Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Katie Hafner, writing earlier in the week in The New York Times, had a story entitled “Film Drop-Off Sites Fade Against Digital Cameras.” The story was about how, in an increasingly digital world, drive-thru photo kiosks — a staple for decades that, in the Southern California suburbs where I was raised, meant going to a Fotomat — are becoming an endangered species. “The rate of decline is apparent from film sales — since only people who buy film need to have it developed,” writes Hafner. “Over the last four years, the sale of film has been dropping at a rate of 25 to 30 percent each year. In 2006, 204 million rolls were sold, a quarter of the 800 million sold at the peak in 1999. ‘It’s pretty alarming,’ said Bing Liem, senior vice president of sales for the imaging division of Fujifilm USA.’

And yet, while these photo processing centers are closing down, and the sales of film are tanking, people are taking more pictures than ever. Not to mention that they’re sharing these photos in ways that had been all but impossible in an analog world. For instance, my sister-in-law who lives in another state had a baby last year. And while she occasionally still puts snapshots in an envelope and sends them to us in the mail, most often my wife and I chart our nephew’s growth by looking at the digital photos his mother e-mails us on a weekly basis. And when I got married last year, since our family and guests were scattered throughout the country, the way that most people saw our photos was on our website. And of course while most digital photos are sent via e-mail (or else directly from cameras), photo-sharing websites like Flickr make it incredibly easy to share entire photo collections, not to mention that websites like Blurb allow you to then turn all of those photos into a book (bypassing the need to collect prints in photo albums).

But in terms of Fotomats and the standalone kiosks that had been around for decades, how they worked was simple: you would drive in, drop off your film, go back to living your life, and a week or so later you’d drive by again to pick up your pictures. While that seems positively glacial now, it used to be even worse. In previous decades people had to the mail the film from their Brownies to processing centers that could be in another state; photos could take weeks or moths to get back (which is maybe when they started putting dates on them; so people would remember what they were looking at). So when those huge vinegar-smelling machines came along in the ‘80s that could get you your film in an hour, people were overjoyed (not to mention that it gave us a decent Robin Williams film).

Suddenly, the time from taking a picture to having it your hand was shrinking. And while instant cameras had been around since the late ‘40s, they were seen mostly as a novelty because their quality was not as good as regular film (and anyway, instant cameras were hardly “instant” since that gray square always took a few minutes to develop; and these days, even minutes are too long). But with the advent and now almost total domination of digital cameras, people are able to print photos at home within seconds, on professional-grade paper that makes them look like expensive prints. Not just that, but people these days routinely take a picture with their digital camera and then instantly turn the camera around to check if it’s any good, or to see what they’ve captured. They’re reliving the moment right there in the, well, moment. What used to take months — seeing what your camera sees — now takes mere seconds.

And because of all this, entire generations are getting hooked on the idea of an on-demand world that offers instant gratification at every turn. Want to watch last week’s episode of Ugly Betty in the middle of the night? Dial it up from your DVR (if not the network’s website). Want to buy that silly “You had a bad day” song that’s been in your head all morning since hearing it in the deli, but you’re nowhere near a record store? No problem; access iTunes from your iPhone and download the track that you want. And while watching movies on handheld devices or laptops hasn’t quite caught on, most people I know buy their tickets online (if not from their cellphone). People still may wait online like in Annie Hall once they get to the theater, but they no longer have to do that to buy tickets.

And publishing needs to realize that it has to participate in this new mindset on some level. Because for a new generation, overnight shipping is going to feel as absurdly slow as dropping off film at a Fotomat. Why wait for words you want to read right now? And while I’m heartened by new devices that have wi-fi and a keyboard, the process for buying books online has to be made even easier, along with making sure there’s a wide-enough selection and a price-point that makes sense. And while I don’t think that the Barnes and Nobles of today will suffer the same fate as the Fotomats of yesterday, one of these days people will care a lot more about clicks than they do bricks.

