special effects and set design were in aid of what was a pretty kick-ass story.) So when another review — this time in the San Francisco Chronicle — declares about Speed Racer that, “If this action extravaganza represents the future of movies, it’s going to be a sad, dead and awful future,” I think there’s plenty of time to make sure this doesn’t happen. The future’s a long way off, and hopefully by the time it arrives we’ll have learned to put story ahead of effects, and people above computers.

Last week I wrote about my experiences at the recent Video Games Live concert, and how the interactivity I saw in the video game footage, not to mention the reaction of the crowd at the mere mention of the names of some of these games, presaged — in my mind, anyway — the death of the novel. Well, after last week’s release of the ultra-successful game franchise Grand Theft Auto, I can’t help but continue to think that, for at least a certain generation, books are on the way out and these new, hyper-realistic and interactive games are in (and are here to stay). According to an article last week in The New York Times, “The [Grand Theft Auto] release is expected to be one of the biggest video game debuts ever, extending a franchise that has already sold 70 million copies since its arrival in 1997.”

But wait; there’s more:

But customers’ intense desire for video games extends beyond Grand Theft Auto. Despite pressure on consumers’ entertainment budgets, they keep spending more money on games. Over all, the industry is having a banner year. Software sales were up 63 percent in March compared with March 2007, according to NPD Group, which tracks sales. Equipment sales were up 46 percent over the same period.

“People say that if consumers are down to their last $50, the last three things they’ll buy are milk, eggs and video games,” said Colin Sebastian, a video game industry analyst with Lazard Capital Markets.

When’s the last time you heard people talk like that about books? Well, specifically, it was last July, when the final book in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series came out. But that was almost a year ago, and no more Potter books are set to appear. In fact, she’s finally off the bestseller list for the first time in a decade. And yet, whereas studies have shown that — despite the phenomenal interest in and success of the Potter books — literacy rates among children have continued to decline, the success of games like Grand Theft Auto are a gateway to the playing of yet more games (and probably the reading of even fewer books). Potter may not lead to Pynchon, but Auto certainly leads to Halo. You can argue about whether or not this is good for society, but you can’t deny that it’s a trend that shows no sign of reversing itself.