Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Via Buzzmachine, last week I discovered Wordle, a really great site/online application that generates “word clouds” from either text that’s pasted into the Wordle site, or else from words that are scooped from a website or blog. According to the Wordle site, “The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” Above is the word cloud I generated over two weekends ago from this site. And it looks like it’s scooping text from just my home page and not the entire site (I really don’t write about either Jonathan Franzen or Franz Kafka that much), but I still think the cloud is a pretty accurate representation of the overall feel of this site’s content and my own ideas. And because of that, what I really love about this is that the two biggest words that appear are “people” and “reading.” Yes, a few other book 2.0 terms are there like “screen,” “Apple” and “futurist” (as are plenty of book 1.0 words such as “writer,” “paperback” and “jacket”). But rising above all of that clutter are the two core terms and ideas which should always be at the center of the future of the book debate, the same way they’re front and center in the word cloud above: reading and people.

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing wrote last week about another instance of someone using books in an, uh, interesting way. This time books are being used to create what Doctorow calls a “marvelous” chair (pictured above). And while I’ve written about a number of design uses involving books or bookcases in the past (including sticking books inside staircases and ceilings, in addition to having them be part of a chair), this chair made out of books is surely one of the stranger (not to mention least respectful) uses of books I’ve seen so far. I mean, do we now care so little for books that we’re going to just sit on top of them? Why not just put a layer of them on the floor and walk all over them? I bet a bunch of mass market paperbacks would feel kind of springy under the feet.

Of course, what’s manifestly different with this latest example of creative book repurposing is that, whereas before books were being stored in decorative ways for potential re-reading later on, this chair is expressly made from “discarded paperbacks.” It reminds me of a scene in the Rodney Dangerfield classic Back to School, when his Melon clothing company tries to come up with a cuddly doll to rival the then popular Cabbage Patch Kids. Their answer? Melon Patch Kids. A company executive describes the new product during a meeting: “Now, the competition exploits the notion that their dolls are orphans. The Melon Patch Kids are not orphans; they’re abandoned!” Because if we’re now starting to use books as chair cushions, it’s just a matter of time before they’re “recycled” as firewood.

Via Galleycat, today I read about an event entitled “Great Expectations: A Reading Marathon.” Scheduled to occur this October, and started by the RiverRun Bookstore in New Hampshire, the plan is for independent bookstores to host “24-hour reading marathons in their stores, designed to highlight the importance of reading to our culture, as well as create an opportunity for booklovers to tackle the next book on their to-read pile.” And while I appreciate the spirit behind “Great Expectations,” I think that this doesn’t do anything to “highlight the importance of reading.” Instead it’s just, as Galleycat describes, a stunt. I mean, I think it’s great when Symphony Space reads the entirety of Ulysses on Bloomsday; that makes perfect thematic sense (something which the RiverRun bookstore, with such a Joycean name, must appreciate). But to just pick one day a year when everyone sort of crams words into their head just for the sake of doing so, in a literary version of the Coney Island Nathan’s hot dog eating contest, only further marginalizes reading rather than truly endorsing it. And while I have indeed read books in one sitting — in marathon stretches — when I was struck by certain material, to force people around the country to hunker down and read non-stop seems almost like punishment (no matter how RiverRun tries to spice things up in their Handy Tips for Hosting a Read-A-Thon: “Break up the round-the-clock reading with a few activities. Literary Trivial Pursuit, local author readings, and midnight snacks all are fun possibilities”: going home early is also a fun possibility). And if this caught on, and became an annual thing, then I could see reading becoming for people a yearly chore akin to having their teeth cleaned. The bottomline is that we need to try and get people to read more, but I’m not sure this is the best way to do so.

The following are some random notes and thoughts from my recent ten-day trip to France and Italy:

Paris has a lot of bookstores, including ones devoted to certain areas of interest (ranging from philosophy to books about the ocean). In fact, around the Left Bank I was stumbling upon bookstores every couple of streets (I started to take pictures of them all, but gave up after the fifth one). In fact, our hotel was right next door to a used bookstore specializing in English books, and while there I bought a Zola novel which I then read throughout the trip and finished on the plane. And in the book Zola mentioned the street of the bookstore in which I bought the book and hotel we’d been staying in.

The bookstores in Paris were divided by region, and I thought that was really odd. Because where would you put Lolita? In American or Russian literature? After all, Nabokov was of course Russian, but Lolita was written in English, and the story takes place in America. (Okay, maybe that’s an easy one.) But what about a writer like Josef Škvorecký, who is Czech, and writes in Czech, but who lives in Canada and often writes about Canada and Canadian characters?

