Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

I was in Los Angeles a few weeks ago for BEA, and during a day off as I was driving around the city I couldn’t help but notice some pretty big changes. It’s been over a decade since I lived there; I moved to LA in 1989 and moved away in early 1997. In the intervening years I lived in the Fairfax, Larchmont Village and Silverlake sections of the city (to this day I miss my phone number with the 666 prefix). And since — during those years — I was a rabid music fan, the biggest change I noticed as I drove down Sunset Boulevard was the empty building where Tower Records used to be. Tower, of course, was one of the biggest record store chains in the country, and the fact that they’re all out of business — while iTunes, something that didn’t exist six years ago, is now a major player — shows just how much the music industry has changed.

In addition to Tower, I was upset to learn a few years ago that my favorite record store in Los Angeles, Aron’s, had also closed. While I had occasionally gone to Tower for music, Aron’s was where I really spent most of my time. Once a week I would wander its aisles for at least an hour, either perusing the used CDs to the left of the entrance or else checking out the new releases lined against the far wall opposite the front doors. I even remember when Aron’s, in the late ‘80s, used to be on Melrose in a much smaller location. But now it, too, is out of business. At the time of its closing, Aron’s management was placing blame on our digital age, saying that “People simply aren’t buying CDs like they used to; they’re downloading, burning their own CDs, or file-trading online.”

On my final day in California, I went with my brother to a movie at the Cinerama Dome (itself now part of a big complex called Arclight). While killing time before the film, we went across the street to Amoeba Records (which was the only record store I happened to see while in LA; the Music Plus that used to be on Fairfax is also — like Tower — closed and out of business). And while Amoeba seemed like a really great store — huge space, great selection — it’s pretty much off the beaten path for most music buyers. For instance, I asked my brother, while we were standing in line to buy something, “How does someone just pop in here to buy something?” He said he wasn’t sure; he only went there when he was killing time before a movie. We had parked at the garage for the theater, and on Sunset there are precious few parking spots. Aron’s, back in the day, only had a small and chaotic parking lot, but at least it was in an area where you could park on the street. But Amoeba is on one of the busiest streets in the city, and seems more like a tourist attraction than a record store. It probably has its own nearby parking garage, but shopping for records shouldn’t be like going to Disneyland; you shouldn’t have to remember in which lot you’ve parked just because you want the new Wedding Present CD.

Of course, as much as I lament these changes and the closing of those stores, I wonder how often — in this digital age — I would have visited Aron’s or Tower if I still lived in Los Angeles. For instance, when I first moved to New York in the late ‘90s I used to go to what I considered to be Manhattan’s equivalent to Aron’s: Other Music on Fourth Street (which itself used to be across the street from a Tower Records location). And while Other Music is still there, now that Amazon and iTunes exists, I never really go there. Why should I when I can instantly download stuff, or when even Amazon has stuff that I want, including semi-obscure stuff? There’s now no need to go across town to pay more for records at Other Music (not to mention I also don’t have to have one of their hipper-than-thou salespeople smirk at me for not buying vinyl). In fact, in talking about this similar phenomenon in the California book world, Chris Anderson said last year, ““A lot of our affection for bookstores is based on a romanticized notion. The fact that we’re not patronizing them speaks more loudly than our words.” So it’s behavior like mine that led to the demise of both Tower and Aron’s records, not to mention it’s the same behavior that is continuing the threaten bookstores across the country.

There’s an episode of the ‘80s sitcom classic Cheers where Sam, after selling the bar and having spent months trying desperately to get it back, opts instead to open a new bar. Sam decides on reopening a bar down on the waterfront that previously went out of business. After relating his idea to billionaire businessman Robin Colcord, Colcord asks what the difference will be between Sam’s new bar and the old bar, i.e. Why will his business be a success when the other one was a failure? Sam’s only reply is that, this time, it’ll be called “Sam’s Place.”

