Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The Los Angeles Times recently announced that they will cease publication of the standalone Sunday book review section. As further fallout from this decision, a number of editors will lose their jobs. This is of course bad news, but I also think it needs to be kept in perspective. For instance, on the website LA Observed, four former editors of the LA Times book review have an essay that discusses the situation (LA Observed calls the essay a “protest” but I always envision a protest as involving marching and signs, or at the very least a pickup truck, generator, and one of those creepy inflatable union rats). “The dismantling of the Sunday Book Review section and the migration of a few surviving reviews to the Sunday Calendar section,” write the four editors, “represents a historic retreat from the large ambitions which accompanied the birth of the section.” While I’m sure that there will be plenty of Angeleno bibliophiles who will miss the book review section, I’m not sure its disappearance constitutes a “historic retreat.” George Washington and his army’s various escapes from the British in 1776, now that was retreat. This is just a business decision based on the undeniable facts of readership, circulation, etc.

In the essay, the editors also frame the decision to kill the book review section, but keep the popular Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, as hypocritical:

…since its founding in 1996, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books has attracted upwards of 140,000 people to the UCLA campus from all walks of life throughout Southern California. Four hundred writers from all over America typically participate. The written word is celebrated. It is the most significant civic event undertaken by the Los Angeles Times to deepen literacy and to strengthen the bond between its news coverage and its far-flung community of readers. But without the Book Review itself, the book festival will be a hollow joke.

I think that saying that the festival will be either hollow or a joke without the book review is itself kind of a joke. If anything, I see much more worth in the festival than the book review section. At the festival, people can meet writers, and interact with other readers and booklovers within their community. This seems to me much more vital and real than reading what someone like Walter Kirn thinks of someone like Michael Chabon. If anything, the loss of the book review now makes the festival more important, not less. Or rather, it makes the festival much more practical. Because book reviews are too often about critics, and festivals are all about people. After all, I’d take Woodstock over Rolling Stone any day.

Via Buzzmachine, last week I discovered Wordle, a really great site/online application that generates “word clouds” from either text that’s pasted into the Wordle site, or else from words that are scooped from a website or blog. According to the Wordle site, “The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” Above is the word cloud I generated over two weekends ago from this site. And it looks like it’s scooping text from just my home page and not the entire site (I really don’t write about either Jonathan Franzen or Franz Kafka that much), but I still think the cloud is a pretty accurate representation of the overall feel of this site’s content and my own ideas. And because of that, what I really love about this is that the two biggest words that appear are “people” and “reading.” Yes, a few other book 2.0 terms are there like “screen,” “Apple” and “futurist” (as are plenty of book 1.0 words such as “writer,” “paperback” and “jacket”). But rising above all of that clutter are the two core terms and ideas which should always be at the center of the future of the book debate, the same way they’re front and center in the word cloud above: reading and people.

In the recent edition of The Nation, Eric Alterman has a story entitled “I Read the News Today…Oh Boy.” The thrust of Alterman’s story is that newspapers are in serious decline, and the newspaper industry can’t figure out a way to stop the bleeding.

Here’s how he sums it up:

The dearth of decent ideas designed to save newspapers–or reinvent them for the digital age in ways that preserve their crucial democratic functions–is curious and depressing. It’s curious because some of the smartest, most ambitious and most civic-minded people in America are deeply engaged with the problem. It is depressing because the only ones with the self-confidence to undertake radical measures appear to be completely off their respective rockers.

Alterman then goes on to list a bunch of ideas that various newspaper editors have come up with to get more people reading newspapers, including giving copies away to college kids (but even this doesn’t work since college kids have better things to do than read newspapers, even free ones).

In the end, Alterman admits that — even though the stakes are sky-high — that even he can’t come up with any good ideas for how to save newspapers:

I don’t have a better idea, except to repeat, again, the following: the loss of daily newspapers is a significant threat to the future of our democracy. It is far too important to be left in the hands of a bunch of clueless media moguls and their “chief innovation officers.”

Alterman here seems to be paraphrasing Clemenceau’s famous phrase “War’s too important to be left to the generals” (with Alterman’s version being, I guess, “Newspapers are too important to be left to the moguls”). And yet, in this case, the real problem is how important Alterman is making newspapers. I mean, is he serious when we says that “the loss of daily newspapers is a significant threat to the future of our democracy”? Because that is ridiculous.

