Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

On the Institute for the Future of the Book blog last week Sebastian Mary wrote about a recent online discussion based upon the question of whether or not it’s snooping to examine someone’s bookshelves, and contemplated what the results could mean to a relationship (the title of the entry was “would you date someone with no books on their shelves?”). I was personally thrown into the mix because Mary mentioned that my book Print is Dead is a “narrative [that] pits books against the internet.” While this isn’t exactly correctly (I’d say that my book is a narrative that pits one form of technology against another: the printing press versus the Internet), Mary’s comments on the discussion, which is big on the mere presence of books but short on their utility, only reinforces my thesis instead of negating it.

Because, in terms of the “snooping” factor, books on a nightstand are just about at the bottom of the list in terms of potential discoveries. These days most people don’t wait to get inside someone’s apartment to start snooping. Instead, they start doing online research on their potential partners as soon as they possibly can. Indeed, Google is the new digital apartment inside which we all live, with Facebook and Myspace pages being the new bookshelf or nightstand into and onto which we all peek. This is where first impressions and opinions are being made; this where more people are getting turned on or off. True, someone might see the boxset of Man Without Qualities sitting on a bookshelf, and decide that its owner has qualities, but Musil is no match for a Myspace page filled with drunken photos and a Limp Bizkit soundtrack.

Besides, all of this has already happened. I mean, where’s the blog entry about dating someone with no CDs on their shelves? And if someone’s shelves are indeed empty, that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have or like music. These days, a lot of music collections live on innocuous looking hard drives, rather than as a stack of vinyl or plastic. And as books become a smaller and smaller part of our lives, the same will hold true. (In Annie Hall, Woody Allen spots a copy of The National Review in Diane Keaton’s apartment, and is aghast. That can’t happen these days with Slate or Salon.)

However, in the present tense, the fact that books are now mere props in our lives, inert commodities on the same level as the clothes we wear or the paintings we hang on our wall, proves my thesis more than ever. If books were truly alive the discussion would be about reading and talking about them; instead, it’s all about snap judgments or a glimmer of recognition as we peruse them on a shelf, as if they were a police line-up or a collection of mugshots. In fact, not only is print dead, but it also seems — since its true purpose is now to be admired in display rather than read or absorbed — to have been stuffed and mounted

The National Endowment for the Arts (also know as the NEA) yesterday released a follow up report to its landmark 2004 study about literacy, “Reading at Risk.” What the 2004 report stated was that Americans were reading less across all social and economic sectors, while kids — despite the success of Harry Potter — were turning away from reading in near-record numbers. The new report, entitled “To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence,” delivers yet more bad news on the state of reading in America. Put bluntly, the decrease we witnessed three years ago has continued unabated, while troubling new statistics are starting to rear their ugly heads.

But first, here’s some background on the report, according to the NEA website:

This report is a new and comprehensive analysis of reading patterns of children, teenagers, and adults in the United States. To Read or Not To Read assembled data on reading trends from more than 40 sources, including federal agencies, universities, foundations, and associations. The compendium expands the investigation of the NEA’s landmark 2004 report, Reading at Risk, and reveals recent declines in voluntary reading and test scores alike, exposing trends that have severe consequences for American society.

All of this shows that recent downward trends are beginning to look permanent, and that literacy is becoming an endangered species. As NEA Chairman Dana Gioia states in his preface to the report, “It is no longer reasonable to debate whether the problem exists. It is now time to become more committed to solving it or face the consequences. The nation needs to focus more attention and resources on an activity both fundamental and irreplaceable for democracy.” I couldn’t agree more, which is why I think we waste valuable energy with battles between eBook aficionados and bibliophiles, with one group saying you can’t “curl up” with an electronic device while the other insists that you can. (Just for the record, I think that you can.)

Because what’s rarely mentioned in the future of the book debate is the fact that people are reading less and less. So what’s the point of discussing the future of the book if no one will care enough to read one, whatever format it happens to morph into? It’s like debating the future of the automobile while we run out of oil (which is, to a degree, happening). The NEA’s most recent, and depressing, report should act as a wake-up call, rousing us all from the narcotized sleep which inhaling the fumes of our books has lulled us into. The real battle is now being fought — and potentially lost — and it has nothing to do with pages or screens, bindings or devices. It has instead to do with eyes and words.

