Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

In Print is Dead, in the chapter about eBooks, I describe how we usually find fault with science fiction books and movies:

In every book or film or piece of art from the last century that has depicted the future – from Jules Verne to George Lucas – we usually fault it twice: first for the things that didn’t come true, and then for failing to see the myriad of changes that did take place.

But last week, as I read The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick, I was struck by a few passages that seemed to almost perfectly portray aspects of our current digital age.

Published in 1981, The Divine Invasion is part of Dick’s VALIS trilogy. Comprising the last three novels published before Dick’s untimely death at the age of 53, the books were based on a religious experience that Dick had in 1974 when he felt he was zapped by a pink laser that he believed was extraterrestrial in origin.

At one point in The Divine Invasion, a character named Emmanuel (who is actually God in the body of a child) is given an electronic device at his school. Called an “information slate,” the gadget sounds an awful lot like either an eBook device or a Tablet PC. Made by I.B.M. (which, in the future, is part of the government), Dick describes each slate as having a “pale gray surface” and containing “common microcircuitry” (which makes it sort of seem like a Kindle). Each student is given one, and each device is “plugged into the school” (which sounds a lot like either an intranet if not the Internet). Plus, the fact that every child gets one reminded me of this story from last week in The New York Times about how colleges are handing out iPods to freshman. The slates quiz the students, answering questions and giving out information.

In the early ‘80s — at the dawn of the computer revolution — this could have easily been imagined. The slates Dick describes sound a bit like an expansion of any number of gizmos that existed back then, even my beloved Dataman that I had in elementary school. The big difference is that none of those devices were networked with other devices (the closest I came to that was my Coleco Head-to-Head Football). More interesting than this is a description a few pages later about a holographic (and thus obviously electronic) version of the Bible:

…the Bible expressed as layers at different depths within the hologram, each layer according to age. The total structure of Scripture formed, then, a three-dimensional cosmos that could be viewed from any angle and its contents read. According to the title of the axis of observation, different messages could be extracted. Thus Scripture yielded up an infinitude of knowledge that ceaselessly changed. It became a wondrous work of art, beautiful to the eye, and incredible in its pulsations of color.

This is a pretty wonderful description, and it kind of reminds me of the online version of Gamer Theory from last year where each paragraph had a graphical and color-coded representation on the screen. If that website were able to be portrayed in 3D, and was accessed on something like an iPhone, where you could flip through its layers and turn it over and around with your fingers, then you’d be close to experiencing what Dick had envisioned.

But even more interesting than even this is that, a decade before the birth of anything resembling the Internet that we know today, and twenty years before the birth of Wikipedia, Dick writes about a kind of Creative Commons online version of the Bible, a living document which anyone can add to.

As the narrator describes:

It was an open hologram. New information could be fed into it. Emmanuel wondered about that, but he said nothing…

What he could do, however, was type out on the keyboard linked to the hologram a few crucial words of Scripture, whereupon the hologram would align itself from the vantage point of the citation, along all its spacial axes. Thus the entire text of the Bible would be focused in a relationship to the typed-out information.

Emmanuel, being God, of course has a few things to add to the Bible. However, he resists the temptation:

He wanted to feed that into the hologram of the Bible, as an addendum, but he knew that he should not. How would it alter the total hologram? he wondered. To add to the Torah that God enjoys joyful sport … Strange, he thought, that I can’t add that. Someone must add it; it has to be there, in Scripture. Someday.

In an age of living documents, and the constant updating of blogs, the day of people correcting and adding content to websites is today. Too bad Philip K. Dick isn’t alive to see it.

Reading blogs and newspapers on the Kindle felt strange to me, whereas — after some initial trepidation — reading a book did not. Maybe it’s because the Kindle really does feel like the next step in the evolution of reading: words started out on the page, and now they’re migrating to the screen. Whereas reading a blog on a Kindle felt like a distinct step backwards. Because blogs are constantly updated, hyperlinked, are in color, and — more and more these days — feature video and audio. So while blogs, and certainly newspapers, began as just words, increasingly they consist of a variety of media, none of which make it to your Kindle (even photos really don’t look very good).

In fact, to me it felt like the reverse of the page/screen evolution; sort of like taking something 3D and turning it into 2D. That being said, when I was on a recent trip I was more glad than not to being able to download a few of my favorite blogs. Reading The Huffington Post on an airplane was a pretty cool experience, but it was also frustrating not to be able to hop from link to link, or to be able to click through to original stories the blog posts were sometimes commenting on.