From the video blog I Hate Young People, I found the above clip that consists of people talking about cell phones and their hatred/fear of technology (epitomized by the woman who says “Just because it’s new doesn’t make it better”). While being pretty funny, I also think it goes to show just how wary people are of new things and change in general, and I bet that — a hundred years ago — you would have received the same reactions in terms of people talking about horseless carriages and the telephone. And, of course, you hear people talk like this in the “future of the book” debate, decrying things like electronic reading devices or portable gadgets, saying no one will want to “curl up” with computers. The subtext in both discussions is a general fear of the new, and a desire to always have things remain the same. However, as we all know, the only thing that remains the same is the fact that things will indeed always change. So, like it or not, technology is here to stay.

Ian Austen, writing in The New York Times earlier in the week, had an article entitled “Extinction Is at Hand for Paper Airline Tickets.” The article was about how paper tickets for plane travel are now practically extinct due to the introduction of electronic tickets. As Austen writes, “Replacing paper tickets, and the elaborate global system that processed them, with electronic ticketing will save airlines $3 billion annually on the roughly 400 million tickets sold outside of the United States alone.” So while this makes economic sense, for passengers it also makes their lives easier (tickets being one less thing to forget to pack).

I also think this development has some relevance in terms of the “print is dead” debate. Because, while airplane tickets aren’t narrative (although a one-way ticket certainly tells a different story than a roundtrip), the reduction of yet another piece of paper in our lives shows that deeply ingrained habits and customs can (and do) change. When people say “print is dead” they’re referring words printed on paper, but the statement could also signify anything written by hand. And the increase of computer technology and electronic communication has led to a direct (and significant) decrease of various forms or instances of printing and handwriting.

In fact, in numerous aspects of daily living, paper is getting more and more scarce. I see this often in my own life. For instance, I haven’t written a check in years. Instead, I do all of my banking online. And I now receive my statements online, and I also no longer receive paychecks (opting for direct deposit). I rarely even carry money anymore because I’d rather just use a credit or debit card for pretty much everything. Paper used to be at heart of all financial transactions, and yet nowadays it has practically disappeared.

So where we were, just ten years ago, covered in paper like Robert DeNiro at the end of Brazil, we’re all becoming increasingly digital, with e-mail signatures replacing the real thing and virtual greeting cards usurping paper ones. And so, while the “paperless office” that was predicted a few decades ago hasn’t yet come to pass, in 2007 we have less interaction with paper than we’ve had since it came into widespread circulation a few hundred years ago. Airline tickets are the latest bit of print to disappear, and many more examples will follow.

On the New York Times “City Room” blog yesterday, David Dunlap had a posting entitled “Coming to Newsstands Now: A New Look.” In the posting, Dunlap writes about how newsstands around the city (which he poetically describes as “a bit of ungainly but plainspoken street furniture”) are being redesigned by Grimshaw Architects, “one of the world’s leading design companies.” In an age of growing online consumption of not just news, but all kinds of entertainment (who needs The New York Post when you have Gawker?), having famous architects spend their time designing newsstands is like having leading record labels release eight-tracks. Because, in an increasingly digital world, an RSS reader is the new newsstand.

RSS readers allow people to easily find and cherry-pick the news that they want to read, thereby constructing their own publication. In fact, I find it interesting/silly that The Washington Post will put, at the top of the stories that appear on their website, where in the paper the story originally appeared (as if it makes any difference to me that something that was on the home page appeared on page B01 or C01 of the print edition). I wouldn’t care if it was on the very last page of the very last section of the paper; if it’s content I’m interested in, it’s going to be the first thing I read.

I was thinking this about when I read Joe Strupp’s article on the Editor & Publisher website entitled “’User’ Sites Choose Different News Than Mainstream Outlets.” In the article Strupp talks about how, according to a new survey, “New York Mainstream media outlets may not be offering up the stories online users most want to read.” Instead, “user-generated news sites like Yahoo give top billing to different stories than mainstream organizations.”