Democracy does not rely on newspapers. Democracy relies on honest journalism and reporting (or, at the very least, freedom of the press, which is an idea all its own). Because if the content that appears on Fox News were distributed via a newspaper instead of a cable channel, and it was the only newspaper we had, it would surely be a bad thing for our democracy.

Anyway, Alterman’s forgetting the first real tenet of the democracy he seems so intent on saving: this is a government for the people, by the people. And the people, if they choose an alternate way of getting their news and information (such as websites and blogs) will have made their decision. The point shouldn’t be to just shove a newspaper into someone’s hand, but rather to instill in that person the curiosity to find out the truth in the first place.

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing wrote last week about another instance of someone using books in an, uh, interesting way. This time books are being used to create what Doctorow calls a “marvelous” chair (pictured above). And while I’ve written about a number of design uses involving books or bookcases in the past (including sticking books inside staircases and ceilings, in addition to having them be part of a chair), this chair made out of books is surely one of the stranger (not to mention least respectful) uses of books I’ve seen so far. I mean, do we now care so little for books that we’re going to just sit on top of them? Why not just put a layer of them on the floor and walk all over them? I bet a bunch of mass market paperbacks would feel kind of springy under the feet.

Of course, what’s manifestly different with this latest example of creative book repurposing is that, whereas before books were being stored in decorative ways for potential re-reading later on, this chair is expressly made from “discarded paperbacks.” It reminds me of a scene in the Rodney Dangerfield classic Back to School, when his Melon clothing company tries to come up with a cuddly doll to rival the then popular Cabbage Patch Kids. Their answer? Melon Patch Kids. A company executive describes the new product during a meeting: “Now, the competition exploits the notion that their dolls are orphans. The Melon Patch Kids are not orphans; they’re abandoned!” Because if we’re now starting to use books as chair cushions, it’s just a matter of time before they’re “recycled” as firewood.

Via Galleycat, today I read about an event entitled “Great Expectations: A Reading Marathon.” Scheduled to occur this October, and started by the RiverRun Bookstore in New Hampshire, the plan is for independent bookstores to host “24-hour reading marathons in their stores, designed to highlight the importance of reading to our culture, as well as create an opportunity for booklovers to tackle the next book on their to-read pile.” And while I appreciate the spirit behind “Great Expectations,” I think that this doesn’t do anything to “highlight the importance of reading.” Instead it’s just, as Galleycat describes, a stunt. I mean, I think it’s great when Symphony Space reads the entirety of Ulysses on Bloomsday; that makes perfect thematic sense (something which the RiverRun bookstore, with such a Joycean name, must appreciate). But to just pick one day a year when everyone sort of crams words into their head just for the sake of doing so, in a literary version of the Coney Island Nathan’s hot dog eating contest, only further marginalizes reading rather than truly endorsing it. And while I have indeed read books in one sitting — in marathon stretches — when I was struck by certain material, to force people around the country to hunker down and read non-stop seems almost like punishment (no matter how RiverRun tries to spice things up in their Handy Tips for Hosting a Read-A-Thon: “Break up the round-the-clock reading with a few activities. Literary Trivial Pursuit, local author readings, and midnight snacks all are fun possibilities”: going home early is also a fun possibility). And if this caught on, and became an annual thing, then I could see reading becoming for people a yearly chore akin to having their teeth cleaned. The bottomline is that we need to try and get people to read more, but I’m not sure this is the best way to do so.

Last week Apple introduced its newest iteration of the iPhone, the 3G, and people around the world lined up outside stores (sometimes overnight) to be one of the first ones to get it. Now, while this has become routine (people have been known to join a line outside of an Apple store without really knowing what they’re getting in line for), this is still a pretty remarkable event. I mean, people getting in line for a phone? It used to be that people bought a new phone every ten years, choosing to wait online for things like Springsteen tickets. Not anymore.

And yet, as someone who works in publishing I couldn’t help but be jealous last Friday morning as I passed a bunch of people lined up outside of a Sprint store waiting for their iPhones. After all, when’s the last time someone camped out all night to buy a book? Sure, people lined up for the Harry Potter books, but in those instances they were craving the the next installment of Harry’s story; that it just so happened to come in book form — towards the end of the franchise — was almost a beside the point.