Also, something that frustrated me about the blog process, and that again seems like a step backwards rather than forward, is that the Kindle seems to treat a blog like it’s a newspaper. It seems that, once a day, it “publishes” the blog, and sends it out to devices the same way a copy of The New York Times lands on your front door courtesy of the paperboy. As someone who reads a dozen blogs, and checks his RSS reader for updates throughout the day, the idea of a blog being a static thing makes no sense.

Instead of being pushed out to subscribers once a day, I don’t know why the Kindle version of a blog can’t constantly refresh and update itself (as long as the wireless signal is on, of course). Also, it’s jarring if you’re keeping track of the blog using both the Kindle and a computer. While I was traveling I would wake up and read my blogs and websites and then later, when I was on a plane, I would get out the Kindle and sync it up and want to read what I’d missed since packing my computer away. Instead, what I got on my Kindle was literally yesterday’s news. I had the same experience with reading a newspaper on the Kindle.

Even though newspapers have traditionally been thought of as static objects, something that’s delivered once a day, in the Internet age newspapers have become more like constantly updating stock tickers that deliver news and events as they happen. In fact, I check The New York Times website several times a day, the same way I check Daily Kos, because I know that the Times — online, anyway — will have fresh content throughout the day. But on the Kindle, the same as blogs, you get a static edition of a newspaper (presumably the same content that’s in the printed edition). And rather than the Kindle searching out the latest stories every time you turn on the wireless signal, what you get are day-by-day editions. And I don’t want to read newspapers on a Kindle; I want to read news.

The Kindle’s digital menu listing the dates of different editions of The New York Times is just a digital version of the clutter that I find in my living room after a few days of collecting the real thing. Instead of this, the blogs and newspapers I subscribe to should be singular entities that constantly update and change, the same as their online counterparts. The fact that this isn’t the case betrays the notion of the Kindle being a never-ending source of always and instantly replenished content; instead of the screen being a true portal, the device itself is just a vault.

However, I will say that reading the newspaper on a Kindle is a better experience than reading it online. For instance, it was really easy to navigate through a Sunday edition of The New York Times on the Kindle (if you know what sections you like; browsing through ALL of the stories is a chore), whereas I find that poking around on the website on a Sunday is a bit difficult. And while I still read the physical edition of the Times on the weekends (mainly because it’s too difficult to sit on a couch with a laptop while eating bagels), now that I have a Kindle I may finally cancel that subscription once and for all.

The first book I read on the Kindle was David McCullough’s 1776 (which I wanted to read because of the recent 4th of July holiday). And I must say that it never felt weird to be reading about the 18th century on an electronic device that would have appeared to George Washington as the work of men from outer space. In fact, I can imagine using the Kindle to read anyone from Tom Wolfe to Thomas Wolfe without it feeling either out of context or just plain wrong. (The only kind of writing that depends on its placement on the page — and thus would lose some of its punch in a reflowable format — is poetry). However, initially it did indeed feel a little funny to read a book on a computer screen; it involved subtly fighting against decades of learning.

I associate words with pages (the same way that I similarly associate small computer screens with content like e-mail, text messages and my iPod). So to mash the two together was, at first, a strange experience. It reminded me of the scene in Wall-E where the robot, after coming back from a day of smashing garbage and collecting treasures, has a spork (half spoon, half fork). He goes to add it to his collection, but he can’t decide whether to add it to his jumble of spoons or his haystack of forks. Instead, since this is a new hybrid of them both, he places the spork to the side (and, I guess, a new collection — and a new way of looking at utensils — begins). This example, as silly as it might seem, I think has real relevance to the future of the book debate. Because people insist on seeing books as books, and computer content as computer content, and yet eBooks are truly a mixture of the two in order to create something new.

As I started to really get into the book, the way the words appeared on the screen felt sort of magical. It was as if each time I “turned the page” I was shaking up a magic eight ball, with the words then lazily floating to the surface. The screen seemed to be like an Etch-A-Sketch, the screen a blank surface constantly filled and then erased, filled and then erased.

And yet all of the old behavior was there. Whereas, with a print book I’ll occasionally flip forward a few pages to see if the chapter I’m reading is about to end — searching for a good stopping point before I go to bed — with the Kindle I would do the same thing, hitting Next Page a few times to see if there was a natural break in the prose.

The only thing that was a little odd was that I never really knew where I was in the story. In print books progress is easy to tell because every night you gain satisfaction in looking at how many pages you’ve managed the get through. But reading an electronic book is like being on a treadmill; yes, you’re absorbing the content, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re not just running in place, going nowhere.