The story lists a number of surprising conclusions, among them that “online users gravitated toward different topics than those from traditional news outlets.” All of which goes to show that, when the New York Times claims that its paper contains “All the news that’s fit to print,” what it’s really saying is “All the news we feel like printing.” But Web 2.0 technology, and websites like Digg and Reddit, allow the users themselves to vote, endorse and share the stories that they’re interested in. The same way that on-demand television shattered prime time, the term “front page news” is now in for a bashing.

In Dunlap’s posting, he acknowledges this to a degree, asking in the end, “Perhaps more to the point, will [New Yorkers in three years] be going to newsstands at all?” My answer is, yes, of course, New Yorkers will continue going to newsstands, but the numbers will be way down from what they used to be. Or rather, they’ll be going to the newsstands for just gum and candy (and what architect in the world would like to spend their time designing a work of art for that?)

New York Times art director Steven Heller, on the design blog A Brief Message, had a posting on Tuesday entitled “An Inconvenient Truth?” The question that Heller’s asking is whether or not the “inconvenient truth” that print may be dead is actually true. As he skeptically states in his opening sentence, “I keep hearing from designers that print is dying.” (Note that Heller himself doesn’t necessarily think it’s dying; it’s just something he’s heard on the grapevine.) Heller then relates a recent incident that pertains to the subject: a young student has come to show him his thesis “printed out on clean, white paper.” The student had just come from a meeting with another well-known designer who had told him to forget about print; that it was dead and that “he should find an alternate means to reach the largest number of people.”

The confused young student then asks Heller for his thoughts. Heller responds Socratically, asking a question instead of giving an answer. “I asked how he reads the newspaper,” writes Heller. “The answer: ‘On the Internet.’” Heller, at first, chalks up the youth’s ditching of print to his age, thinking, “Okay, he’s under 30.” But then Heller remembers that “the other night I asked two friends, both over 60, the same question. The answer was the same.” Which makes me think that, if even designers, many of whom — as Cory Doctorow says — are “pervy” for paper, are eschewing printed products for the Internet, then I’d say that Heller can probably remove his question mark and declare that it’s true that print is dead. And what’s more important, there doesn’t need to be anything “inconvenient” about this truth.

Because the same way that previous generations played with different physical media — from Calder’s mobiles to Matisse’s cut-outs and Rauschenberg’s combines — new generations of artists and designers are using computers and programs like Flash in order to express themselves. In fact, what used to take a myriad of raw materials and a printing press or a silk screen, not to mention an artist’s spacious studio, now can take place within the microchips of a laptop. While select artists and artisans will continue to work with paper and other printed media, more and more artists and designers will choose electronic creation as well as consumption. And today’s thesis “printed out on clean, white paper” is tomorrow’s networked website, full of hyperlinks and comments, easy to share and to access.

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.

Over the weekend, the New York Times Magazine had a cover story by Lynn Hirschberg on music mogul Rick Rubin, the brilliant maverick producer who has been behind projects as diverse as the debut of the Beastie Boys and the comeback of Johnny Cash. His latest endeavor is the heading up Columbia Records, one of the most traditional record companies out there (and therefore — in this digital age — most in need of Rubin’s rehabilitation). The article has lots of great quotes about how the music industry has changed, and is still changing (as Rubin says, “Well, the world has changed. And the [recording] industry has not”) and I think that parallels abound when thinking about publishing being yet another industry going through immense changes. As I’ve written before, I think we can learn a lot from witnessing what music’s going through, as well as learning from its mistakes.

When putting Columbia in perspective alongside the other labels, Rubin is predictably blunt. “Columbia is stuck in the dark ages,” he says. “I have great confidence that we will have the best record company in the industry, but the reality is, in today’s world, we might have the best dinosaur. Until a new model is agreed upon and rolling, we can be the best at the existing paradigm, but until the paradigm shifts, it’s going to be a declining business. This model is done.”

I think many publishers have a similar view, and instead of trying to transform themselves into something new — and instead of realizing that the current model may be “done” — they’re trying to be the “best dinosaur” out there by eluding evolution and sticking it out the longest. In fact, the worst thing for some of these companies is that they will indeed survive by doing what they’re doing, because by that point they’ll be so inoculated against change that they’ll forever stay the same.