I thought of this when, earlier in the week, I read in The Los Angeles Times that the Brentwood location of the recently closed Duttons bookstore will be replaced with — wait for it — a bookstore. So what’s the difference between the stores? This time it’s called Diesel. However, the changes will be deeper than that. For instance, Duttons was “more regional,” while Diesel will be “neighborhood-oriented.” (Uh, if anyone can let me know the difference between these two, I’d appreciate it; for instance, is it that Steinbeck — being from California — is a regional writer, but a flier for guitar lessons posted to the bulletin board is more neighborhood oriented?).

Also, as the story states, “Diesel will have floor-to-ceiling shelves with a wide selection of books and a staff interested in ‘passionate engagement’ with customers.” And yet, from the photo above, taken from an earlier LA Times story about Duttons, it looks like the store already has pretty high shelves (not to mention that the Duttons staff was always smart and passionate). Frankly, I think the problem is larger than shelves and passion; the fact is that people spend less time at bookstores, and more time online. At any rate, I wish Diesel the best.

The following are some random notes and thoughts from my recent ten-day trip to France and Italy:

Paris has a lot of bookstores, including ones devoted to certain areas of interest (ranging from philosophy to books about the ocean). In fact, around the Left Bank I was stumbling upon bookstores every couple of streets (I started to take pictures of them all, but gave up after the fifth one). In fact, our hotel was right next door to a used bookstore specializing in English books, and while there I bought a Zola novel which I then read throughout the trip and finished on the plane. And in the book Zola mentioned the street of the bookstore in which I bought the book and hotel we’d been staying in.

The bookstores in Paris were divided by region, and I thought that was really odd. Because where would you put Lolita? In American or Russian literature? After all, Nabokov was of course Russian, but Lolita was written in English, and the story takes place in America. (Okay, maybe that’s an easy one.) But what about a writer like Josef Škvorecký, who is Czech, and writes in Czech, but who lives in Canada and often writes about Canada and Canadian characters?

Both Italian and French versions of various F. Scott Fitzgerald novels listed the author as “Francis Scott Fitzgerald.” Yes, I know that’s what the “F” stands for, but still, he never published anything under that name.

The Shakespeare and Co. Bookstore in Paris (which is where the photo above is from) was a bit of a let down; it looked a lot bigger in all of those photos of a grinning Hemingway. That being said, it’s still a nice bookstore, and I thought it charming that the resident dog was aptly named Collette.

Many Italian and French publishers publish books with practically bare covers; a lot of them looked almost like galleys. A friend of mine who is a librarian in a small French town said that the books with designed jackets get checked out much more than the ones without.

In a Parisian bookstore, when just sort of hovering of a table of books, I was drawn to a beautiful book by Julien Gracq. When I picked it up I saw something I’d never seen before: a book that had untrimmed edges at the top. I’m used to seeing those occasionally on American books (usually on John Updike novels), but when I do, the untrimmed pages are on the side. Upon closer examination, I discovered that the untrimmed pages were also uncut. Indeed, the top of each page was sort of webbed, and you couldn’t read the entire page. My two Parisian friends who were walking around Paris with me and my wife that day, knew the publisher — José Corti — and explained that the reader has to cut each of the pages in order to read the book. This seemed really odd to me, and like a lot of work (I mean, getting the plastic wrap off of a CD is bad enough; imagine having to do it for every song or bar of music).

The majority of the people sitting around me on my various flights (to Paris, to Venice, and back to New York) weren’t reading anything. In fact, a group of kids on my flight back to the States just sat in their seats for over eight hours, and not one of them that I could see (from about six of them) took out any form of reading material during the duration of the flight. Instead, they listened to their iPods, watched the movies, or talked to each other.

While staying with some Italian friends in Milan, I was surprised see them consult a phone book. We were looking up a pizzeria a friend of theirs had recommended, and instead of hopping online our host pulled out the white pages. This was shocking to me since I haven’t consulted a phonebook since the ‘90s. And then, in an age of Google Maps, as we were running out the door and someone asked if we knew where the restaurant was, once again our host consulted the phone book for the address instead of the Internet.

