Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

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

The other day I came across the clip above on Gawker, which is taken I guess from David Lynch’s introduction to his film Inland Empire, but here it has been Youtubed into a parody of an iPhone ad. Needless to say, Lynch is not too happy with the idea of you watching Eraserhead on your cell phone. In the clip, Lynch says that “You will never in a trillion years experience the film…you’ll be cheated.” He then goes on to call the situation, “Such a sadness.”

First of all, a trillion years is a really long time. Second of all, it’s not really up to him anymore, is it? I mean, is it better to see the movie in a crowded theater when the film is preceded by twenty minutes of previews and commercials, only to have people sitting all around you talking and chomping on popcorn the entire time (not to mention getting, and actually answering, calls on their cell phone?). This versus maybe watching it on an iPhone at home, in a comfy chair, curled up and cocoon-like. Which is the more intimate experience?

Yes, a big screen is great, but to think that true cinema can only be experienced inside a theater is going to lead people like Lynch locking us immobile into seats a la Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, forcing us to watch movies with our eyes pried open (heaven forbid we blink and miss something). Instead, Lynch needs to realize that, as a filmmaker, he has lots of control behind the camera, and none anywhere else. Where and how people watch his films is not up to him. Like when a Woody Allen character years ago joked about reading Finnegans Wake on rollercoaster; hey, it’s our choice to do so. And if Lynch, or other directors (Spielberg has been similarly dim and caustic when it comes to things like this), think that it’s not, then they’re going to limit their audience wildly, and this is going to only hurt, and not help, their careers.

In the end, a big screen is not going to make a bad movie good, nor will a small screen make a good movie bad. True, it might add up to a different experience, but so do a dozen other factors (all of which are out of the control of the filmmakers). Maybe this is just a knee-jerk reaction from directors since they get pushed around so much by the film companies (even boy-genius Orson Welles saw pretty much every post-Kane movie recut to some extent by his studio bosses). But the truth is that the control, in a digital age, is in the hands of the consumers. And if Lynch or anyone else doesn’t like that, they’d better stop making films all together. If not, they can face the alternative: their film playing in a theater, but the theater is empty.

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.

Last week on Wowio’s blog The Reader, there was a post entitled “iPhone Reader: The Long Sessions.” The post had some great photos from their recent efforts to test-drive reading on Apple’s iPhone (which is not easy since the iPhone is pretty much a closed device when it comes to third-party applications).

Wowio itself is a company that offers free downloads of PDF eBooks from its website. They feel that “by making ebooks available for free — including copyrighted works from major publishers — we ultimately hope to make sure that every person who wants to read a book will be able to get it.” Wowio’s business model is based on the assumption that print is not dead, and that the reading of free electronic books can and does lead to the sale of printed books.

The company has only been in existence since 2006, so it’s a little early to tell if any of this is working, but they’re certainly a passionate voice in the “future of the book” debate, and they’re doing an awful lot to meet the demands of an “attention economy” society where people want to interact with content wherever and however they want. However, the selection of material on their site, at this point, is not eclectic or widespread enough to attract more than a specialized interest.

However, the Wowio blog consistently writes intelligently about eBooks and related issues, not to mention that reading on the iPhone is a bit of an obsession; they also recently wrote up a post about supposedly an even newer iPod model named the iSlate, and what that could mean to reading. There’s also a great video of the experience of reading on an iPhone. This is obviously the blog to subscribe to if this is an interest of yours.

In terms of the experience itself, a Wowio staffer pretty much gushes about the experience of reading on an iPhone:

I’ve now had several multi-hour reading sessions on the iPhone, and I’m finding that it affirms my earlier impressions that its display and touch interface are quite well suited to the purpose of reading long, text-oriented PDFs. The ultra-sharp screen and flexible zooming — combined with easy rotation to landscape orientation — allow fixed-page (non-reflowable) PDFs to display at a comfortable reading size. While I’ve generally hated reading on small devices like PDAs in the past, the iPhone’s excellent display makes it not just viable but actually quite enjoyable. I read in a variety of lighting conditions, including bright outdoor sunlight, artificial light and total darkness, and in all cases, the display performed brilliantly.

