Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

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.

The Wall Street Journal last week had a story by Emily Steel entitled “Newspapers’ Ad Sales Show Accelerating Drop.” The article is pretty much the usual newspapers-are-in-trouble story, with Steel writing that “The newspaper industry has been suffering from slow growth for years, of course, after decades of declining readership. In the past couple of years, though, competition from the Internet — big portals as well as free-classified Web sites such as Craigslist — and other media has transformed anemic growth into slipping revenue.” A chart accompanying the story (pictured above) shows the “inky depths” that newspaper revenue has sunk to. (While the chart’s information is relevant and informative, I also really love the phrase “Inky depths”; it could be a great band name or, at the very least, a White Stripes record).

Steel goes on to say that “publishers are putting initiatives in place to generate a larger portion of ad dollars through the Web. Still, analysts say that growth in Web revenue is beginning to slow and isn’t enough to offset the decline in print.” Which is another way of saying that the newspaper industry, after resisting change for so long — and trying desperately to hang onto both its product and its audience — is now trying to change themselves and their business model. As Steel writes, “The decline, which has sent newspaper stocks into a tailspin, has prompted restructuring and consolidation.” However, it just might be too little, too late. Recent downward trends don’t show any sign of reversing themselves, and new consumer traits — such as going to Craiglist instead of the Classified section — are hardening into habit. The same way that music turned the digital corner, never to go back, newspapers are now heading in a similar direction.

Earlier in the week the Broadcast & Cable website had an article by Marisa Guthrie entitled “Survey Says: More People Watch TV Online,” which reported on a recent survey completed by The Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing. The survey found that “More consumers are accessing television and movies online. An estimated 81 million of the 129 million people who access the Internet via a broadband connection watched TV or movies online, according to a new study from Nielsen.” The good news, for the television networks, is that it seems “broadband viewing does not replace traditional television viewing.” This means that new viewers are found viewers; they are new viewers in addition to the regular viewers. The top network, in online terms, was ABC, which makes sense since they’ve had a really smart online strategy (whereas both NBC and CBS have made missteps, such as suing YouTube).

In addition, “The study also posits (rather obviously) that better navigation interfaces and increased availability of popular television series online will drive even more consumers to broadband.” In terms of the “print is dead” debate, this could mean that — if/when publishers make more of their works available electronically — it won’t cannibalize their existing sales, but will instead add to them.

Of course, this kind of thinking usually just leads people to say that books are different; that books are, well, books. And because of their print-based nature (as if words were invented to fill pages instead of it being the other way around), the content of books must remain shackled to the page. I think this is completely incorrect. Words — like water — can cover any surface, be poured into any vessel, and be consumed in a variety of ways. After all, water can also be liquid, ice or steam; why can’t text similarly shift shape and take on new forms? And, more importantly, because people have less and less time these days for entertainment, in addition to the fact that there are more and more options in terms of the ways people can spend their time (Youtube, Myspace, iPods, Wii, etc.), if we want people to read words and ideas and stories, we’re going to have to give them more choices than just books.

The same way that TV networks are branching out to the Web in order to find new consumers, and please existing ones, publishing will have to follow suit. But many people in publishing, from critics to authors, are resisting this change. Which reminds me of that Saturday Night Live sketch from the ’70s of the diner that sold nothing but cheeseburgers and chips (along with Coke, “No Pepsi”). What made that skit funny was that the guys who worked there were so rigid and clueless. People could only order the three things on the menu, and if you tried to get anything else they’d get annoyed and throw you out. Moreover, they couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t satisfied with just cheeseburgers, chips, and Coke. A lot of the literary establishment is much the same way: ask for words in anything other than a book, and you get either a blank stare or a hostile response. In terms of the restaurant in the skit, people would often walk out and go to another restaurant. In terms of books, people might just pass them over for something else entirely.

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.

Following up on last week’s post about how the upcoming NEA study will show — despite everyone being, er, wild about Harry Potter — that kids aren’t reading more, The New York Times today reports that apathy in terms of teen reading isn’t restricted to just books. Teenagers aren’t reading newspapers, either. Juston Jones, in a story entitled “Young Adults Are Giving Newspapers Scant Notice,” writes that “With the United States military fighting a protracted war in Iraq and a wide-open presidential campaign already making headlines daily, Americans of all ages are interested in current affairs and are consuming news like never before, right? Not so, especially not teenagers and young adults, according to a report released last week…”

The report, entitled “Young People and News” (click here for a PDF) was “based on a national sample of 1,800 Americans that included teenagers, young adults aged 18 to 30 and older adults.” What the study found (among other things) was that “only 16 percent of the young adults surveyed aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did. That compared with 35 percent of adults over 30. Furthermore, despite the popular belief that young people are flocking to the Internet, the survey found that teenagers and young adults were twice as likely to get daily news from television than from the Web.”

