Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Via Galleycat, last week two new book blogs were launched by such august print icons as The New Yorker and Harpers. The New Yorker blog is named “The Book Bench,” while the Harpers blog is entitled “Sentences.” It’s nice to see these respected print brands enter the blogosphere, and I think it just goes to show how even the most tried-and-true company needs to embrace our increasingly digital age.

Adrian Tomine (who, incidentally, way back in the day illustrated the cover of the third issue of my zine Our Noise) has a New Yorker cover this week entitled “Shelf Life.” It basically traces the trajectory of a book’s life, starting with the writer composing it and the publisher accepting it, then showing the book being published and someone reading it, until it finally ends up being tossed on a fire to keep homeless people warm. It’s a sad, but of course sometimes correct, depiction of what happens to books. However, the same thing could be done with cars, toasters or iPods. Every product starts out as inspiration, moves to the drafting board, the production line, and then goes into someone’s hands before ending up, finally, on the scrap heap. There’s nothing much out there that evades this fate, and books are no different. So what the Tomine cover needs is a few extra panels that show either the writer, or one of the book’s readers, sitting on a park bench with a thought balloon above their head that encloses the book. Because what the New Yorker cover conveys perfectly is that books are physical objects that have a life span. What the cover completely misses, however, is the fact that writing, words, and literature have a soul that transcends any physical object. So whatever was between the covers of the book that Tomine depicted will continue to live on, even after the book itself goes up in flames. In fact, the book’s the least interesting thing about the process. As William Burroughs said, “Language is a virus.” Well, in a way, stories are also viruses. We catch them when we read them, and then we pass them on to others when we talk about them, or else when their ideas infect us in a way that changes our behavior. Basically, words and stories leave their trace in us long after the book that initially spread the ideas in the first place is gone.

Alt-country music magazine No Depression, created thirteen years ago, recently announced that it’s going to cease printing a physical edition. However, the magazine’s website will continue to exist, and will be expanded with additional content. And yet, while the editors claim that the website “will in no way replace the print edition,” the fact that the website’s going to continue to exist while the magazine goes away speaks volumes.

In a note in the recent issue, the magazine’s editors cited numerous reasons for the decision to halt printing the magazine, such as the lack of advertising revenue and “the precipitous fall of the music industry.” But, of course, it’s more complicated than that; this is about publishing and paper as much as it is about words and music:

The decline of brick and mortar music retail means we have fewer newsstands on which to sell our magazine, and small labels have fewer venues that might embrace and hand-sell their music. Ditto for independent bookstores. Paper manufacturers have consolidated and begun closing mills to cut production; we’ve been told to expect three price increases in 2008. Last year there was a shift in postal regulations, written by and for big publishers, which shifted costs down to smaller publishers whose economies of scale are unable to take advantage of advanced sorting techniques.

So while it’s depressing to see yet another magazine bite the dust, at least the brand (and hopefully the archives) will continue to live online.

One of the side effects of having been a teenager in the ‘80s is that I now often associate classic songs with old commercials that either featured them or else completely rewrote their lyrics in order to suit the ad (e.g. “Sittin’ on the dock of a bay drinking Hires”). Because of this, the first time I heard the song “Turn, Turn, Turn” by The Byrds it wasn’t on the radio or a stereo, but instead it was on TV in a commercial for Time Magazine. (If I’d had hippie parents, this of course would not have been the case.) Anyway, as the lyrics to that song state (that is, as Pete Seeger adapted some words from the Book of Ecclesiastes):

To everything - turn, turn, turn
There is a season - turn, turn, turn

I thought of this yesterday as I read an article on the Folio website about comments made by Time Magazine’s managing editor, Richard Stengel, that he delivered earlier in the week at the Direct Marketing Association’s 22nd annual Circulation Day event. Stengel, in addition to talking about how Time needs to remain a vital brand, acknowledged the challenges and opportunities that a digital world presents. In fact, he went so far as to admit that, if print’s not dead right now, it will be one day, saying “Someday there will be people who don’t know there’s a print product.” Of course, for all of the readers that the Web has siphoned away from Time Magazine, whether it’s because of RSS readers that collect headlines from various sources, or else online-only outlets like Salon and Slate, this fate — for many publications — has already arrived. Or rather, people know that there’s physical product but they eschew the printed item for its online equivalent. And as this happens, like in that song by The Byrds, yet another thing turns, changes, and ends.

