Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Earlier this week eMusic.com, which bills itself as the “Number one site for independent music,” announced that it would begin selling audiobooks from its website. eMusic, which operates on a subscription basis and is second only to iTunes in the digital music space, started offering the titles yesterday, and they include major publishers and titles from some of the biggest names in publishing, including Random House and Penguin.

What’s an interesting wrinkle is that the audiobooks will be issued sans digital rights management, which means the files can be listened to on multiple devices and/or computers. While iTunes offers some music free of DRM (at a premium price), its audiobooks (made available through Audible) are always swaddled with DRM. Because of this, listeners are restricted in terms of how (and when) they can listen to the files. eMusic’s move to offer their audiobooks without these restrictions, I think, marks another blow to DRM in general and points towards a future where people will truly own the digital content that they buy.

Of course, what’s also really important is the fact that eMusic is trying to get people who usually listen to music to also listen to audiobooks. And despite the outcry of purists who heap disdain upon audiobooks, saying that listening to one is a less-rewarding experience than reading the original book, this is indeed an encouraging development. Because it not only gives eMusic more content to offer to its users, but it has the potential to open up an entire world to music buyers who now may only be experiencing words in the form of song lyrics.

To celebrate the announcement, eMusic last night held a party at the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts in downtown New York. The party itself was a literary/musical combination that included performances by a couple of bands, not mention DJ J.G. Thirlwell (who was playing snippets of audiobooks over the music, which sounded very cool). In addition, Indecision author Benjamin Kunkel also put in an appearance, talking about his novel and then introducing one of the bands (who, in their sweaters, looked very much like Weezer).

And while writers have occasionally held the stage with musicians (from Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading at The Band’s final concert to The Magnetic Fields working with Lemony Snicket), now that everyone has an iPod and is downloading music (and increasingly eschewing print for electronic entertainment), the time seems right for there to be a real collaboration between these two art forms.

In fact, on the back of the party invitation, eMusic lists a few suggested pairings of books and music, offering a number of food/wine combos: Macbeth and McCartney, White Noise and The White Stripes, Leaves of Grass and Panda Bear, Metamorphosis and Max Roach, and the obligatory Moby Dick and Moby. (What, no Cement Garden and Pavement? Not to mention Steppenwolf and, well, Steppenwolf.) I mean, mixing the vocals of Destiny’s Child with the music of Nirvana is one thing, but getting Nirvana fans to read Chuck Palahniuk is something else (Bleach and Lullaby). Because, while print may be dead words themselves are still alive, and are always seeking either an eye or ear to take them in.

The fine folks at The Future of the Book have just launched a new interactive online version of McKenzie Wark’s book Gamer Theory, which is published in a physical format by Harvard University Press. While I thought the first online iterations of this book were splendid, this 2.0 release continues to add amazing features. For instance, one of the coolest things about the new site is the ability to graphically visualize the text; not since Anthony Burgess suggested putting Finnegans Wake on a big wheel that constantly spun around have I seen such a wonderful graphical representation of words and ideas. Plus, it’s just exquisite to look at; Peter Saville would be proud. Check out the site, and the book, if you haven’t already…

GAMER THEORY / McKenzie Wark / Institute for the Future of the Book

Apple announced this week that it has sold 100 million iPods, its MP3 player that came on the market back in 2001. What’s amazing about this is that, at the time the iPod was launched, there were already numerous MP3 players in existence, none of which managed to capture either the share of the market nor the collective imagination of consumers. But Apple’s ingenious design, as well as its iTunes software interface, have made it a must-own item for more than half a decade. And what’s also amazing is that something that started within a very select group (early adopting Mac owners, once only a tiny community) is now nearly ubiquitous (both the president of the United States and the Pope own iPods). But this is much more than just a great gadget; the iPod has also shuffled the music business — directly leading to the death of the CD and, to a lesser degree, the format of the long-playing album — and the iPod’s success means both big trouble and tremendous opportunity for other entertainment industries.

