Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Edward Tenner has an interesting essay entitled “The Prestigious Inconvenience of Print,” which appeared in the March issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Tenner’s thesis is that even though digital media provides an interactive experience, and is (mostly) all-around more efficient, the physical medium of print still contains within it a “prestigious inconvenience” which people are willing to put up with. Tenner’s real point is basically the chant of the pigs at the end of Animal Farm, which I’d paraphrase as “Digital good, print better!” For instance, he mentions that while most businessmen send and receive voluminous amounts of e-mail, “their most important sentiments are likely to be expressed as handwritten notes — one of the reasons for the luxury fountain-pen industry’s niche in the digital age.” In this Tenner is completely correct, especially in his use of the word “niche.” Fountain pens are a rarity these days since they have been technologically replaced by the computer, Blackberry, and handheld devices with keyboards such as cellphones and UMPCs. In fact, that’s the exact argument of the “print is dead” debate; not that print will become extinct, but that it will instead become a niche product and interest.

Tenner even hovers around idea of print being dead, writing that, “just as luxury watches remain in demand while most people carry cellphones that give the time with virtually observatory-standard accuracy, the Web will never destroy older media because their technical difficulties and risks help create glamour and interest. At the same time, however, the Web does nibble at their base, creating new challenges for writers, musicians, and other members of the media.” First of all, I would say that, given the online world in which we now live, the Web is doing a lot more than just “nibbling” at older media. In fact, the thousands of people who have recently lost their jobs because they worked at magazines or newspapers that went out of business because of lack of interest and online competition would probably say they feel swallowed whole, and not just nibbled. And here Tenner makes a point he probably doesn’t want to make, pointing out that one day (perhaps soon) a printed book in a digital world will seem as quaint and as antiquated as a watch or a fountain pen feels today.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Prestigious Inconvenience of Print

InfoWorld, a magazine about information and technology that has existed for nearly thirty years, today published its last ever physical copy. As Editor in Chief Steve Fox put it last week, “No more printing on dead trees, no more glossy covers, no more supporting the US Post Office in its rush to get thousands of inky copies on subscribers’ desks by Monday morning (or thereabouts).” But InfoWorld is not going out of business; instead, it’s just going online. “We’re not going anywhere,” says Fox. “We are merely embracing a more efficient delivery mechanism — the Web — at InfoWorld.com. You can still get all the news coverage, reviews, analysis, opinion, and commentary that InfoWorld is known for. You’ll just have to access it in a browser (or RSS reader) — something more than a million of you already do every month.”

I think this move makes a lot of sense, and not just for InfoWorld’s audience, but in general. The Web has created expectations in users concerning delivery, interaction and utility, and all of this — in a Web 2.0 world — makes the need for print magazines increasingly obsolete (or, if nothing else, a souvenir-like afterthought). As Fox notes, he and his staff have been producing for years more material than a magazine can handle: “In addition to the articles we had prepared for print, our staff and contributors create and post the equivalent of a full magazine online every day, featuring 25 blogs, bundles of daily online-only news stories, columns, articles, regular videos, slideshows, and podcasts. The limited confines of a print magazine, with 32 pages of editorial content each week, simply couldn’t begin to address the needs of an information-hungry IT audience.” Freed from the confines of ink and paper, InfoWorld can now exist as purely itself, stretching or contracting to fill any virtual space it wants.

InfoWorld folds print mag to focus on online and events

The New York Times, among other media outlets, is reporting that “Time Inc. announced yesterday that Life magazine would cease publication next month, the third time since Life’s founding in 1936 that its owner has pulled the plug.” The last issue will appear on April 20. Increased competition from similar publications, such as Parade and USA Weekend, contributed to the death of Life, but another factor was the rise of Internet usage and the fact that Life is putting all of its photographs on the Web, “where consumers will be able to download them free.”

The company explained their decision in a statement: “While consumers responded enthusiastically to Life, with the decline in the newspaper business and the outlook for advertising growth in the newspaper supplement category, the response was not strong enough to warrant further investment in Life as a weekly newspaper supplement.”

Looked at in terms of the “print is dead” debate, Life’s general erosion of readership and brand value can be linked to more and more people getting what they want online for free or else from other media outlets who have a robust online presence. During the magazine’s heyday of the ‘40s and ‘50s, Life — along with Look and National Geographic — was one of the premier ways to communicate experiences and images to readers across the country, and yet now the Web can do that much more quickly and efficiently. Life has been usurped by websites, Flickr pages and photoblogs, and the world itself has been so flattened in terms of information dispersal that new images are communicated throughout the world in seconds; no one waits for them to arrive once a month in their mailbox.