Both Italian and French versions of various F. Scott Fitzgerald novels listed the author as “Francis Scott Fitzgerald.” Yes, I know that’s what the “F” stands for, but still, he never published anything under that name.

The Shakespeare and Co. Bookstore in Paris (which is where the photo above is from) was a bit of a let down; it looked a lot bigger in all of those photos of a grinning Hemingway. That being said, it’s still a nice bookstore, and I thought it charming that the resident dog was aptly named Collette.

Many Italian and French publishers publish books with practically bare covers; a lot of them looked almost like galleys. A friend of mine who is a librarian in a small French town said that the books with designed jackets get checked out much more than the ones without.

In a Parisian bookstore, when just sort of hovering of a table of books, I was drawn to a beautiful book by Julien Gracq. When I picked it up I saw something I’d never seen before: a book that had untrimmed edges at the top. I’m used to seeing those occasionally on American books (usually on John Updike novels), but when I do, the untrimmed pages are on the side. Upon closer examination, I discovered that the untrimmed pages were also uncut. Indeed, the top of each page was sort of webbed, and you couldn’t read the entire page. My two Parisian friends who were walking around Paris with me and my wife that day, knew the publisher — José Corti — and explained that the reader has to cut each of the pages in order to read the book. This seemed really odd to me, and like a lot of work (I mean, getting the plastic wrap off of a CD is bad enough; imagine having to do it for every song or bar of music).

The majority of the people sitting around me on my various flights (to Paris, to Venice, and back to New York) weren’t reading anything. In fact, a group of kids on my flight back to the States just sat in their seats for over eight hours, and not one of them that I could see (from about six of them) took out any form of reading material during the duration of the flight. Instead, they listened to their iPods, watched the movies, or talked to each other.

While staying with some Italian friends in Milan, I was surprised see them consult a phone book. We were looking up a pizzeria a friend of theirs had recommended, and instead of hopping online our host pulled out the white pages. This was shocking to me since I haven’t consulted a phonebook since the ‘90s. And then, in an age of Google Maps, as we were running out the door and someone asked if we knew where the restaurant was, once again our host consulted the phone book for the address instead of the Internet.

In Paris I was able to find wireless networks pretty much everywhere, which allowed me to find our exact location on my iPod Touch (not to mention check e-mail and read The New York Times). But in Milan and Venice, I came across practically no wireless networks, and our hosts in Milan had only limited access to the Internet via a pay-as-you-go model.

While the Italians didn’t seem very wired in term of the Internet, on a train trip from Venice to Milan I was sitting next to a teenage girl who spent the entire two hour trip glued to her cell phone. She used it non-stop to either text, talk, or play games. American teens are probably also this wired, and I just haven’t sat next to one for any appreciable amount of time. Still, I was pretty impressed with the amount of time this teenager spent using her phone. Also, while the rest of us in the six-person compartment read or listened to music, the only thing the teenager’s eyes were glued to was the screen of her phone.

And finally, the film European Vacation is indeed the masterwork I always thought it was. During the trip I kept thinking of it and referring to certain scenes over and over again, specifically the “Do you want to watch cheese or snow?” scene. This is because every time I checked into a hotel and turned on the TV, the cable had about six channels, each of them offering dubbed American shows (Happy Days in Italian; they call Richie Rickie) or else there was some weird documentary that made no sense to me. And, of course, any time I contemplated trying to speak French, I thought of this scene.

Over the weekend The New York Times had two stories about books, one that talked abut them in analog form and another that discussed their more recent digital transformation. Analog showed up in the form of a small piece on playwright Tom Stoppard, who lugs with him wherever he goes a box filled with books (pictured above). The article is drenched in nostalgia, describing a world of porters and ocean-liners. And maybe this is indeed Stoppard’s world (I can see him being like Owen Wilson in The Darjeeling Limited, traveling with a myriad of monogrammed trunks). But for most us having a forty or fifty pound “portable bookshelf” isn’t an option (or even something we’d consider). Which is where electronic books come in very handy.

Which leads to the piece on digital books. Entitled “Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless,” the article is mostly a review of Amazon’s eBook device, the Kindle. But the writer also gets at the heart of the future of the book debate, and how our definition of exactly what a book is is beginning to change:

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell. Kindle’s long-term success is still unknown, but Amazon should be credited with imaginatively redefining its original product line, replacing the book business with the reading business.

It’s not hard to connect the dots between Stoppard’s “portable bookshelf” and the Kindle’s ability to hold dozens of books at a time. And while Stoppard will probably never embrace an eBook device, there are thousands of other readers out there — drawn by the ability to carry one small device instead of all those books — who will.