Of course, the fact that teens get their news from TV doesn’t mean they’re not flocking to the Web; it’s now the place where they spend most of their time. It shows that — while they’re online — news is not something they care about or seek out. Instead, they’re spending hours upon hours on MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. Towards the end of the article, Thomas Patterson, “a professor of government and the press at Harvard who conducted the survey” says “My sense is that, like it or not, the future of news is going to be in the electronic media, but we don’t really know what that form is going to look like.” So if the future of news is going to be in the “electronic media,” I think that many other areas of publishing — including magazines and books — will be similarly digital. And if it’s not, we just might lose an entire generation of readers.

Earlier in the week Galleycat reported on the Boston Globe story pointing out that, despite the immense popularity of the Harry Potter books, the downward trend in reading among teenagers continues unabated (Motoko Rich has a similar story in today’s New York Times). In the Boston Globe story by David Mehegan, entitled “In the end, Potter magic extends only so far,” Mehegan writes that “A forthcoming national study finds that not even Harry Potter has stemmed a decline in adolescent reading.” The study, conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts (also known as the NEA), is due to be released this fall, and it finds that “reading among adolescent children is in trouble.”

It sounds like the study will be a follow up to the NEA’s landmark report from 2004 entitled Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. Back then NEA chairman Dana Gioia wrote that “Literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young.” And now, quoted in Mehegan’s story, Gioia says that “When kids hit high school, all the social pressure takes them away from reading and you see an enormous fall, to a point where most kids are almost not reading at all.”

So despite the fact that “325 million copies of Harry Potter books have been printed worldwide, in 66 languages” and that “Scholastic Inc.’s first US printing of Deathly Hallows is an unprecedented 12 million copies,” kids these days are reading less, not more.

In Mehegan’s story, Jodi Reamer — a New York children’s literary agent — is quoted as saying that “Harry Potter made it cool to read a big, fat, complicated book. Before Harry Potter, that sort of book was the hardest sell.” But it seems that the NEA study is proving that these kids, once they finish the Potter books and get a little older, are not continuing to read “big, fat, complicated books.” The dotted line that connects Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to Gravity’s Rainbow and Underworld doesn’t necessarily exist.

Instead, this shows that what kids have gravitated to in terms of the Potter books has been both the content and the immersive experience that the books offer. But since Potter’s arrival a decade ago, a number of interactive media — from World of Warcraft to Second Life — have been introduced which offer an equally immersive experience (if not more so). Indeed, continuing to read the Potter books — for many fans — has become just another part of the ongoing Harry Potter cottage industry, which includes everything from movies to theme parks. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, books are getting to be the least interesting part of the Potter universe.

So if not even Harry Potter can encourage kids to read, what’s it going to take? And if kids are trading books for online experiences — whether it’s Facebook, Youtube or Myspace — publishing is going to have to work to engage younger readers. If not, it risks losing them forever. And not even a wizard will be able to bring them back…

Rolling Stone recently had a two part article by Brian Hiatt and Evan Serpic entitled “The Record Industry’s Decline.” Subtitled, “Record sales are tanking, and there’s no hope in sight: How it all went wrong,” you can pretty much figure out what the article’s about. For instance, here’s how Hiatt and Serpic set the stage: “Overall CD sales have plummeted sixteen percent for the year so far — and that’s after seven years of near-constant erosion. In the face of widespread piracy, consumers’ growing preference for low-profit-margin digital singles over albums, and other woes, the record business has plunged into a historic decline.” The story is packed with a number of depressing facts and figures about the industry (“more than 5,000 record-company employees have been laid off since 2000,” “about 2,700 record stores have closed across the country since 2003”), and also features some insightful quotes from industry leaders:

The major labels are struggling to reinvent their business models, even as some wonder whether it’s too late. “The record business is over,” says music attorney Peter Paterno, who represents Metallica and Dr. Dre. “The labels have wonderful assets — they just can’t make any money off them.” One senior music-industry source who requested anonymity went further: “Here we have a business that’s dying. There won’t be any major labels pretty soon.”

And what’s the cause of industry’s death? The Internet, of course. Write Hiatt and Serpic: “The Internet appears to be the most consequential technological shift for the business of selling music since the 1920s, when phonograph records replaced sheet music as the industry’s profit center.” But while the Internet may be the cause, the real culprit is the industry itself. “While there are factors outside of the labels’ control — from the rise of the Internet to the popularity of video games and DVDs — many in the industry see the last seven years as a series of botched opportunities.” Hiatt and Serpic contend that the Internet didn’t kill the music industry, but rather the music industry’s botched reaction to the online revolution slit its own throat. And it may be too late to recover.

This makes me think of the Seinfeld episode where George pledges to do the exact opposite of his natural inclination (since his normal behavior only leads to distress and ruin). Because I kind of think publishing should do the same thing. Or rather, we should look at what the music industry did, and do the opposite. Insist nothing is wrong and stick to our usual business model? Swaddle our material in layers of prohibitive DRM? Relentlessly sue people who try and spread the word of our product by sharing it with others? Stick with a physical product and shun electronic delivery? Instead, we should look at what these decisions have meant for the music industry, and simply do the opposite. In George’s case, this new behavior gets him a job with the New York Yankees, a lifelong dream. In the case of publishing, it might just stop the rolling stone — starting to head downhill — dead in its tracks.