As reported by MSNBC, the success of the iPod and iTunes will have far-reaching consequences, not only in music but for almost every entertainment medium: “‘It’s pretty clear to me, as to most people who have watched it, that the record label business is just the canary in the coal mine,’ said Phil Leigh, an analyst with Inside Digital Media who has followed the digital music business for years. ‘The Hollywood studios and the TV production companies — they need to pay attention because their businesses are going to change just as rapidly, and they need to adapt.’” And so what has happened in terms of the death of the CD could also lead to the end of various other entertainment formats and business models. “As downloading television and movies becomes more popular, Leigh expects those industries to have to grapple with the same major changes,” according to MSNBC. “That could mean job cuts, changes in product lineups or any number of other moves.” The success of the iPod will also have an impact on publishing and the “print is dead” debate. Of course, whether publishing will have its own iPod moment, with a singular, killer device drastically changing the playing field, remains to be seen. But there’s no longer any doubt that these changes are coming.

An Apple milestone: 100 million iPods sold

Editor& Publisher this week published some very surprising findings from a study that showed, in terms of readers reading material both in print and online, “more text was read online than in print.” The study was part of a survey “in which 600 newspaper readers from six different newspapers were studied, utilized electronic eyetracking equipment that readers wore while they read broadsheet, tabloid and online editions of newspapers. The research, conducted last year, focused on 100 readers from each newspaper.” What the study found was that “when readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.”

This is pretty astounding, and it I think it goes a long way towards dispelling the myth that print is the perfect media/medium, and that its marriage with text is a marriage made in heaven. Instead, I think this study shows that, in many cases, the marriage between print and text is instead a marriage of convenience, and that the joining of the two was originally incidental (engineered to meet a function) rather than predestined (text invented to fill the page). Not to mention that, in an increasingly digital world, the relationship between print and text is becoming gradually anachronistic. So then, since print itself is not the point, what has become truly important is the content itself. What matters least of all is the paper and the ink.

Surprise: Study Finds Online Users Finish More Stories Than Print Readers

The TED conference starts today in Monterey, California. No, not the Ted pictured. Instead, TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” and is an annual think-thank gathering of “icons, geniuses and mavericks” (the TED website features pictures of both Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, but I don’t think either have confirmed for this year’s conference). With sessions that include people such as Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann and NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (on the same panel!) it seems like a pretty good time. I’d love to attend one of these conferences, but they’re by invitation only (and to be accepted you have to be a “leading thinker and doer” and I’m more of a third-place thinker and at best a fourth-place doer), not to mention the cost is nearly $5K. For a lot less money I’ll take a few walks in Central Park, sit on a nice bench under a tall tree, get out a notebook, and do my thinking there. This may not make me a genius (not to mention an icon or a maverick), but I think saving five thousand dollars is pretty smart.

TED 2007 Conference Schedule

Reuters yesterday reported on recent digital initiatives by Harper Collins and Random House that will allow users to search inside books from their respective websites and then consume — to various degrees — the content found within. As news goes this information is a bit old (Harper announced their initiative months ago), and in terms of functionality neither Harper or Random House are offering anything terribly different from what Amazon and Google already offer. (That being said, Random’s digital solution allows users to add material to their personal pages, which is pretty cool.) What I find more interesting is the tone in most of the articles, for example the first line of the Reuters piece: “The dusty world of book publishing has taken a step into cyberspace as Random House and HarperCollins [are] letting customers browse books online,” which only goes to show how out-of-step publishing is seen to be in terms of the Internet and digital delivery and consumption.