NY Times: “Life Magazine, Its Pages Dwindling, Will Cease Publication”

Last week The Economist published an article entitled “Not bound by anything,” which deals with the future of books and asks the question, “Now that books are being digitised, how will people read?” The digitization in question is of course Google’s book program, already written about (and maligned) in plenty of other places. In fact, the open line of the Economist story makes this sound all very clandestine (“In secret locations and using secret methods, human beings are scanning lots and lots of books for Google, the world’s largest web-search company”; I love that the writer makes it clear that “human beings” are doing the work, lest we think Google has invented their own kind of Umpa Lumpa). By the fourth paragraph, however, the Google-hysteria ends and the article moves on to more important questions, the very ones that form the foundation of the future of the book movement and the “print is dead” argument: “As books go digital, new questions, both philosophical and commercial, arise. How, physically, will people read books in future? Will technology ‘unbind’ books, as it has unbundled other media, such as music albums? Will reading habits change as a result? What happens when books are interlinked? And what is a book anyway?”

The article then goes on to talk about eBooks (including the new Sony device), the new paradigm of wikis, the popularity of iPods, and what all of this could mean for non-fiction (hyperlinks galore) not to mention all of the material (such as novellas) that have never really fit within the business of traditional publishing. But just when you think that someone’s really getting it, the writer trots out the old “the book is perfect” argument: “Most stories, however, will never find a better medium than the paper-bound novel. That is because readers immersed in a storyline want above all not to be interrupted, and all online media teem with distractions (even a hyperlink is an interruption).”

The same way that, just a week ago, Cory Doctorow seemed to classify all novels as the same, so now does the Economist classify all readers as similar, noting that the most important thing to them is to not be interrupted while they’re reading. This is a silly if not insane notion. Readers are changing just as much as novels are, and have been for generations now. When Less Than Zero first appeared, more than twenty years ago, it was noted that its brief scenes, short chapters, and stream-lined prose made it a novel for the MTV Generation whose attention had been shattered and for whom slow narratives had been banished in order to make way for the three minute fix of rock videos. Well, it’s now a quarter of a century later, and society has only increased speed; we have not slowed down. Music and films reflect this, and the rise of reality television shows that audiences no longer have the patience for storylines, characters or plot. Today’s readers (not to mention tomorrow’s) are used to e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, podcasts, and a dozen other inventions that didn’t exist a decade ago. Because of all this, they will be able to intelligently absorb text on a screen (even within the form of a novel) alongside a myriad of other digital distractions, and it’s an insult to them to say that they won’t and to assume that readers are like squirrels (as if any sudden movement will scare them away). Not to mention that novels of the future will reflect and celebrate these changes, not provide an antidote to them. Yes, some people will continue to hug novels in bay windows on autumn days, basking in the warm glow of a fireplace with a cup of Chamomile at their side. But many more will embrace the convenience and advanced usability that digital technology and digital reading provides, and for them nothing will be lost in the equation.

The Economist: Not Bound By Anything

Rachel Smolkin has an interesting article on the American Journalism Review website. Entitled “Finding a Niche,” the essay asks “Is there a role for the weekly newsmagazines and their Web sites in a 24-7 news environment?” Here’s how Smolkin sums up the current situation: “The weekly newsmagazines could use some divine inspiration as they grasp for a foothold in a media landscape increasingly dominated by the Web. Over the last few months, the repositioning has been illustrated most dramatically at Time. In addition to shedding about 50 staffers as part of a larger contraction at parent Time Inc., the magazine has hiked its newsstand price by $1, reduced its guaranteed circulation to advertisers from 4 million to 3.25 million, debuted a new advertiser option for counting readers and unveiled a redesign in its March 26 issue. Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report are adapting as well, if at a less precipitous pace.”

Throughout the piece there’s the usual hand-wringing and doom-and-gloom predictions (”I worry about the future of newsweeklies,” says a media analyst, “I don’t know what their relevance is in the world today”), and while the “print is dead” debate gets an oblique mention (“Writing obituaries for the newsweeklies has been a popular pastime for media handicappers for decade”), the essay is a thoughtful, non-hysterical look at the current facts (and the eventual fate) surrounding newsweeklies in an increasingly digital world.