Not only that, but the new, more interactive and intuitive touch-screen surface actually delivers some of the physical feeling that is missing in most eBook experiences when “turning a page” really means pressing a tiny button the size of a Tic Tac:

Touching the slippery-smooth glass to scroll through the book made the experience pleasantly tactile, somehow better echoing the positive visceral experience of turning pages of a paper book than the mechanical, button-pushing motion used on most other reading devices. Since the touch interface permits for simultaneous scrolling in both horizontal and vertical directions, I expected to have some trouble with unintentionally moving diagonally instead of straight down, but the system seems to have built-in smarts to ignore such spurious motion off the main axis of movement.

So while Steve Jobs and Apple are just getting started, it seems, with the new touch-surface interface for Apple products (I’m loving my new iTouch, but wish it had more memory), then it would seem that Wowio’s dreams on reading on an iPhone or some next-generation iPhone-like device will some day be a reality. Whether or not that means a text-based iTunes bookstore interface remains to be seen, but technology this good will have to be harnessed for reading at some point.

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.

Last week Apple introduced three new iPod models, including a redesign of their ultra-successful Nano model, along with a Classic version and the new iPod Touch (which is basically the iPhone minus the phone and the AT&T contract; I instantly pre-ordered one). What I think is remarkable about this is whenever Apple introduces new products, it instantly phases out its old ones. For example, it’s now impossible to buy any of the former Nano models (you know, the ones that were cutting-edge up until last Wednesday). The same way that the Nano itself replaced the mega-popular iPod Mini just a few years ago, the Nano itself has now been replaced with an even newer model. While some view this with cynicism, as if Steve Jobs is out to wring every nickel he can from enthusiasts/obsessives who’ll purchase anything with the Apple logo on it, I instead look at this with awe and admiration, the sign of a man and a company who demand nothing but the very best.

After all, neither Apple or Jobs are cluttering the marketplace; at any one time, there are only three to five iPod models to choose from. So instead of the Mini standing next to both versions of the Nano (not to mention the Shuffle, which itself has gone through a few transformations), the older models disappear — a la Logan’s Run — and make way for the new ones. But instead of this being about Jobs and money, this is about Apple and its addiction to change, along with its relentless quest to always have on hand the best possible product.

In thinking about this in terms of the publishing industry, I thought it would make an interesting comparison (mainly because, while Apple changes all the time, publishing tries to change as little as possible). True, Apple is a technology company whose bread and butter is innovation, while publishing is supplying a good rather than an experience (after all, no one expects much innovation to come from such basic products as, well, bread and butter). And yet, in the “print is dead” debate, the fact that books are indeed a technology is brought up all the time. Indeed, many pro-book pundits feel that printed books are the “perfect” technology, and that computers — no matter how advanced — can never best a book when it comes to delivering a satisfying reading experience. So I think that the comparison between Apple and publishing is somewhat apt (or rather, not as outlandish as it sounds).

So then what I find so shocking is that no one in publishing is really trying to push the boundaries the way Apple always is. In fact, it’s almost the reverse; instead of charging ever forward, publishing seems content to always look back. At this point, we’ve gone from viewing Gutenberg as the man who printed bibles to looking at him like a biblical figure himself: a saint not to argued with, the inventor of a religion instead of a technology. So instead of, in the past 500 years, pushing for the evolution of books, we have instead grown warm with the idea that they won’t evolve at all. Not only that, but we reject as a heretic anyone who suggests that books, “the perfect invention,” have any need for improvement. If Steve Jobs felt this way, Apple computers would still be made out of blocks of wood and the world wouldn’t have any iPods to be updated in the first place.