Reuters: Publishers allow book browsing on the Web

In C.P. Snow’s controversial 1959 speech “The Two Cultures,” the British scientist-turned-writer described how the sciences and the arts and humanities were at that moment being increasingly segregated into separate camps by a growing and profound split in thinking and values. Each group distrusted the other, with the artists looking at the scientists as if they were boorish philistines, while the scientists regarded the artists as clueless Luddites. According to a new report from IBM entitled Navigating the Digital Divide — as reported last week on The Australian’s website — there is now emerging a new but different schism, this time between old media and new media. The report “warns that the conflict between traditional and new media is seeing the emergence of a media divide that could erase hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from the bottom line of the world’s leading media companies.”

(Of course, the significance of this coming from IBM cannot be lost; the computer giant, who looked untouchable in the 1950s and 1960s — their name was synonymous with computing — found themselves increasingly out of touch with the lucrative personal computer market of the 1970s and 1980s, playing catch-up to more nimble rivals like Apple. So if anyone should know something about ignoring important emerging technology, it’s IBM.)

The IBM report talks about how the music industry lost well over $100 billion in its transition to digital, noting that “television and film companies will be next if companies don’t systematically navigate the media divide. Now is the time to determine changes in business models, innovate and re-evaluate partnerships. Media companies must take action before it is too late.”

The publishing industry is not mentioned in the article, but of course it too will need to make this tricky transition, and if it doesn’t learn from the mistakes of these previous industries — music, television and film — then the cost to publishing’s bottomline may be so large it never recovers.

The Australian: Old v new may cost billions

The Financial Times looks at Microsoft’s launch of its new operating system, Vista, pointing out that the new release “also reflects a deeper change in how the software business works,” most notably that the new model is “software as service.” This means that software is no longer a physical thing that comes in a box and then gets loaded to your computer, but software is instead a web application (such as Google). This really does signal a sea change for the software industry, as well as for consumers. Personally, I remember my boss buying Pagemaker back in the early ’90s, and it came on something like six floppy discs that had to all be loaded onto the PC in the right order. It was a laborious process. But now, not only do CDs and downloading make getting programs much easier, but the programs themselves will disappear, leaving in their place websites which will perform the needed functions instead. In terms of the “print is dead” debate, it just goes to show that yet another physical product — software — is beginning to go away, and if you’ve ever been in a computer store looking for a computer program, the racks and racks of them look an awful lot like books. Those packages are going away the same way that books will go away in an increasingly digital future. What remains instead will be the “service.” Jeff Jarvis has already said that journalism isn’t a product, it’s a service, and soon we’ll be saying the same thing about long-form non-fiction or even novels.

From the story: “The moment also marks a turning point in the history of the world’s biggest software company, as Microsoft turns its attention more fully towards a future software industry that is likely to look very different.”

FT.com: Vista marks end of an era for Microsoft

The Los Angeles Times had an interesting article earlier in the week about how 2007 is going to be a year when big media companies finally integrate their offline products into an online presence. While the people being mentioned in the article are big players like NBC and Disney, smaller media companies — including book publishers — will have to increase their online activities in order to keep up with increasingly digital consumer interests, and that will include not only online marketing, but digital delivery and consumption.

From the article: “The scramble to keep up with the new medium — along with the threat of a Hollywood writers strike, the possible retirement of a handful of industry bosses and some high-profile mergers — will make for an exciting, if unpredictable, 2007 in the media, entertainment and technology businesses.”

LA Times: Putting more on the line online

Speaking of “digital natives,” USA Today (and believe me, I read plenty of websites other than USA Today’s) had a story today entitled “Google VP says youth determine Internet future” in which a VP at Google said that it’s today’s kids who will determine the future of the internet. This made me think of electronic reading and digital delivery, and how people like Updike say that “books traditionally have edges,” but for a whole new generation, who are completely raised on the internet, nothing will have edges. To them, digital delivery and reading of content will be like second nature (if not Second Life).

Excerpt: “‘If you really want to know what will happen with the Internet, ask a 13-year-old,’ said [Vinton] Cerf, the vice president of Google. He was a keynote speaker Monday at the Upper Great Plains Technology Conference.”

Google VP says youth determine Internet future