In the end, though, the article comes to the conclusion that most people are slowly realizing, in terms of the digital reading debate, that electronic screens or audio players or tablet devices or whatever simply represent a new way to consume and enjoy information, the same way that the Iliad a long time ago went from lips to the page: “Through that media cacophony, the leaders of the old-guard newsweeklies believe they still provide a special service — no matter what the platform.” And it is indeed all about the service, the content, the stories, the words; what matters least is the paper, the staples, the ink.

American Journalism Review: “Finding a Niche”

Robin Steinberg (pictured above as her Second Life avatar) has an essay as part of Ad Age magazine’s MediaWorks column entitled “Is Print Dead? Not on Your (Second) Life.” Apparently Steinberg was at the recent 4A’s Media Conference, and was sitting on a panel when she was confronted with the question, Is print dead? Here’s what happened: “I took a breath and rallied myself: ‘Not on your life!’ I answered with passion. ‘Not on this life, your avatar life, or your Second Life. Print is not dead.’” She then goes on, in her essay, to state “I am certain that digital is not going to kill publishing.” To this I say, well, of course it’s not. In fact, not only will digital not kill publishing, but the two will merge and publishing will become digital (in terms of production and workflow, publishing has been digital for years; the only place where it’s still analog is at the final point, when the consumer gets his or her hands on it). What’s being talked about in the “print is dead” debate is something different than “digital killing publishing”; instead what’s happening is that the increasing habits of digital reading are leading to a decrease of physical reading. And this is happening by degrees in numerous areas, including newspapers, magazines, and books. Indeed, the death of books won’t be from an atomic blast of sudden reader disinterest, but instead will be a “death of a thousand cuts,” the first hundred of which have already occurred (for example, try telling the staffers of those magazines and newspapers who have recently lost their jobs due to electronic competition that digital is not having an effect on the publishing business). So Steinberg’s breathless defense of print seems misguided, as does her aligning the “print is dead” debate with the Second Life phenomenon. Digital reading is not an all-or-nothing alternative, where people exist as either a Norman Rockwell painting or an avatar that looks like Cory Doctorow. Instead, digital delivery and consumption of content is gradually seeping into all areas of our everyday lives, including the books, magazines and newspapers that we read. That is where digital is making an impact, and that is how digital will lead — not to publishing’s murder — but instead to its evolution.

Ad Age: “Is Print Dead? Not on Your (Second) Life”

Jeremy Leslie, writing on Business Week.com, reviews the new book The Last Magazine by David Renard. As Leslie writes, “Renard’s central theme is established with the opening sentence of the book. ‘Magazines, as we know them, are dying.’” Leslie then draws a picture of the how the future of magazine publishing could play out: “over the next 20 years, mainstream magazines will cease to be distributed as printed items, as a combination of pressures pushes publishers to move to digital distribution.” This sounds very much like the “print is dead” debate, with major consumption of printed material happening digitally online (rather than physically offline). However, most of the The Last Magazine seems to be about not the mainstream magazines which will disappear (in fact, just this week Premiere magazine folded), but rather the book highlights the smaller, more idiosyncratic magazines that have a chance to flourish in a digital future by flying under the radar. These “microzines” will be issued in limited editions, and will focus on specific niches, rather than today’s magazines and newspapers (not to mention books) that try to appeal to as many people as possible (which is why they are failing: because most people are now online, so that’s where the brands and authors must also exist). Sounds like an interesting read…

From the review: “While the process of designing and printing magazines has been revolutionised in a single generation of digitalisation, the financial model behind the making of magazines has barely changed. The model has been successful because of continued growth. But recently this growth has stopped.”

BusinessWeek.com: “It’s Not The End of Print”

On the Good Magazine website, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter has an introductory essay to Good Magazine’s list of the “51 Best Magazines Ever.” Carter gets, I think, just about everything wrong in his essay, stating that “the essential strength of a magazine is its ability to amplify. An idea, or an image, or a story, set within the pages of a magazine and assembled by the right hands, can become the grist of breakfast chatter, dinner-party conversation, or elective body debate around the world.” That may have been the case before the Internet, but the explosion of the Web has shown that there is now a dozen other ways — besides magazines — to amplify ideas and spread information. Whether it’s through blogs or websites like MySpace and YouTube, our current breakfast chatter revolves most often around something we see online, not something we read offline. And in terms of delivery, when Carter writes “you can buy a magazine almost anywhere. Publishers will even deliver it to your door,” this is almost laughable. In our on-demand everything world, magazines are physical copies sitting in dark mailboxes, whereas blogs and websites are digital bits instantly flying through cyberspace. When Carter finally acknowledges the “print is dead” argument, writing that “magazines — or, rather, certain magazines — aren’t going away anytime soon,” he has a point. Not all magazines will become extinct in a future where people increasingly get their information online, but when Carter also says that magazines “have, so far, not perished at the altar of the internet,” he’s factually correct but intellectually wrong since magazines have recently taken several direct hits, and the upcoming generation of Digital Natives — for whom interacting with a computer in order to get information is now second nature — they will turn less and less to the newsstand, rejecting it for the already amplified ideas they find online.