In Paris I was able to find wireless networks pretty much everywhere, which allowed me to find our exact location on my iPod Touch (not to mention check e-mail and read The New York Times). But in Milan and Venice, I came across practically no wireless networks, and our hosts in Milan had only limited access to the Internet via a pay-as-you-go model.

While the Italians didn’t seem very wired in term of the Internet, on a train trip from Venice to Milan I was sitting next to a teenage girl who spent the entire two hour trip glued to her cell phone. She used it non-stop to either text, talk, or play games. American teens are probably also this wired, and I just haven’t sat next to one for any appreciable amount of time. Still, I was pretty impressed with the amount of time this teenager spent using her phone. Also, while the rest of us in the six-person compartment read or listened to music, the only thing the teenager’s eyes were glued to was the screen of her phone.

And finally, the film European Vacation is indeed the masterwork I always thought it was. During the trip I kept thinking of it and referring to certain scenes over and over again, specifically the “Do you want to watch cheese or snow?” scene. This is because every time I checked into a hotel and turned on the TV, the cable had about six channels, each of them offering dubbed American shows (Happy Days in Italian; they call Richie Rickie) or else there was some weird documentary that made no sense to me. And, of course, any time I contemplated trying to speak French, I thought of this scene.

Katie Hafner, writing earlier in the week in The New York Times, had a story entitled “Film Drop-Off Sites Fade Against Digital Cameras.” The story was about how, in an increasingly digital world, drive-thru photo kiosks — a staple for decades that, in the Southern California suburbs where I was raised, meant going to a Fotomat — are becoming an endangered species. “The rate of decline is apparent from film sales — since only people who buy film need to have it developed,” writes Hafner. “Over the last four years, the sale of film has been dropping at a rate of 25 to 30 percent each year. In 2006, 204 million rolls were sold, a quarter of the 800 million sold at the peak in 1999. ‘It’s pretty alarming,’ said Bing Liem, senior vice president of sales for the imaging division of Fujifilm USA.’

And yet, while these photo processing centers are closing down, and the sales of film are tanking, people are taking more pictures than ever. Not to mention that they’re sharing these photos in ways that had been all but impossible in an analog world. For instance, my sister-in-law who lives in another state had a baby last year. And while she occasionally still puts snapshots in an envelope and sends them to us in the mail, most often my wife and I chart our nephew’s growth by looking at the digital photos his mother e-mails us on a weekly basis. And when I got married last year, since our family and guests were scattered throughout the country, the way that most people saw our photos was on our website. And of course while most digital photos are sent via e-mail (or else directly from cameras), photo-sharing websites like Flickr make it incredibly easy to share entire photo collections, not to mention that websites like Blurb allow you to then turn all of those photos into a book (bypassing the need to collect prints in photo albums).

But in terms of Fotomats and the standalone kiosks that had been around for decades, how they worked was simple: you would drive in, drop off your film, go back to living your life, and a week or so later you’d drive by again to pick up your pictures. While that seems positively glacial now, it used to be even worse. In previous decades people had to the mail the film from their Brownies to processing centers that could be in another state; photos could take weeks or moths to get back (which is maybe when they started putting dates on them; so people would remember what they were looking at). So when those huge vinegar-smelling machines came along in the ‘80s that could get you your film in an hour, people were overjoyed (not to mention that it gave us a decent Robin Williams film).

Suddenly, the time from taking a picture to having it your hand was shrinking. And while instant cameras had been around since the late ‘40s, they were seen mostly as a novelty because their quality was not as good as regular film (and anyway, instant cameras were hardly “instant” since that gray square always took a few minutes to develop; and these days, even minutes are too long). But with the advent and now almost total domination of digital cameras, people are able to print photos at home within seconds, on professional-grade paper that makes them look like expensive prints. Not just that, but people these days routinely take a picture with their digital camera and then instantly turn the camera around to check if it’s any good, or to see what they’ve captured. They’re reliving the moment right there in the, well, moment. What used to take months — seeing what your camera sees — now takes mere seconds.

