Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

There’s a long cover story this week in New York Magazine about publishing. Rather than leave any doubt as to the future of the book industry, the article is called “The End.” And while movies in the thirties and forties were never complete without those two words appearing in the final reel — those six letters giving cathartic closure and making us eager for yet more stories — what writer Boris Kachka seems to be saying with his piece is that not only is our movie over, but there won’t be a sequel. Time to leave the theater. Go home. Stick a fork in publishing; it’s done. Don’t believe me? Here’s the subheadline:

The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world.

And yet, even though I wrote a book called Print is Dead, even I don’t think that publishing is over. Rather, it just needs to change and be willing to embrace new ideas and business models. And while the challenges the industry faces are indeed difficult, they’re hardly insurmountable. Kachka himself points to a few hopeful enterprises (HarperStudio, the Kindle) but, for the most part, the article is more of the usual.

The New York Times reported today on Google’s newspaper scanning efforts:

Google has begun scanning microfilm from some newspapers’ historic archives to make them searchable online, first through Google News and eventually on the papers’ own Web sites…

Google will then serve up scans of newspapers either via Google, or on the site of the originating newspapers, which provides income for Google (in the first example) and/or traffic and visitors (and potentially income from advertising) for the original newspapers (in the second example).

And while Google got in hot water with its book-scanning program a few years ago, touching on raw nerves and igniting a debate about copyright, the newspaper initiative seems like a better idea. Because a July 21st issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1969 is a different kind of content from the novel The Godfather (which was published that same year). The novel is available from retailers, and is making money for its publisher and author. Whereas the newspaper is a quietly fading artifact, an orphaned antique not likely to find a foster home.  And that’s a shame since, in terms of being a sort of fossil record of our national identity, newspapers can be more valuable than books: a great novel has the ability to reflect our common hopes and dreams, but almost any old newspaper is an indispensable record of the quotidian details that make up our everyday lives.

Two years ago I posted the first entry to the Print is Dead blog; I’m not sure if that makes today a birthday or an anniversary (it’s probably neither and a bit of both). But as you can see from the above I went with candles as a graphic, so let’s call it a birthday.

I created the blog in the summer of 2006, just as I was finalizing a deal to write the book Print is Dead (which was itself an expansion of a 50 page essay I’d written and distributed privately to a few friends and colleagues that winter and spring). Initially I just wanted the blog to be a place where I could post, and thus have record of, articles that I’d read or come across concerning the future of the book debate. Because, at that point, I was still just sort of getting my head around the subject: compiling books to read, printing out articles for research, trying to learn everything I could.

It also seemed that every other day I was coming across something that was relevant to the topic and my argument, items and ideas that I was going to want to include somehow in the text. So rather than just printing out Web pages and sticking them in a folder, or even bookmarking the sites so I could visit them later, I wanted to post them as blog entries with links and a bit of commentary (mainly as a way of putting the link into some sort of context). Plus, it forced me think about my topic on a daily basis.

Looking back, it’s interesting for me to see how the posts evolved; how they got longer, became a bit more involved and, hopefully, more thought-out and precise. For instance, here’s a short post from 2006 about The Nation writing about newspapers. Here’s a longer article about a similar Nation article written two years later.

Bill Griffith, the creator of Zippy the Pinhead, wrote that “Comics is a language. It’s a language most people understand intuitively.” Blogs also have their own language, rhythm, and rules, and it certainly took me a while to discover that language. Plus, blogs have their own form.

A blog post is one long unraveling of prose; a digital version, almost, of Kerouac’s On the Road scroll. And so, the more I got into the language and format of blogging, the more I would write the posts with careful attention to the length of the paragraphs. I always kept in mind the fact that the reader would be reading my words in a continuous flow rather than divided into pages. This is similar to what musicians are up against; they now sequence records as one continuous program (for CD, if not download) instead of in two different halves for vinyl or cassette.

For a non-fiction book, the blog was a huge help in getting down, in a permanent way, my thoughts on my subject. What’s also interesting to me is that, because I was blogging as I wrote the book, some of the material I wrote as posts eventually made it into the finished draft. Of course, I’m not the first author to do this; many others have done this already and, I suspect, lots of writers are doing this right now.

I remember reading, years ago, Martin Amis saying that the computer scared him, and that he liked to write in longhand because once something was written down he could always return to it. Whereas, once something digital is virtually erased or deleted, it’s long gone. However, a blog also allows you to sort through all of its entries, as well as tag entries by content or topic; a moleskin journal or yellow legal pad will never let you do that.

Also, getting comments and reader feedback was great. I was most happy when a discussion would start because of something I wrote. As a writer you can only hope that people read, or think critically, about your work. With a physical book, you know if they bought it but not if they read it (not mention whether or not it’s being discussed). But a blog gives you a real window into that process: people can interact with you and your material almost immediately. Sometimes that’s a scary prospect, and sometimes it’s not fun, but it’s almost always worthwhile.

I think the most valuable lesson I learned from keeping this blog — and how it pertains to my subject — is that it indeed reinforced in me (or else reintroduced) the prejudice that people feel towards screens. We revere the page, but we take the screen for granted. As Jonathan Franzen recently said in an interview, “If there’s great fiction getting published online, I look forward to seeing it in print someday soon.” E-mail, stock quotes and porn are displayed on screens; literature, love letters and ideas are printed on the page. And I fell into this trap myself.  Because, at times, I would find myself — when trying to get a sentence or an argument right when writing up an entry — think to myself, “Oh, hell, just post it; it’s only a blog.”

So there’s certainly something to the idea that the screen is not as permanent as the page. Or rather, it’s that a blog — or anything electronic, really — is not yet a final draft. Because if I know that I can log on later and make a change (apostrophe here, comma there), then why sweat every word now? People like Harold Brodkey labored over every word in their prose because they believed books were real and final things; he may have been writing on a typewriter, but in his mind he was chiseling words into stone for all eternity. Whereas today we see software — from Word to Wordpress — as being a mixture of training wheels and a safety net: there’s always the ability to edit, undo, or “revert to saved.”

And yet, I would say that it’s actually the opposite. The screen can be much more permanent than the page ever was. Once something’s online it’s scooped, crawled, indexed, and cached, and from that point on it can be awfully hard to get rid of. After all, it’s easier to buy a portable hard drive with every single issue of The New Yorker on it than to try and collect — let alone store — all of the print editions (if you could even find them). One day entire libraries — both personal and public collections — will come on Flash drives that will fit on your key chain. And when we get to that point, with all of that content accessible by and available on an electronic device, we’ll finally see that screens can be both sandbox and concrete.

Anyway, my thanks to everyone who reads, writes about, or links to this blog.