Illustration: Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Bird Box)

House & Garden, a magazine that has been around for more than a century, is going out of business; its December issue will be its last. Founded in 1901, House & Garden’s parent company, Condé Nast Publications, finally decided to pull the plug after the recent departure of the magazine’s publisher (of course, the fact that it wasn’t profitable probably also had something to do with it).

“The magazine had monthly paid circulation of nearly 1 million and about 800 advertising pages through the first 11 months of the year,” writes the New York Times. “Better numbers than many of its competitors. But Condé Nast, a privately held company with more than two dozen magazines, is known in the industry for having high operating costs.”

And while a lot of House & Garden’s troubles can be traced to things like the housing slump and the competition among other “shelter” magazines (the category that House & Garden fits into), another factor in the magazine’s downfall is our new digital, always-online culture.

Per the Times:

The closing of House & Garden “is probably symptomatic of what we might see more of in the magazine industry,” said Charlie Rutman, chief executive for the North American operations of MPG, a media agency owned by Havas. “In today’s hyperspeed ‘give me what I want when I want it’ world, the idea of waiting 30 days to get my information is out of sync.”

Thus House & Garden now becomes the latest in a number of high profile magazines to have bit the dust in the past couple of years: ElleGirl, Jane, Business 2.0, Teen People and Life (not to mention that Portfolio is not doing so hot either). Meanwhile, more and more people are consuming content online, choosing to subscribe to RSS feeds instead of magazines.

In last week’s issue of The New Yorker, Anthony Grafton had a long article entitled “Future Reading.” Subtitled, “Digitization and its discontents,” Grafton looked at how “the computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press,” with huge companies like Google and Microsoft embarking on massive efforts to digitize the world’s knowledge by breaking down the contents of books and pouring them into easily accessible databases which anyone can tap into. Grafton compares all of this, as most people tend to do, with the huge Library of Alexandria, which was founded in Egypt in 300BC. Back in the day, the Library of Alexandria housed the largest repository of human knowledge on earth, with more than 500,000 works. And now, or so it’s being said, major Internet companies like Google and Microsoft are looking to create Alexandria 2.0, digitizing every scrap of print and storing it in a database.

Grafton, however, is skeptical. While he admits that “we have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production,” he thinks that all of these efforts “will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.”

And while Grafton’s correct in stating that the argument is hardly as simple as saying Google Book Search=the Library of Alexandria, what Grafton fails to grasp is that an awful lot of knowledge these days is already digital. After all, to “digitize” something means that you turn it from being non-digital to digital, and yet — for the most part — knowledge now begins as a digital form. So while Grafton can talk all he wants about microfilm, or musty books being scanned, he makes no allowances (or concession) to the fact that a great deal of present and future knowledge will be digital from its conception. But, of course, since this is the New Yorker, Grafton’s really just slouching towards digitization, and not really embracing it. He finishes his article with the usual Animal Farm-esque bleating of “Digital good, print better,” implying that, while students with computers will get most of the picture online, for the real thing they’re going to have to go to a library: “The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.”

Grafton’s fetishism here for the trappings and mise-en-scène of an overly romantic literary life is embarrassing. And the idea that true knowledge is contained only in “dusty, crumbling, smelly irreplaceable documents” is anachronistic to the point of devolution. I mean, I read his piece online; would it have been better for me to have read a dusty, crumbling, smelly version in print? What would I have gained from paper that eluded me on the screen? The answer, of course, is nothing.