And because of all this, entire generations are getting hooked on the idea of an on-demand world that offers instant gratification at every turn. Want to watch last week’s episode of Ugly Betty in the middle of the night? Dial it up from your DVR (if not the network’s website). Want to buy that silly “You had a bad day” song that’s been in your head all morning since hearing it in the deli, but you’re nowhere near a record store? No problem; access iTunes from your iPhone and download the track that you want. And while watching movies on handheld devices or laptops hasn’t quite caught on, most people I know buy their tickets online (if not from their cellphone). People still may wait online like in Annie Hall once they get to the theater, but they no longer have to do that to buy tickets.

And publishing needs to realize that it has to participate in this new mindset on some level. Because for a new generation, overnight shipping is going to feel as absurdly slow as dropping off film at a Fotomat. Why wait for words you want to read right now? And while I’m heartened by new devices that have wi-fi and a keyboard, the process for buying books online has to be made even easier, along with making sure there’s a wide-enough selection and a price-point that makes sense. And while I don’t think that the Barnes and Nobles of today will suffer the same fate as the Fotomats of yesterday, one of these days people will care a lot more about clicks than they do bricks.

Matt Richtel, writing this morning in the New York Times, has a story entitled “At Starbucks, Songs of Instant Gratification,” which is about a new Starbucks feature starting today that will allow anyone with an iPhone, iPod Touch or iTunes on a laptop to instantly download any song that Starbucks is currently playing. The songs will cost the $.99 that they always cost on iTunes. For right now, though, this is only being introduced in New York and Seattle.

Starbucks has previously waded into non-coffee items, selling things like music compilation CDs and even the occasional book. But they took a huge leap a few months ago when they put out Paul McCartney’s new record. With the McCartney CD, Starbucks essentially turned itself into a music label. With this new service, it has now transformed itself into a digital music store.

“And it’s just the tip of the iced latte,” writes Richtel. “Businesses are using new technologies to enhance the impulse buy so consumers can purchase their temptations whenever they want, wherever they are, before the urge passes.”

This kind of on-demand business model goes beyond even the flexibility of something like Tivo or the one-click shopping of Amazon. By being able to instantly download a song that’s playing in the background while you either order or sip your morning coffee, suddenly even tunes floating invisibly through the air can be bought and sold. “The idea is no waiting, cashier or other buying barrier,” writes Richtel, “aside from the charges that show up on a credit card or cellphone bill.”

This is not only amazing from a technical point of view, but it’s also just pretty damn cool. And I think it will work. Even if people don’t buy or download the songs from Starbucks, right then and there, being able to know what the song is will probably lead to a purchase at a later date or time,

Of course, as soon as we have wireless and portable devices that offer a good reading experience, books will similarly be as instantly available as songs. For instance, imagine being in a coffee house (like, a real one; not a Starbucks) and you meet a friend and they’re telling how great Master and Margarita is, that you just have to read it. Well, you could pull out your laptop or device (or iPhone), and buy it right then and there, having it download to your device in a matter of seconds. At that point, The Portable Faulkner turns into the instant Faulkner. And when that happens, it’ll be yet another bad sign not only for books, but for bookstores.

Sewell Chan, writing on the New York Times “City Room” blog yesterday, had a post entitled “High Rents Chase Another Bookstore, This One From a Chain.” The post is about how, while a large number of independent bookstores have recently gone out of business in New York City (i.e. The Gotham Book Mart, Coliseum Books), even the majors are now feeling the pinch. Specifically, the Astor Place Barnes & Noble will go out of business at the end of this year. As for the reason why its doors are closing, Chan quotes Mary Ellen Keating, a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman, as saying, “The sales simply didn’t justify the high rent. We’d love to stay, but unfortunately couldn’t work out the economics.”