Yes, there are a series of dots at the bottom of that screen that show where you are in the story, but those dots can be misleading. The book I was reading was a non-fiction book, with a lot of endnotes (which, in a print edition, would take up a lot of pages at the back of book). And when I glanced down at the dots at the bottom of the screen at one point, which showed I was about three-fourths through the book, I thought I was three-fourths through the story. So I was a bit shocked when the story suddenly ended, and all of those remaining dots were representing content I didn’t want to read. This wouldn’t have happened in a print book.

You crack the spine of a book when you first start to read it the same way you crack your knuckles before you start a task you know will be a challenge. And when you do this — or at least, when I do this — I flip ahead to see how long the book is, to see what I’m up against. I’ve often felt daunted when reading the opening sentence of either a very long or multi-volume work (“For a long time I used to go to bed early”), gulping as I began my long climb up all of those words. And yet, none of that exists in an electronic format because eBooks are like icebergs: the words we see on the surface are not representative of how many of them are lurking below. This phenomenon essentially turns books into movies, because you know when a movie’s going to begin but you never know when it’s going to end. This is both good and bad.

Endings in movies can sneak up on you, which give them immense power. Think of last scenes of something like Birdy, Memento or even the more recent There Will Be Blood. Endings like those come out of nowhere, and can pack a wallop. Then again, not knowing when a movie will end can lead to peering at your watch in the dark, wondering when in the hell it will be over. I remember, in high school, being in a theater watching Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and just hating it. Every time a scene faded out I hoped it would be the end of the movie, and I was disappointed a dozen times when the screen faded in with yet more scenes. In a book, this is not the case.

We see the end of a book coming from pages away. In fact, sometimes the hardest thing to do, when you have only two or three pages left of a book, is to not go to the very last line and read it. The end is so close, and you want to get there so badly, that the temptation to take a quick glance is sometimes overpowering. On a Kindle, this is much more difficult. The pages are virtual, and you’re only being served up one page at a time (with not much of an idea of how that screen fits into the rest), so it’s like driving at night and not being able to see much past your headlights. For some people, this will seem a thrill; for others, it may seem a bit claustrophobic.

As I wrote in a previous post, I now own an Amazon Kindle and have been using it for the past couple of weeks.

In terms of the device itself, it’s very light and sleek (without, that is, the cover). The cover, I think, tries to make the Kindle look/feel like it’s either a moleskin journal or a hardback book, and yet it’s neither.

Once free of the cover, the Kindle feels great to hold is more than comfortable to read with one hand (either one). Plus, turning the page with the tip of a finger, or thumb, of the hand you’re holding the device with is a cinch. I had perfected how to do this with paperbacks years ago — in my pre iPod days — when I lived in Manhattan and would read on the subways during my commute, always having to hold onto my book with one hand and the subway pole with the other. I’m glad to see that the skill is again coming in handy.

However, as comfortable as the device feels in the hand, the “page” (meaning, the screen), rather than being truly white, is a kind of non-fat milk gray. In fact, since it’s contrasted with the matte white of the Kindle itself, the screen looks even grayer than it probably is. True, I’ve read plenty of books in my time that were printed on cheap, almost newsprint paper, which was both coarse to the touch and hardly white, so I’m hardly expecting the screen to be bone-white. But the “slate gray Victorian sky” tone of the Kindle screen doesn’t at all match the ultra crisp resolution found either an iPhone or a Pocket PC. And, at times, I find this to be a distraction.

In terms of how words look on the screen, I thought they looked great; text is very easy to read, and I didn’t mind having to have light in order to see the screen (since it’s not backlit, like a Blackberry or iPod). And changing the font size is really easy, and something I did often (like, at night — if I’m tired — I’ll make the font bigger and easier to read). But I also kept wanting to change the font itself. Why not offer a number of different fonts to choose from? That should be a setting the consumer can change as easily as the size of the font.

Another display issue that bothered me was the “ghosting” of the type: the fact that the words from the previous page seem to sort of hover on the screen even after you’ve changed the page. This makes the Kindle perennially feel like an old monitor with a Windows logo burned into the screen. I realize that this is an inherent design element/flaw with the eInk technology, and isn’t really the fault of the Kindle itself, but for me it’s a bit of a distraction. Is there really no getting rid of this?