Brad Stone, writing in today’s New York Times, reports that the monthly magazine Business 2.0 will be shut down by parent corporation Time Inc.; the October issue will be its last. Business 2.0 debuted in 1998, during the ballooning of the Internet bubble that would ultimately burst two years later. But for a brief period Business 2.0, along with The Industry Standard, Fast Company and Red Herring, were the magazines to read in terms of keeping track of changing paradigms and “new economy” business models. In fact, for a while there these magazines got so fat with advertising that they looked like Silicon Valley versions of Vogue, often exceeding 400 pages. But when the Internet bubble began finally to burst, a lot of the publications that had been started in order to document (or, some would say, profit from) the bubble also shattered and disappeared.

But recently, as we’ve started to enter Bubble 2.0 (i.e. Google buying Youtube — then less than two years old — for $1.65 billion dollars) these magazines, or at least interest in stories about new ventures on the Web, made a comeback. But instead of there being much of a market for print magazines surrounding the New New Economy (Portfolio, anyone?), people are flocking to websites and blogs (because who needs a newsstand when you have an RSS reader?). And so what’s really interesting is that we seem to be witnessing yet another bubble about to burst, with a number of companies going out of business because their business models are no longer sustainable. But instead of it being Internet companies that are doomed, what we’re seeing is a number of print publications — everything from Jane to Life — going out of business because they can’t compete in an increasingly digital marketplace.

Mr. Magazine (AKA Samir Husni), in a recent blog entry written while preparing to debate his friend Bob Sacks at the upcoming Florida Magazine Association’s annual convention, declared that print is in fact not dead because of the fact that four recent fashion magazines recently had their biggest issues ever. For Husni, somehow, this is good news. As he posted to his blog upon seeing these four tomes sitting proudly on the newsstand, “I rubbed my eyes and took a second look. I asked myself how can this be true? I thought someone told me (actually a lot of someones) that print is dead. Well folks, guess what, print is not dead. Soon the prophets of doom and gloom will wake up from their nightmare.” No, I would say the fact that Vogue is growing in physical size while The New York Times is shrinking makes the nightmare not only true but that much more worse. Also, when the defenders of literacy and print start holding up copies of Harper’s Bazaar as a sign that printed matter is surviving, I can tell they’re really getting desperate.

Jon Fine, writing on the Business Week website in an essay entitled “When Do You Stop The Presses?” asks a hypothetical question: “Which major American newspaper should be the first to throw up its hands and stop publishing a print product?” (I assume the question is hypothetical; who knows, maybe somebody asked him.) His question arises from the current state of the newspaper industry, which has taken numerous hits due to the Internet. Writes Fine: “This could be the worst year for newspapers since the Great Depression. The double-digit revenue declines long forecast by doomsters have arrived. While nearly all the major papers still post profits, albeit smaller than before, a few prominent ones are losing boatloads.”

Because of this, Fine thinks that enough is enough and — with no upward trend in sight — at least a couple of major American newspapers (“not today, but within the next 18 or 24 months”) should cease printing a physical edition. His prime candidate for printhanasia? The San Francisco Chronicle. Why? Fine thinks that Chronicle’s website, sfgate.com, would be better served if it didn’t have the print counterpart. “With [an] unassailable market position, excellent editorial, and massive traffic—[the website] will be worth more as a solo digital play than attached to a print newspaper.”

Of course, in the magazine world, many media companies already have killed the magazine but kept the website. (However, last week Jane Magazine — aimed at young women — was killed all together, both the print edition and the website.) But this model, in place for the past few years in terms of magazines and some smaller publications, may now be spreading to the world of newspapers. Such moves would prove that, in the “print is dead” debate, printers have the most to fear. After all, Fine and others aren’t saying that newspapers, magazines or books should go away. Instead, what’s happening is that the physical products which are too costly to produce, and some times difficult for people to obtain, should be killed off in favor of less expensive, more interactive websites.

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?