Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

On Monday, Information Age columnist L. Gordon Crovitz had an essay in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Digital Future of Books.” The essay is ostensibly about the Kindle, but he also touches upon the general idea and nature of digital books. For instance, Crovitz writes that “perhaps a new digital device like the Kindle can help us regain the attention spans earlier devices helped us lose. If so, this could become a great era for books, or more accurately for the future of words that for centuries could be delivered only in book form.”

He also quotes a bit from my book, Print is Dead:

Much is at stake. As Mr. Gomez concluded, “what’s really important is the culture of ideas and innovation” books represent. But “to expect future generations to be satisfied with printed books is like expecting the BlackBerry users of today to start communicating by writing letters, stuffing envelopes and licking stamps.”

It’s a nice article, and I especially like its last line: “With innovations like the Kindle, digital media can help return to us our attention spans and extend what makes books great: words and their meaning.”

Over the weekend The New York Times had two stories about books, one that talked abut them in analog form and another that discussed their more recent digital transformation. Analog showed up in the form of a small piece on playwright Tom Stoppard, who lugs with him wherever he goes a box filled with books (pictured above). The article is drenched in nostalgia, describing a world of porters and ocean-liners. And maybe this is indeed Stoppard’s world (I can see him being like Owen Wilson in The Darjeeling Limited, traveling with a myriad of monogrammed trunks). But for most us having a forty or fifty pound “portable bookshelf” isn’t an option (or even something we’d consider). Which is where electronic books come in very handy.

Which leads to the piece on digital books. Entitled “Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless,” the article is mostly a review of Amazon’s eBook device, the Kindle. But the writer also gets at the heart of the future of the book debate, and how our definition of exactly what a book is is beginning to change:

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell. Kindle’s long-term success is still unknown, but Amazon should be credited with imaginatively redefining its original product line, replacing the book business with the reading business.

It’s not hard to connect the dots between Stoppard’s “portable bookshelf” and the Kindle’s ability to hold dozens of books at a time. And while Stoppard will probably never embrace an eBook device, there are thousands of other readers out there — drawn by the ability to carry one small device instead of all those books — who will.

Hardware hacker Igor Skochinsky has cracked open his Kindle — the Amazon eReader that debuted in November — and, as Cnet and other places are reporting, Skochinsky has found a wealth of great features inside. Specifically, he’s found “a basic photo viewer, a minesweeper game, and most interesting, location technology that uses the Kindle’s CDMA networking to pinpoint its position. There also are some basic location-based services that call up a Google Maps view to show where you are and nearby gas stations and restaurants.”

This is all really great stuff, and hopefully the Kindle 2.0 will push these features to the forefront (and maybe even feature yet more stuff). Because this is precisely the kind of functionality that eBook devices need to have in order to be taken seriously. Otherwise, people just look at gadgets like the Kindle and Sony’s eReader and think, “Why spend $400 to read a book, when I can spend $12.95 on a paperback instead?” And so, with the current limitations in terms of features, people can quite rightly claim that there’s not much you can’t do with an eBook you can do with a print book.

Maybe all of this is Apple’s fault. Perhaps eBook makers were too taken with the iPod, and the notion that all it did was play music. Because of this, they thought that all eBook devices had to do was, well, read books. And yet the iPod worked because it did what it did gloriously and beautifully. And — as bibliophiles are constantly pointing out — books are already a near perfect reading experience. Which means that eBooks need to offer a whole lot more than just electronically turning the page, and eBook devices themselves need to offer a whole bunch more than just books. It seems that a lot of this is already lurking inside of the Kindle’s circuit and wires. But Amazon better not wait too long to unveil these features, or else Apple’s going to come along and do it for them.

The other day on the design website A Brief Message, designer Chip Kidd had a short essay entitled “Notify the Next of Kindle.” In the essay, Kidd disparages Amazon’s new Kindle eBook reader by bestowing upon it the usual kind of narrow-minded bibliophile dismissal that culminates with the rather Proulxian declaration that “PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN.” This is, of course, news to all of those people out there who DO ACTUALLY WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN. (Not to mention that Kidd doesn’t really seem to comment on the fact that both his words and my words are BEING READ ON A SCREEN RIGHT NOW.)