One thing that I don’t mind about the Kindle is that it’s an extra device. I used to think that I wanted an integrated device — one thing that did everything — and that I wouldn’t want to carry around yet another device or gadget. But I actually like the fact that the Kindle is (more or less) just a device for the reading of content. Maybe this harkens back to the fact that every book is a destination; you get into bed and pick up a book because you want to read. You don’t pick up a book to take pictures, record video or get your voicemail. So the fact that I don’t use the Kindle to play solitaire is fine with me. True, that means I can’t read something if I leave the house and have just my cell phone in my back pocket. But then again, a cell phone screen is too small, and most books are too big, so carrying a Kindle seems the right compromise.

Besides, I tend to get weary when it comes to loading down devices with too many uses and bits of software; sooner or later, it’s going to get overloaded and crash. Or else the device will get so far removed from its original purpose that it’ll end up doing two things poorly instead of excelling at one (this reminds me of the New Yorker cartoon where a disgruntled customer in a bookstore says to a sales person, “No caffe latte? And you call yourself a bookstore?”). I’m starting to see this with the iPhone and iTouch. People are going crazy for the all of those applications, but each one (not to mention the music videos, movies and TV shows that iTunes now sells), is taking precious bits of memory. I have a 16GB iPod iTouch, and 18,000 songs on my computer at home. The last thing in the world I’m going to do is have half a dozen silly applications on my iPod that take away from my music collection (more Captain Beefheart, less Crash Bandicoot). It doesn’t make much sense to me to carry around an iPod and have it be PSP. So when it comes to storing books and text — for now — I’m fine carrying around a specialized device.

Because I wrote a book called Print is Dead, most people think I’m some super techno-futurist who eats astronaut food and has a Bluetooth headset permanently implanted in his ear. But the truth is that I fall much more on the book side of the computer/book debate. At least, I approach the debate from the book side, having been an ardent booklover for most of my life. True, I have a few Apple computers — a desktop and a laptop — and about five different sizes and kinds of iPods, but that may say more about my consumer habits rather than any inner philosophy.

Because of this, people are usually surprised when — after they ask me how I love my Kindle or Sony eReader — I sheepishly admit that I don’t own either. They think it’s odd that I wrote a book about eBooks and the future of reading without being a true and devout eBook person. Of course, this is precisely why I think I was a good person to write Print is Dead. I was, and to a certain degree still am, a skeptic of electronic reading and the idea that computer files will one day replace physical books. So even if even a skeptic like me, who treasures books and words, can believe that it’s what’s inside books that count — the words and the stories — then I think that even the most ardent bibliophile may one day see some worth in digital delivery.

However, I now own an Amazon Kindle. While I had been tempted to buy one since its initial release, both the scarcity and the price of the device had kept it on my wishlist rather than on my nightstand. And while I had written about the Kindle on my blog a few times, I had never really been able to use or even test drive the machine for any length of time. Yes, I had seen it at conventions or when someone down the hall from me at work bought one, but I’d never really lived with it.

During those initial experiences, I was mostly impressed by the Kindle but was hardly blown away. I mean, it looked much better than the advance photos I had seen (that initial unflattering one set against the blue backdrop that made the Kindle look like a Cyclon spaceship from the first version of Battlestar Galatica). So it was a relief to see it and hold it, in person, and discover that — while not as ingenious as an iPod — the Kindle is a wonderful invention. And then, as I started to use the device itself, buying a few books, subscribing to some blogs and a newspaper — as well as e-mailing documents to myself — I must admit that I fell in love.

So, during the next week or so I’m going to be writing about the Kindle, sharing some thoughts on the device as well as the reading experience in general…

The Telegraph in the UK is reporting on a new plan by Brooklyn writer Tao Lin to sell shares of his upcoming book. He’s doing this — charging $2000 per share to potential investors — in order to raise enough cash so that he can support himself while he completes his second novel. Lin, the author of a previous novel entitled Eeeee Eee Eeee (forget funds to finish his second book; I think he needs to take up a collection in order to get a good editor), thinks doing this will somehow “motivate” him. From the Telegraph story:

Tao admits that he hopes publicity generated by his innovative money-raising strategy will itself boost sales of the book, but he also says that being publicly owned — at least in a professional sense — would boost his motivation.

Um, I don’t think being “publicly owned” is good for anything, let alone motivation (true, a whip may make you move, but probably not in the direction you want to go).

In the end, as the Telegraph asks in its headline, is this “shameless self-promotion or the future of the publishing industry?,” I’d have to say it’s probably more the former and not quite the latter. But still, it’s interesting that the Web is making it all possible.