Galleycat reports on comments made by Steve Jobs earlier this week at Macworld Expo. Basically, Jobs doesn’t think much of the Kindle design-wise (which, coming from the man behind the iPod, makes sense). But Jobs also makes some comments about people and reading (saying, basically, that they don’t read). And yet, while studies like the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” and “To Read or Not to Read” certainly point towards disturbing trends, when people go to a website, they’re reading. As “point and click” as the Internet is, you can’t get very far without doing a fair amount of text consumption. After all, the online world doesn’t look like a sheet of Ikea instructions, with nothing by symbols and diagrams. And while it may not be Wordsworth, it’s still words.

Hot on the heels of last Fall’s depressing NEA report “To Read or Not to Read” (itself a follow-up to the equally depressing NEA report “Reading at Risk”), which showed that more and more Americans are giving up reading, there’s now a report that states that reading is heading downhill in Britain, too. According to the website This is London, “A quarter of Britons say they have not read a book in the past year and nearly half admit to lying about their reading to appear more intelligent.”

In order to try and reverse these trends, the government is now urging “bosses to set up libraries in former workplace smoking rooms to transform employees’ reading habits,” not to mention that “parents are also being urged to spend at least ten minutes a day reading with their children.” Added to this is the insane notion that “more time would be set aside in the primary school day for reading as part of a review of the curriculum” (which means the Wii elective just flew right out the window along with the controller).

I find it pretty depressing that the nation that gave us the peerless geniuses Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham now has to scramble to erect libraries the way earlier generations built bomb shelters. And yet, funnily enough, books still have some cachet. Because, as the British study found, people had lied about reading certain books “just so they could join in with the conversation.” Which begs the question, I wonder if anyone taking part in those “conversations” had read the book in question, or were they all faking it?

Some clues as to why this is happening can be found in the website’s comments section, where one guy says that “I think people would be better of trying to think of ways to improve the world rather than wasting their lives reading any sort of book,” while another chimes in with “It’s not that we don’t want to read. It’s simply this drivel they publish nowadays and try to pass it off as bestsellers. There’s nothing to read! No thanks. I’d much rather read a good article online.” And, of course, none of this is relegated just to Britain. These depressing trends are being seen in lots of countries (mine included). Print is disappearing from our schools, parents spend less time reading to their kids, and your average “man on the street” found his way there via Google Maps.

In the current issue of The New Yorker, Caleb Crain has an essay entitled “Twilight of the Books,” which — if that weren’t already moody enough — carries the apocalyptic subtitle, “What will life be like if people stop reading?” All of this is placed in the context of a (long) review of Maryanne Wolf’s new book, Proust and the Squid, which is a non-fiction account of the biological process of reading, going all the way back to its origins in ancient history. But Crain uses his to review to point out that perhaps reading itself is ancient history. For instance, he points to the overall downward trend in terms of Americans and reading:

In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year.

As you can see from the above, our standards are slipping just as fast as the numbers. Whereas, seventy years ago, people were asked if they were currently reading a book, they’re now asked whether or not they’ve read a book in the past year. What had been, in the not-so-distant past, a daily event seems today like an annual chore (kind of like filing your taxes or getting your teeth cleaned). Crain ties all of this to the shrinking circulation numbers from newspapers and the stagnation of book sales, showing that average Americans are increasingly choosing to spend their time away from the world of words. And, for Crain, the stakes are incredibly high and could have huge, unforeseen consequences: “If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.”

Crain is here stretching for the “butterfly effect,” which is the notion that insignificant events can, through global amplification, have a huge influence (such as, a butterfly flaps its wings in India and causes a hurricane in Indiana). And, of course, Crain is right to some degree. These declining rates of book-reading mentioned above have a rising correlation somewhere else (such as in terms of movies or TV, not to mention new pursuits like the Wii and Guitar Hero 3). But Crain’s also preaching the usual doom and gloom, and I think he gives books way too much credit by implying that, if reading disappears, we’ll all be turned into either Philistines or CHUDs.

This kind of worry seems to me — instead of the “butterfly effect” — to be the “butterfly affectation.” Because it’s silly to think that, just because the butterfly that’s been buzzing around Eustace Tilley’s nose for the better part of a century will cease flapping its wings, that it will cause some kind of rip in the space-time-literacy continuum. In fact, as Wolf’s book seems to amply show, the act and art of reading has evolved over centuries, and it will continue to evolve. Just because tomorrow it may not look like what it looks like today, doesn’t mean that it’s not still reading (not to mention that one scenario is better than the other). But if Crain — along with Devo — happens to be right, and instead of evolving we’re all devolving, and reading is a skill we’re going to lose rather than adapt as something else, then I guess we’ll crawl back into that slime when we come to it. But in the meantime, with the invention of the Internet and all of the millions upon millions of pages of content that exists out there, people are indeed spending more time than ever reading, and I can’t ever see that totally disappearing.