The Guardian reported earlier this week that the magazine The Economist has just announced that “From this week listeners will be able to scroll through the Economist and download audio versions of articles by section or in its entirety.” I think this is a thoroughly great idea; content is content, and whether or not it’s listened to or read, what’s important (especially in journalism) are the words. It doesn’t matter if the words are ingested via the eyes or the ears (or the fingertips, for anyone reading Braille); the only thing that matters is that someone is consuming them.

But why are they doing this? According to the Guardian: “The idea of giving Economist readers news and features to digest while they are on the move follows a move by all the major newspapers into podcasts, quasi-radio programmes that can be downloaded to a computer and transferred to a player.” What’s not explicitly said, and yet is implied (in terms of the Economist reader being “on the move”) is that a person is probably going to do both: read some stories in paper form, while listening to others as an MP3. In fact, a subscriber may start reading a story in the magazine over breakfast, get halfway through it, and then listen to the rest of it while they’re commuting to work. That situation would be a perfect example of “the attention economy” (or, in this case, “the attention Economist”). Because the battle The Economist is facing is not the facile battle of the formats (printed paper versus electronic delivery), but rather it’s getting people interested in their content in the first place; getting people to subscribe to and read their magazine.

Books, in a lo-fi way, already exist like this since people can listen to an audio book or read the print book. Of course, the selection in terms of audio books is not nearly the same as it is for print books, and most people choose one or the other: print book or audio. But what if they were given both, for one price, and they could then switch back and forth as they wanted, when they had time and when the situation called for it? For instance, you read the print book in bed, but listen to the audio book while you’re working out. During his keynote speech at last month’s O’Reilly TOC conference, Chris Anderson suggested that the buyer of his next book might receive a code that would allow him or her to a free MP3 download of the audio book. To stretch this concept a bit, if a book was also made available electronically it would be a third way to consume the content: read a few pages of the book, listen to the audio version a little, and then read the electronic one for a while. In chapter three of Ulysses a character says “Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh?” So why not read seven pages a day in two or three different formats?

There are now only two days until the debut of Apple’s much-anticipated iPhone. Writing in an article entitled “Hollywood Seeks Ways to Fit Its Content Into the Realm of the iPhone,” that appeared on Monday in The New York Times, Laura Holson describes how “Many in Hollywood and Silicon Valley hope the iPhone’s multimedia features will make it easier for any mobile-crazed consumer to do the same things they do on the Web: watch their favorite television shows, download maps, send e-mail messages to friends and swap videos.” This is all taking place due to the fact that modern day “consumers demand more and better access to media and care less about how they get it.”

Viewed in this context, the triumph of the iPhone will be a triumph not only for Apple, but will ultimately be a triumph for content itself. Because the iPhone is obviously more than just a phone. In fact, if it succeeds the way that’s being predicted, the “phone” part of the equation will be the least interesting part (since most people already have a cell phone; that’s not why they’re buying an iPhone). Instead, why people are lusting after the iPhone (apart from the usual Apple scruffs who have to own everything Jobsian) is because they’re dying for a gadget that will do multiple things. Yes, they want a cell phone and iPod combo, but they also want something that can send and receive e-mail, watch videos, surf the Web, etc. They want all of these things in one device, and the iPhone will soon arrive to make this a reality.

This has ramifications for the book industry for two reasons: 1. It shows that consumers prefer integrated devices that can perform multiple functions, rather than separate devices that only do one thing; which helps explain why dedicated eBook devices — that only read books — have not yet taken off. 2. It shows that, after changing the face of music, Steve Jobs is now poised to change the world of cell phones. As The Times states, “This will not be Mr. Jobs’s first experience in redefining an industry.” Of course, whether or not Apple plans on taking on the world of books any time soon is anyone’s guess, but the recent activity, and new thinking, surrounding the iPhone shows that even the most entrenched business models have the capacity for change (which means that even publishing could one day similarly change).