Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

A colleague and fellow writer recently sent me a number of passages from The Stone Gods, Jeanette Winterson’s recent novel. The book has a section set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic (and post-print) world. In fact, the quotes below remind me very much of Bradbury’s dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451.

From The Stone Gods, page 49:

“We were flying in a strange part of the sky,” said Handsome, “and we thought we’d hit a meteorite shower, ship spinning like a windsock in a gale. I took a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree shot of the ship, and I saw that what we were flying through was a bookstorm–encyclopedias, dictionaries, a Uniform Edition of the Romantic poets, the complete works of Shakespeare.”

From The Stone Gods, page 162:

Books had been lost like everything else in the War, and Post-3 War we hadn’t returned to print media. Natural wastage was the economic argument: why go back to something that was on the way out anyway? You can order books from Print on Demand, but most people use Digital Readers now, or don’t read at all. The younger kids have never known book culture so they don’t miss it.

From The Stone Gods, page 164:

I had been in the British Library, researching the history of artificial intelligence. It was the books that saved my life. As the building collapsed I fell on to a raft of books, and stacks of books fell on to me, knocking me unconscious but casing me from further damage. I came round, pushed myself out of the mountain of books, and started to walk home through the blasted streets, in shock, aware, somewhere, that people were running and screaming, and that everywhere, like one of those archive films of detonated demolitions, buildings were falling.

I think these are great quotes, and the predictions feel very real given all that we’re going through right now.

This week on the the website Red Room, writer Naomi Bock has posted the first of what’s planned to be a two-part article entitled “The Future of the Book.” That this article is appearing on Red Room (a site whose tagline is ”Where the writers are”) makes perfect sense; more and more authors are heading online, so it’s a great place to discuss and debate whether or not books are similarly Internet-bound. Indeed, as Bock writes in her opening paragraph: “But just as digital literary endeavors like [Red Room] gain momentum, print reading is said to be losing its mass appeal, considered less a cherished pastime and more an activity of the past. What could be the future of the book?”

I’m quoted a few times in the article, both from Print is Dead and an e–mail exchange I had with Naomi a few weeks ago. Here’s a bit of the article where I’m mentioned:

Interestingly, [Gomez] acknowledges that more people have been buying his book in print rather than e-reading it, and he himself hasn’t yet made the switch either (although he does all his periodical reading online). He’s “not a fan of existing eBook devices” and, like most, finds it too much of a strain reading long-form on a traditional computer screen. He recognizes the irony of this. He also devotes a chapter of the book to explaining the late ‘90s e-book revolution that wasn’t, and why he thinks the time is finally ripe: Society wasn’t as wired (and wireless) then as it is now. The digital music revolution and its ubiquitous devices have set the stage, and just as other arts are following suit, literature must also do or die. If the e-reader market has yet to offer a truly “great device” in his opinion, he expects to see it in the next two or three years.

“When it comes, I look forward to reading The Great Gatsby on a screen; I’m convinced it’ll still be a great book.”

It’s an interesting and well-written article, so take a look if you have a chance. Part Two of the article will appear over the weekend.

The Angry Journalist website, which is a blog where people from the field of journalism can anonymously post their complaints about the industry, is now offering a line journalism-inspired t-shirts, such as ones that say “Angry Journalist” and “journalists get laid (off).” But, of course, the one I like the most is the one that says “print is dead” (one of which is featured above). It comes in a variety of sizes and colors, as well as both men’s and women’s versions. Needless to say, I think this is pretty cool. However, we now need a t-shirt that says, “When someone asks you if you’re a God, you say yes.”

Earlier today I was part of the annual We Media conference, which is put on by the iFocos organization. The conference is taking place in Miami, Florida, and I was honored to be part of the first day’s keynote address, which consisted of a conversation between me and designer Roger Black. The crowd was really smart, and the conversation flowed well and smoothly. In fact, the session after mine was called “Print Reincarnated.” And, of course, something can’t come back to life if it hasn’t already died. Because the conference was wired, there were people liveblogging the event, and I think there’s going to be video on my entire session, but for now here’s a good link. I’ll update this post as I or if I get more links.

Update: audio from the morning sessions.

Update: new photo.

Update: more blog coverage.

Update: yet more blog coverage.

Now that Print is Dead is out, I have a number of friends and relatives sending me their best wishes for my efforts. But what’s interesting about all of these kind words is that almost all of them add that they hope my predictions for the demise of books doesn’t come true. I guess they think I’m predicting that print’s going to die, but what I’m really saying is that print’s already dead.

Indeed, print is dead in the sense that it’s no longer as vital or relevant as it once was. It used to be that print was a broadcast medium, a way to convey knowledge and information across long distances and to all ranges of social and economic groups. But that’s all been replaced by the Internet. (If Jerry Maguire wanted to distribute his manifesto today, he wouldn’t go to a Kinko’s and have copies made; he’d start a blog, which of course means he’d end up get Dooced in addition to being fired.) So the point isn’t to debate whether or not print is going to die, but rather the question is, What do we do with its corpse?

In hundreds of small ways print is already giving up the ghost. Yet more proof of this is the fact that Picador UK is going to stop publishing hardback books, except in special limited editions. Instead, books will be published directly in paperback format. As Nicholas Clee wrote in the Guardian Book Blog a few weeks ago:

Until now, a small market has just about upheld the other arguments for literary fiction in hardback. But that market has almost reached vanishing point. The paucity of sales of novels even by acclaimed authors was an awkward book industry secret until this summer, when it was broadcast that eight of the novels on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize had sold fewer than 1,000 copies.