On his 1988 concert record The Off-White Album, comedian Dennis Miller has a fake routine where he imagines what the Civil War would have been like if, instead of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union army had been under the command of Cary Grant. But, of course, it’s just a ruse; Miller (at least, the Dennis Miller of the ‘80s) would never stoop to such a comedic low. He explains that what he likes to do is ”get right up to the precipice, pivot and then jete back to Coolsville.”

Well, this is exactly what I hoped was happening when I read a blog entry by Shirley Dent on the Guardian book blog earlier this week. Entitled, “Tolstoy and Dickens. Who’d win in a fight?,” with the subtitle, “War and Peace and Our Mutual Friend are literary heavyweights in more ways than one. This one’s going to go a few rounds,” it sounds pretty silly, right? Well, I guess all of this was spurred by something known as the Bookshop Barnies’ Balloon Debate. Dent describes this spectacle as an “annual event [that] involves half-a-dozen terrified pundits arguing terrifically for two minutes for the book they think is the best EVER, before being interrogated and voted out by an ever-so-merry, ever-so-up-for-it, ever-so-informed mob.” And what’s the literary death match that will be debated this year? Tolstoy versus Dickens.

Now, of course, discussing the merits of various literary figures has a modicum of worth (and Dent, at least in her blog posting, has some intelligent things to say: “Dickens grasps the story, squeezes and twists it into shape. Tolstoy lets it flow through his fingers, his touch on the characters barely perceptible”), but with all the challenges and changes facing publishing, literacy, writers and writing, is this really how booklovers choose to spend their time? Coming up with insular and inane competitions between long-dead writers that most of the general public couldn’t care less about because they’re all too busy spending their time on pretty much anything except Tolstoy and Dickens?

So to waste valuable energy with this kind of academic minutiae seems like a crime. (Like, I wonder if Gogol could beat Chekhov in a sprint?! I think it’d be Gogol, by a nose.) This kind of thing reminds me of how the band kept playing while the Titanic sank. Except, in this scenario — while literacy rates are tanking, and books become more and more marginalized in society — booklovers aren’t just enjoying the music while the waves start to lap at their feet, they’re also spending these last moments playing “name that tune.”

Over the weekend, Motoko Rich had a piece in The New York Times entitled “A Good Mystery: Why We Read.” Using the recent NEA report “To Read or Not To Read” as a springboard, Rich asks a very basic question: “Why do we read?” But first, in the shadow of the NEA’s pessimistic report, she sets the stage by also asking the following: “But is all hope gone, or will people still be drawn to the literary landscape? And what is it, exactly, that turns someone into a book lover who keeps coming back for more?” She then, in order to find the answer to why people read, asks a few people how they were initially turned on to reading. And while many writers of course have eloquent thoughts on the subject (including Junot Diaz, who is quoted in the piece), the problem with such tales is that the fan of every conceivable art form (not to mention hobby) has one. Yes, people discover things, and then get into them and love them. And yes, people will always do that with books. But that doesn’t mean that books are relevant, alive, or important in our society. Far from it. After all, someone, somewhere is discovering Desmond Dekker for the first time, and because of this will get into ska music. But that doesn’t mean that ska is either popular or relevant (indeed, it’s quite the opposite). That being said, there are currently small enclaves of fervent fans who are still into ska, and for them it’s their music of choice. But they exist outside the mainstream of music and the discussion taking place around it. And this, to a certain extent, is what’s going to happen more and more with books. (Indeed, the fact that we’re discussing readers as a potentially dying breed shows that it’s happening already.) So instead of asking, “Why do we read?,” what’s more interesting to ask is, What is everyone doing instead of reading? Because the Web, and all its attractions (from Myspace and Facebook to Youtube and iTunes), is luring away the younger generations for whom a computer provides the entry to another world. As Norman Mailer once said of his generation, “fiction was everything.” And now, even though young kids will of course still discover writers the way that Diaz describes in the Times piece, more and more kids are having their time sapped, and their imaginations snatched, by other, more immersive technological interfaces. And older generations can debate the merits of electronic versus print books (with ardent fans on both sides), but younger generations are skipping the debate altogether. So while the “literary landscape” that Rich refers to in her essay will always exist, that landscape — instead of looking like a Where’s Waldo illustration stuffed with figures — will increasingly resemble a sparsely populated Hopper painting.