In terms of the music industry’s broken business model, Rubin thinks he has the answer: paid subscription. “You’d pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you’d like,” says Rubin. “In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home. You’ll say, ‘Today I want to listen to … Simon and Garfunkel,’ and there they are. The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now.” In thinking of that idea, imagine if that were a library of books instead of songs; any book in the world could be instantly available on a variety of screens and devices, at any time. This would lead to more reading, and not less, the same way the iPod has been tremendous for music (but not so much for the music industry).

Of course, whether or not this will work for music (let alone publishing) remains to be seen, but I think it’s great that Rubin and others (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal are also reportedly behind the paid subscription plan) are trying to come up with ways to save their industry. If not, the record labels will follow the record retailers, like Tower, right off the edge of the cliff. And if publishers don’t similarly start trying to think of new business models and strategies, it could one day face a cliff of its own.

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.

Yesterday the AP reported on a new Associated Press-Ipsos Poll about American reading habits. The results were not good. For instance, the study showed that “one in four adults read no books at all in the past year.” While this is of course depressing in and of itself (four books in a year? I just read three during a 10-day vacation), what’s even worse is that this is part of an overall downward trend. According to the AP: “When the Gallup Poll asked in 2005 how many books people had at least started — a similar but not directly comparable question — the typical answer was five. That was down from 10 in 1999, but close to the 1990 response of six.” So while it’s pretty pathetic that a quarter of the American population didn’t read a book last year, what’s really sad is that — three or four years from now — someone who reads just one or two books a year will be instantly nicknamed “Shakespeare.” And a decade from now Bradbury’s world of Fahrenheit 451, where people didn’t care about books before they were banned, might actually arrive.

This mounting apathy is also felt in book sales. According to the AP, sales of books “have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way indefinitely. Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media, the unsteady economy and a well-established industry with limited opportunities for expansion.” Of course, statistics and trends like these go far beyond the “print is dead” debate, and have nothing to do with electronic reading versus traditional reading. Instead, these facts show that Americans are increasingly bypassing any kind of reading, choosing to do something else instead. Whether it’s watching a film in place of picking up a book (a construction worker is quoted in the AP story as saying “Fiction just doesn’t interest me. If I’m going to get a story, I’ll get a movie”), more and more people are bypassing a literary experience altogether. So, with conditions this dire, it’s ridiculous for booklovers or publishers to care about readers “curling up” with eBooks versus printed books; the real battle is to get present and future generations interested in words in the first place.

Elizabeth Olson, writing in The New York Times on Monday, had an article entitled “To Compete With E-Mail Greetings, Funny Cards Try to Be Topical,” which was about how greeting card companies are coming up with new products in order to attract Internet users. The reason for all of this is because — in an increasingly electronic world where more and more people communicate digitally via e-mail instead of physically via letters or greeting cards — people who in the past would have purchased a greeting card now send digital eCards instead. The digital eCards are often free and, in the eyes of many people, are much easier to use and personalize. And the impact of these digital consumers is now being felt by the greeting card companies. According to Olson, “American Greetings had a 10.6 percent dip last year over 2005 for sales of what it calls its everyday cards, which are mostly birthday cards and which make up 38 percent of total card sales.”

So while, in a publishing sense, people have been saying “print is dead” for years, it would seem — with so many people sending electronic greetings rather than hand-written greeting cards — that printing itself is similarly dying. Because why write by hand when you can type? True, as Olson points out in her article, the paper greeting card industry is still much bigger than the electronic version: “While the paper card market is declining, it is still five times as large as the e-card market, according to the Greeting Card Association, a trade group. Ninety percent of United States households still buy paper greeting cards, and the average household buys 30 a year, the association said.” But, the same as with eBooks and electronic reading, the trend is what’s ultimately important. From music to books and now even greeting cards, when it comes to the choice between a physical or a digital experience, consumer behavior is changing.