Good Magazine: The 51 Best Magazines Ever

When I was in high school, twenty years ago, I put together a literary magazine that featured poetry, stories and artwork from my friends and other people at the school. One of the poems was my own, but I signed it using just my initials. It was a love poem titled “To L.B.” This caused a minor scandal for about ten minutes as people tried to figure out who the writer was and who the subject was (it wasn’t too hard). This and the stories I wrote for the school newspaper were the extent of my media exposure in high school. At the time, though, it felt like a lot. But in terms of today’s generation of Digital Natives, I would have been considered a hermit. New York Magazine’s cover story this week, entitled “Say Everything,” takes a long look at this new computer-powered generation who began living their lives online at an early age — usually pre-teen — and who have only shared more and more from there. And this goes well beyond the occasional Myspace page; these are lives documented on a daily basis almost from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed, digitally preserved in the amber of pixels and mouseclicks. Remember that high school yearbook photo that you hate? Well, these kids will remember a lot more than that.

In New York Magazine’s listing of the various changes between this generation and previous ones, the first one is “THEY THINK OF THEMSELVES AS HAVING AN AUDIENCE.” This is pretty different than previous generations who considered themselves an audience. In terms of publishing and the “print is dead” debate, today’s kids are not going to want to pick up a big book and spend hours in a corner silently, passively reading. Why in the world would they do that? It’s not interactive. They can’t share the experience with their friends. There’s no way to change the book to suit their own tastes. Instead, they’re going to ditch the hardback and head over to Facebook. The publishing industry needs to realize this, and it needs to also find a way to get to these kids by making content available in a way that will first reach them (i.e. digitally) and then will give them the tools to interact with it and share it (post excerpts on their Myspace pages, e-mail chapters to friends, IM paragraphs across class, etc.). If not, there are dozens of ways this generation will choose to spend their time, and none of them will involve books.

From the story: “Right now the big question for anyone of my generation seems to be, endlessly, ‘Why would anyone do that?’ This is not a meaningful question for a 16-year-old. The benefits are obvious: The public life is fun. It’s creative. It’s where their friends are. It’s theater, but it’s also community: In this linked, logged world, you have a place to think out loud and be listened to, to meet strangers and go deeper with friends. And, yes, there are all sorts of crappy side effects: the passive-aggressive drama (’you know who you are!’), the shaming outbursts, the chill a person can feel in cyberspace on a particularly bad day. There are lousy side effects of most social changes (see feminism, democracy, the creation of the interstate highway system). But the real question is, as with any revolution, which side are you on?”

New York Magazine: Say Everything

New York Magazine this week has a really interesting article where it features “media diaries” of three New Yorkers, listing every bit of media that they read, look at, consume, etc. And of course what I find interesting is how digital their lives are (especially the woman who bought an episode of “Gray’s Anatomy” on iTunes and watched it on her laptop; that’s totally cool, and a great example of the “on-demand everything/Attention Economy” times in which we now live). Also, you don’t see many diary entries like “1PM-6PM, sat in a bay window and read Tolstoy.” True, these are New Yorkers, and so may not be representative of the rest of the country, but I think it’s not too far off the mark of how lots of young people are living in our increasingly digital world.

Article intro: “When Time magazine put a crinkly, vaguely toxic-looking fun-house mirror on its cover and named ‘you’ the person of the year for 2006, the Establishment weekly was more or less cheering on its own diminution. After all, like most purveyors of mass media, from TV (see the nightly news) to the music industry (Tower Records, R.I.P.) to daily newspapers (which have lost over 20 percent of their stock valuation in the past four years), Time is facing both a vexing shift in consumer behavior and the rise of self-generated content. Of course, amid all this apocalyptic hype, young people are consuming more media than ever. But what is it they’re reading, watching, and listening to, exactly? We asked three members of the coveted 18-to-34 demographic to keep a diary of their habits for a week.”

NY Mag: The Media Diaries