The location opened in 1994, and I used to go there a lot when I first moved to the neighborhood in 1997. What’s sad is that there also used to be a Tower Books around the corner (it went out of business long before the Tower chain folded). Back then, the entire area felt a lot more bookish; it was before the era of the Internet and iPods. In fact, for lots of people these days a bookstore is Amazon. They don’t feel the need to go a big chain store when they can find everything they want (and more) at home, online. Meanwhile, there are still some good independents in the Astor Place area, including Shakespeare & Co and St. Mark’s Bookshop, which gives me hope that, in a “print is dead” world, when the majors realize that they can no longer operate on volume they’ll begin to go out of business and the independents will flourish once again.

Yesterday, the San Francisco Weekly’s Nathaniel Eaton had an interview with neo-beat writer Alan Kaufman. Entitled “The Beat Goes On,” the interview was mainly about how Kaufman and others are trying to keep the beat spirit of the ‘50s and ‘60s alive in modern day San Francisco. And while I’m always glad to see the criminally underrated Richard Brautigan’s name in print (I hunted for his books all over Southern California as a teenager), Kaufman makes a few comments regarding the future of books which I think are pretty silly. A few weeks ago, in D.T. Max’s profile of Tom Staley (the curator of the Ransom literary archives at the University of Texas), Staley defended his decision to not digitize the library’s collection by saying that to do so would sacrifice some of the aesthetics of the physical item, namely the smell. Well, Kaufman goes even further than this. After saying that he doesn’t “believe writers are going to be content having their works published on the Internet,” Kaufman expands this idea by explaining that “I was looking through a book of mine from years ago and it had little pieces of food on it and I remembered the meal that I had eaten.” So I guess that, in addition to curling up in the bath with a book, if there’s enough food in the margin you can also treat yourself to a little snack (try doing that with an eBook).

All of this is in answer to the interviewer’s question, “Do you think writing’s in collapse?” Kaufman answers, “No. Writing will never be in collapse.” He then follows this up with a prediction: “What’s going to happen, I believe, and I’m very excited by this prospect, is that writers will form their own collectives, as was done in the Sixties [and publish their own books]. I don’t think I’m a dinosaur in thinking this way.”

Kaufman’s completely correct that writers will create their own collectives. But what will make these collectives different from what happened in the ‘60s is that — because of the global interconnectedness of the Web — these scenes will no longer have to be centered around one geographic location (or, in the case of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene, a couple of city blocks). Instead, writers from all over the globe will be able to meet and interact with other writers, trading ideas and swatches of prose and verse. What’s also different, I think, is that books will be the least interesting aspect of this; it will be about the exchange of ideas and the feeling of community (and, as Second Life has shown, virtual communities can feel — for many people — just as authentic as the real thing). As I wrote earlier in the week, blogs have now replaced zines. But the zine movement itself, at the time, was simply a new version of the mimeographed chapbook scene of the ‘70s. Technology always plays a part in edging forward artists, and the Internet is simply the latest iteration of this. The same way that San Francisco’s iconic City Lights bookstore was, as Kaufman reminds us, “the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States,” new websites and Internet communities will shatter the literary boundaries and rules that the beats similarly exploded fifty years ago.

As has been reported over the last week or so, self-described bibliophiles Tom Wayne and Will Leathem, owners of the Kansas City bookstore Prospero’s Books, have begun to burn their inventory of 50,000 titles after they could not sell or even give the books away. In a scene that really can’t help but sound like it’s from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, over Memorial Day weekend the two men dragged a few boxes of books to the sidewalk in front of their used bookstore, showered them with lighter fluid, and then set the whole thing ablaze. The books burned until the fire department came to put them out.

But this was no Nazi bonfire. It was more like the Buddhists in Vietnam in the early ‘60s who committed suicide by setting themselves on fire as political protest. Neither Wayne or Leathem feel that books should be burned or destroyed — on the contrary, they’re both ardent booklovers — but they’re doing this to attract attention to the fact that books are, well, no longer receiving any attention.