Anyway, Kidd is obviously a brilliant and talented guy, but he’s coming at this from the point of view of a designer and, dare I say it, he has a chip on his shoulder when it comes to discussing the topic. First of all, here’s how he explains away the success of the iPod: “The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a ‘thing’ in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to.” This is pretty ridiculous. Kidd is failing to realize that, yes, music used to also be objects. In fact, when you think of the elaborate packaging of something like The Beatles White Album, with its embossed gatefold sleeve, fold-out poster and full-size color portraits, it was very much a “physical object,” a “thing.” And yet, after being downgraded to flimsy CD packaging a dozen years ago, it will soon be available as a completely digital download, meaning all you’ll get for your $20 is the music and an invisible package. And it will still be a great record.

So why won’t it be different for books? As Kidd sees it, “Books were always physical objects, and the printed book as a piece of technology has yet to be improved upon.” I completely disagree with this. Books were always physical objects, yes, but that’s because they were, well, books. What Kidd fails to realize is that books have a marrow and a DNA that go far beyond the paper they’re printed on. In fact, as I’ve said many times, the “book” aspect of a book, meaning its physical structure (pages, ink and binding) is always the least interesting thing about a it. (Unless, I guess, you’re a designer.) I mean, the reason Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite writers is because he’s an amazing storyteller who takes me — through his words — to different and wonderful worlds. And while Kidd’s jackets (on Murakami’s books and others) are nice, they’re just part of the package (think of them as icing on the cake; nice, but not essential). I could read Murakami’s novels with different covers, or plain covers or no covers, or as a series of cocktail napkins, and they would still be chilling and amazing stories. So while Kidd can insist that the Kindle changes nothing, I think he’s dead wrong. And I also think the time for the snobbishness of saying no one wants to read books on a screen, when we live in a digital world and plenty of people do, has got to end.

Here’s a YouTube video of Benjamin Higginbotham, from the blog Technology Evangelist, taking Amazon’s new eBook reader, the Kindle, for a test drive (not to mention comparing it to other eBook readers out there). This is informative and really well done.

Long discussed and eagerly anticipated by those in the eBook community, Amazon today launched its Kindle eBook reading device, which is now available for $399. Considering that this is Amazon’s first bit of major merchandise it has produced and sold under its own name, I think it’s a pretty big development. After all, it was years before Microsoft starting producing consumer electronic goods with the Xbox and now the Zune. And yet, even though Amazon’s road (or should we say river?) has been a little longer and winding than Microsoft’s, this decision makes perfect sense. Because even though today Amazon can sell you everything from a humidifier to plate stands (two recent purchases of mine, actually), where it all began — back in 1995 —- was with books. Books were the item that Jeff Bezos finally decided upon after driving to Washington with the idea to start an online business. And now, after the huge and explosive growth of the Internet, it’s to books that Bezos is once again looking in terms of Amazon’s next big development.

And while this will no doubt cause the usual hand-wringing amongst the literati and bibliophiles, it really shouldn’t. That Amazon is making available electronic books is not much different than when they made books available online over a decade ago. Back then the idea was selection and customer service. The same is true today, except instead of the convenience of overnight shipping, Amazon will be offering instantaneous download and delivery. Works of great literature will now never be more than a mouseclick away.

In terms of the device itself, I’ve seen it and think it’s pretty nice. In terms of layout and feel, the closest thing to compare it to (mainly because its screen uses the same eInk technology) is the line of Sony eReaders. However, the big (and, I think, crucial) difference is that the Kindle is wireless and has a web browser along with a small keyboard. So while most other eBook devices insist on you being at home, and online, with your device hooked up to your desktop or laptop computer before you can buy and download a book, with the Kindle you can be just about anywhere in the world and have access to a great bookstore. For instance, if you’re in the middle of Central Park and a friend says you just have to read The Kite Runner, you can pull out the Kindle and access the Amazon eBook store, and seconds later it’s yours. You can then start reading it on the subway ride home. And so while I won’t at all declare that the Kindle represents the “iPod moment” for eBooks, with its web integration it is indeed a step in the right direction. It is also yet another evolution in the dissemination of ideas, continuing in the long line that began with the written word, passed through the era of Gutenberg, and continues today with advances (like this) in digital delivery and consumption.