So it seems that the invisible hand of the consumer has been quietly brushing books aside for years, to the point where even the most feted novels in the UK won’t escape print’s ultimate fate. In fact, Clee’s blog entry is titled “Cover story: hardbacks have their uses,” to which I would reply, “Yes, of course hardbacks have uses; so do horses, even though we’ve stopped riding them around for transportation.” Books will always exist, but they will be produced in much smaller numbers than we may have been used to in the past. And it won’t be technology companies that do either the pruning or the killing; indeed, the fact the Booker Prize nominees have sold in such small quantities shows that the public has been silently — with its very apathy — killing books for years. So with Print is Dead I’m not predicting that print will die; instead I’m drawing chalk around its edges.

Over the weekend, in the “Books of Style” section (nestled within the overall Sunday Styles section) of the New York Times, Print is Dead was featured alongside Pierre Bayard’s recently published How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (which was originally published in French). The article was titled “Beyond the Cover, Who’s to Know,” and it starts off talking about Bayard’s book, which is about how people don’t need to read books in their entirety to get their meaning. The article then segues to my book, which more or less states that you don’t need to read the physical format of books in order to gain meaningful access to the content inside.

Here’s a snippet of the article:

“Today’s kids are not going to want to pick up a big book and spend hours in a corner silently, passively reading,” Mr. Gomez warns. Instead, he says, “They’re going to ditch the hardback and head over to Facebook.” Why shouldn’t the “boring bits” of “The Mill on the Floss” be expunged? he asks. Why don’t savvy publishers expand their market by “remixing Middlemarch and Middlesex?” Why can’t Dickens be as fun as World of Warcraft? And why would anyone write a travel memoir anymore, when “Google Earth has inventoried nearly every backyard on the planet?” (I’d pursue this further, but it’s time to update my Facebook status.)

To read the entire thing, click here.

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.

Farhad Manjoo, writing a column on the Machinist section of Salon, has an essay today entitled “Why I miss the dead-tree newspaper.” In the essay Manjoo laments the fact that, even though he realizes digital reading is the wave of the future and he has willingly given up his subscription to the daily edition of The New York Times, it’s just not the same. Manjoo writes, “Though I will never go back [to newsprint], more and more, these days, I find myself longing for the paper and the unique, perhaps irreplaceable role it played in shaping how I understood the news of the day.”

Manjoo goes on, stuffing his “paean to an antiquated technology” with a number of examples and reasons why he continues to long for newsprint in a digital world. And while I don’t agree with all of Manjoo’s reasons of why he misses print (for instance, he states that “The newspaper, first and chiefly, is easy to skim”; I myself find locating stories in a newspaper is like rifling through a dictionary to find a word), I certainly see his overall point.

Print is indeed a really great thing. People have produced and consumed it for centuries. In fact, nobody said a transition from print to digital would be easy. Therefore Manjoo’s reaction is natural and good. People love newsprint the same way they love books and magazines. But the fact that people will and do miss print has nothing to do with the efficacy of digital reading (not to mention to the inevitability of digital reading). It also doesn’t mean people are going to go down with the ship, and cling to their “antiquated technology” just because they can’t stand to live life without it.

In the end, Manjoo comes to terms with his loss, reflecting that digital reading is at the dawn of its evolution while newsprint is receding into the sunset: “The online newspaper is an infant; in time designers and engineers will surely find a way to give us a perfectly skimmable electronic broadsheet. Until then, there’s a lot I’ll miss — and mourn.” So not only is Manjoo stating that print is dead, but he’s been to the funeral and is now getting on with his (electronic) life.

The second installment of the Print is Dead podcast, as part of the book excerpt site, has just been delivered. The podcast features me reading the chapter “Us and Them” from the first section of the book, “Stop the Presses.”

Here’s a snippet of the chapter:

Not even the sleekest futurist who believes that one day all our food will be eaten in pill form and we will soon commute via buzzing hovercraft thinks that books should or ever will be completely banned or eradicated. Instead, what the proponents of digital reading are advocating is that literary content and text adapt to our increasingly electronic future and lifestyles. And, if it doesn’t, then people won’t only turn away from books but they’ll also turn away from the stories and ideas found inside books

You can read the complete chapter here.

Subsribe to the podcast via iTunes, or use the XML feed.

Also, you can listen to the excerpt directly below:

Or else, download the MP3 here.

Today I’ve launched a website featuring excerpts from my new book Print is Dead. The site can be found at www.printisdeadbook.com. At this site I’m featuring five excerpts: the book’s introduction and afterward, and one chapter from each of the book’s three parts. This amounts to about one-third of the book’s entire content. All of the excerpts are free, as is access to the site. There’s no catch; I just want people to learn about the book and to start talking and thinking about what I believe to be an incredibly important topic.

I’m also starting a podcast of me reading the excerpts; you can sign up using the RSS feed here:

http://www.printisdeadblog.com/print_is_dead_podcast.xml

Or you can listen to the first excerpt, the book’s introduction, here:

For now, here’s a snippet of the Introduction:

While print is not yet dead, it is undoubtedly sickening. Newspaper readership has been in decline for years, magazines are also in trouble, and trade publishing (the selling of novels and non-fiction books to adults primarily for entertainment), has not seen any substantial growth for years. More and more people are turning away from traditional methods of reading, turning instead to their computers and the Internet for information and entertainment. Whether this comes in the form of getting news online, reading a blog, or contributing to a wiki, the general population is shifting away from print consumption, heading instead to increasingly digital lives.

Enjoy.