But when’s the last time you — if you ever have — saw someone dressed up as a book itself? When’s the last time someone posed as a dust jacket rather than as a figure posing on a dust jacket? Of course, this doesn’t happen. Why? Because people don’t love books themselves; rather, they love the characters and worlds found inside of books. So despite all of the talk of books being amazing technological devices, you never see people waiting outside all night in order to buy a blank one.

Photo from Gizmodo

Via MJ Rose’s blog, today I found what seems to be the third part of a four-part conversation with Corrections author Jonathan Franzen. After making what seems to me some terribly shaky reasoning when it comes to publishing work about the lives of his friends and family (Franzen says that it hurts them less to read about themselves in print than it would hurt him not to write the material; WTF?), he then goes on give his “assessment of online reading,” which Franzen acknowledges is “harsh”:

Kafka is about as substantive as a writer can be, and it may be an interesting exercise to spell out the text of “Before the Law” in skywriting over Miami Beach, but I don’t think it will satisfy readers who care about Kafka’s substance. Part of the magic of literature resides in the making of the indelible mark — in our belief in its indelibility. Serious readers are able to invest even the crappiest, most beat-up paperback with a kind of magical permanence. To read Virginia Woolf on a little plastic screen that five seconds ago was filled with Ann Coulter is to undermine one of the basic conditions of literary reading. It’s to make all texts more or less equal and equally provisional. I admit that I may be particularly resistant to reading on a screen because I use a computer to write. When I see words are floating on a screen, I assume they’re still subject to revision. And it’s not that I assume they’re bad — I’m sure there’s plenty of interesting stuff getting published online. It’s more like the difference between fluorescence and a candle. Nothing you can do to a fluorescent fixture can make me want to have a romantic dinner by its light. Writing on the Web is at its best when it’s quick and spontaneous and in process. If there’s great fiction getting published online, I look forward to seeing it in print someday soon.

For me, Franzen basically undermines his own theory, because if “serious readers are able to invest even the crappiest, most beat-up paperback with a kind of magical permanence,” then why can’t serious readers do the same thing with a computer screen? And if they indeed can’t, all it shows is their prejudice for paper over plastic. Which is a shame since — as more and more important work begins to appear online — more and more “serious readers” are going to seriously limit themselves.

Also, for Franzen to use the example of Kafka (in terms of being a writer who must be read in print) is a poor choice. I actually think the writer of The Metamorphosis would find a certain kind of symmetry (if not downright poetry) in the fact that words he wrote on paper have been transformed to fit on a computer screen. Not to mention that the only place Kafka wanted his work to appear was a fireplace (he asked that upon his death his friend Max Brod destroy all of his work, a plea that Brod obviously ignored). So any talk of Kafka having to appear in book format goes against the wishes of the author himself.

Anyway, arguing about Virginia Woolf and Kafka is one thing, but we also need to focus on the new kinds of writing that will be created with computers, websites, blogs and RSS forming an integral part. And of course the bottom-line is that no one’s going to be forced to go digital, no more than stormtroopers are going to storm, or troop, into Franzen’s apartment and make him have romantic dinners by LED rather than candles. However, if he chooses to continue to ignore online writing, or just wait for everything to appear in print, he’s going to miss out on a lot.

Last week, a reader turned me on to an article entitled “The 21st Century Writer,” which happens to be the current cover story for The Futurist magazine. Written by the magazine’s senior editor, Patrick Tucker, the article is one of the best ones I’ve seen in a long time to discuss the evolving role of the writer in these digital times.

And while the fact that the essay is appearing in a magazine entitled The Futurist tips its hand slightly as to where the author falls in the future of the book debate (I would imagine an article on the same topic in Luddite Monthly would take the exact opposite point of view), but despite this Tucker places his argument deftly within historical and technological context:

For people who make their living selling words to readers—and indeed for readers themselves—these are times of upheaval. The information technology revolution has led to an explosion in textual content. More people are engaging in more conversations, sharing more opinions, learning more, and learning faster than anyone could have imagined just a few decades ago.

It’s a really great essay, and has many great quotes and bits of insight.