The LA Weekly this past week had a cover story in their literary supplement section entitled “The Bookish Set,” which profiles a number of independent Los Angeles booksellers, including the owners or staff of places like Book Soup, Dutton’s and Skylight. Having previously lived in LA for years, I’m familiar with all of these places. In fact, I remember being in Book Soup one time when someone asked for The Celestine Prophecy, and the guy behind the counter talked them out of it. I also did a reading from my first novel at the Brentwood Dutton’s in 1995 that Patricia Wettig, who had been shopping in the store when I started — I’ll never forget — walked out of.

The Weekly story highlights the fact that, even though all of these stores are going through changes and publishing’s not what it used to be, this book-loving cadre of “wise, savvy, and by turns funny and tragic” misfits are here to stay: “Despondent at times about the future of their industry yet determined to see it through in some as-yet-unknown fashion, they and their workplaces are gloriously idiosyncratic in a culture veering precariously toward sameness.”

But what I find most interesting about the story is that I live in New York and yet I can still read the LA Weekly. I left Los Angeles in early 1997, right when the Internet was starting to become the phenomenon it is today (when I was looking for a roommate that January, one of them said they’d looked me up on Amazon because I said I’d had a book published, and I distinctly remember thinking, “What’s Amazon?”). And yet now the LA Weekly website touts itself as “The Essential Online Resource for Los Angeles.”

What was a decade ago just printed words on paper, distributed in kiosks around town that were sometimes full and sometimes empty when you went to get a copy, now also exists as a completely electronic, interactive multimedia experience. What was ten years ago just a free newspaper that came out once a week, dropped off on street corners where it sometimes got soaked by the rain or bleached by the sun, now lives eternally online in a pristine, Dorian Gray-like state. I used to make it a point to, every Thursday, get a copy of the Weekly. But now readers, anywhere in the world, can get its info any time they want. That’s a huge positive, and a great leap forward. Print may be dead, but instead of mourning we should be celebrating what it’s being replaced by.

WLS: The Bookish Set

Todd Bishop, writing on the Seattle Post-Intelligencier website earlier this week, reported on Bill Gates’s comments at Microsoft’s recent Strategic Account Summit. The conference is an annual event, during which time Gates usually does his “vision thing.” And as maligned as he is, Gates’s views must have some validity since he’s the world’s richest man, because as much as I agree with the Citizen Kane quote of “It’s no trick to make a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money,” in Gates’s case I don’t think you could make that much money without being right about a few things.

What Gates talked about this year, in addition to a number of other digital topics, was the future of electronic reading. Needless to say, Gates had rather strong feelings on the subject. “Reading is going to go completely online,” Gates is quoted as saying. “Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links.” The case Gates is making is not techno-babble (usually the pro-digital reading side), nor is it purely emotional (usually the pro-book side); instead, he’s rather simply stating the case that the utility, in terms of digital reading, is far higher than it is for print reading. What it comes down to is this: computers can do things that books can’t; while the only thing a book can do, that a computer can’t do, is be a book.

Seattle Post-Intelligencier: Bill Gates: Reading to go ‘completely online’

Editor & Publisher this week announced the results of a Newspaper Association of America study which showed that “an average of 59 million people, or 37% of all active Internet users, visited newspaper Web sites each month” during the first quarter of this year. In addition, “During the same period, the overall Internet audience grew 2.7%.” What does this mean to newspapers and their websites? Well, according to John Sturm, CEO of the NAA, “The fact that [the] newspaper Web site audience is growing at almost double the rate of the Internet audience as a whole validates the industry’s investment in digital innovation, and the ongoing attraction consumers have to newspapers online.”

Adds Shawn Riegsecker, CEO of interactive agency Centro, “As [consumers] become more sophisticated in navigating the Web, they are turning to trusted sources of news and information, like newspapers, instead of aggregators or portals. This couldn’t be better for the industry, as [newspapers] control more of this information than any other medium.”

Keeping in mind that this study was conducted by a industry group, and was presented at an industry conference (and really doesn’t mention all the other ways Web users are getting their news besides newspaper websites), this is still just another way of saying that, well, print is dead. After all, newspaper circulation is down, but traffic to newspaper websites is up. The only thing that’s in flux in this scenario is the paper. People still want news; the only thing that’s different is how they’re getting it. And this new study shows that, increasingly, people are going to the Web for their information instead of picking up a physical newspaper. And what this ultimately means is that the “print is dead” debate is really only a problem for printers; news organizations — like traditional publishers — will still exist; it’s really the product that’s going to change, or in some cases, disappear altogether.

NAA Study: Newspaper Web Users Above Average in Many Ways