As Dan Barry reported in the New York Times over the weekend, “The men say they tried to give away books in bulk that were either not selling or in overabundance — to no avail. When a friend was sent to state prison, for example, they tried to donate books to the correctional system, but were denied. When they donated books to a local fund-raising event, some well-meaning person bought up most of those books and left them at the Prospero’s doorstep.”

One of the ironies of this is that, in my presentation last week at Book Expo, I said that the “print is dead” debate does not mean things like what happens in Bradbury’s novel, stressing that the advocates of digital reading are not the exterminators of the printed word. And yet here we have booksellers — not technologists — who are lightning the match and turning novels and non-fiction into ash.

It should also be mentioned that, in Fahrenheit 451, books are never explicitly banned outright by the government; they only begin to be burned when public disinterest in books grows so large that the government figures no one will miss them (and for the most part, no one does). Burning books was only the government’s reaction to the public’s reaction. In Kansas City, we might be seeing the sad first glimpse of this happening in real life.

NY Times Select: A Requiem for Reading in a Smoldering Pyre of Books

The Washington Post yesterday had a story entitled “For Bookstores, a Real Page-Turner,” which talked about how a small number of bookstores are trying to stay relevant in an increasingly digital world by participating in pilot programs with a non-profit organization known as the Caravan Project, a new company doing its best to stake its claim in terms of the future of the book. The Caravan Project offers bookstores the ability to deliver content to consumers in a myriad of ways, including on screens. In fact, the articles asks, “Want to see the future of the book? Pay attention to what’s on the screen.” This is especially interesting seeing as it comes just a few days after Cory Doctorow’s essay saying that books won’t be read on screens.

In terms of the current literary situation, the Post sums it up like this: “With books increasingly available in multiple formats — among them digital ‘e-books’ and audio versions downloadable to your iPod — what’s to prevent people from bypassing brick-and-mortar bookstores entirely, further undercutting enterprises already under pressure from online competitors?” This is where the Caravan Project comes in, offering to supply readers books in an array of formats, thus perfectly appealing to our increasingly on-demand everything/I want it now culture. For example, books will be available as regular print editions (either paperback or hardcover), digital books in several formats, audio books as either CDs or in digital form, and large-print paperbacks that would be printed on demand. This approach shows how consumer-oriented Publishing 2.0 is going to be, letting readers make their own decisions about how and when they consume their content. Tom Dwyer, director of merchandising at Borders, says of the Caravan Project, “This could be a pilot for what all publishers end up doing eventually.” Whether or not that’s the case, it’s a step in the right direction. It also shows that bookstores are beginning to realize that the “print is dead” argument — this time around — is, for better or worse, here to stay.

Washington Post: “For Bookstores, a Real Page-Turner”

Former Creation Records boss Alan McGee (AKA the guy who signed Oasis) has a posting on his Guardian blog entitled “Do we still need record shops?,” where he asks that question in response to all the digital alternatives that currently exist for music. “All the music I want I can get off Amazon or go on MySpace to hear,” writes McGee. “There’s no real need for record shops any more.” And, indeed, the sales of CDs have reflected this, not to mention the fact that many records stores — including the giant Tower chain — have gone out of business because of the rise of the download and the disappearance of the CD. All of which goes to show that consumers, when given a viable digital alternative (especially younger generations that don’t/won’t feel the nostalgic tug of formats), will choose digital over analog, finding absolutely nothing wrong with either entertainment or art as a computer file. McGee also writes that he even doesn’t read music magazines anymore, instead getting all of his news online. In terms of the “print is dead” debate, McGee’s views on music — since he comes from the point of view of an ardent audiophile — could be easily compared with the booklover who vows to never give up physical books. “Nothing will ever beat vinyl for me,” admits McGee, “but digital technology has changed our world, and for the better…” In fact, with the eventual increase in digital delivery and consumption, a few years from now we’ll probably be reading blog posts entitled “Do we still need bookstores?” I won’t try to answer the question, but I’m sure it’ll one day be asked.

The Guardian: Do we still need record shops?