Last week Joe Wikert, Vice President and Executive Publisher in the Professional/Trade division of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., interviewed me for his Publishing 2020 blog. Joe’s blog is really great, so I was honored to be asked. He’s also a very nice guy, and he asked some great questions.

Here’s a sample question and answer:

JW: Which of the various monetization models do you feel will work best with e-content in the future (advertising, subscription, price per unit, etc.)?

JG: All of the above. I also love that you called it “electronic content,” since that’s what it really is. And that content will vary widely, from things that we would consider today to be either a magazine or a newspaper or a book, but in the future that will all come under the heading of “content”; it will consist of words on a screen. And some material will be better suited to advertising than others, while some material will work on a subscription basis. There won’t be just one monetary model; there will be lots of them.

To read the entire interview, click here.

Last week I was invited to the BBC News offices in midtown New York to record an interview for a BBC 4 radio show entitled “Open Book.” According to the BBC website, “Open Book spotlights new fiction and non-fiction, picks out the best of the paperbacks, talks to authors and publishers, and unearths lost masterpieces.” For the show, I was interviewed by the host Mariella Frostrup, as was Richard Charkin (former head of Macmillan UK, current head of Bloomsbury UK, and all-around good guy). We had a really great discussion on the future of the book, and seeing as how this is the closest I’ll ever get to recording a Peel Session, it was a great honor. The program aired this past Sunday, but you can also listen to it on the BBC website; my interview with Mariella and Richard starts at about 11:30 into the overall 28 minute program; for the direct episode link, click here.

In last week’s issue of The New Yorker, Anthony Grafton had a long article entitled “Future Reading.” Subtitled, “Digitization and its discontents,” Grafton looked at how “the computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press,” with huge companies like Google and Microsoft embarking on massive efforts to digitize the world’s knowledge by breaking down the contents of books and pouring them into easily accessible databases which anyone can tap into. Grafton compares all of this, as most people tend to do, with the huge Library of Alexandria, which was founded in Egypt in 300BC. Back in the day, the Library of Alexandria housed the largest repository of human knowledge on earth, with more than 500,000 works. And now, or so it’s being said, major Internet companies like Google and Microsoft are looking to create Alexandria 2.0, digitizing every scrap of print and storing it in a database.

Grafton, however, is skeptical. While he admits that “we have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production,” he thinks that all of these efforts “will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.”

And while Grafton’s correct in stating that the argument is hardly as simple as saying Google Book Search=the Library of Alexandria, what Grafton fails to grasp is that an awful lot of knowledge these days is already digital. After all, to “digitize” something means that you turn it from being non-digital to digital, and yet — for the most part — knowledge now begins as a digital form. So while Grafton can talk all he wants about microfilm, or musty books being scanned, he makes no allowances (or concession) to the fact that a great deal of present and future knowledge will be digital from its conception. But, of course, since this is the New Yorker, Grafton’s really just slouching towards digitization, and not really embracing it. He finishes his article with the usual Animal Farm-esque bleating of “Digital good, print better,” implying that, while students with computers will get most of the picture online, for the real thing they’re going to have to go to a library: “The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.”

Grafton’s fetishism here for the trappings and mise-en-scène of an overly romantic literary life is embarrassing. And the idea that true knowledge is contained only in “dusty, crumbling, smelly irreplaceable documents” is anachronistic to the point of devolution. I mean, I read his piece online; would it have been better for me to have read a dusty, crumbling, smelly version in print? What would I have gained from paper that eluded me on the screen? The answer, of course, is nothing.

As part of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, I was asked by a couple of UK publications to write pieces on the future of reading and the future of book fairs. The first of the two pieces, one about reading for The Publishing News, has appeared online (and is also part of a special publication they’re handing out at the fair). The piece is called “Left on the Shelf.” Here’s an excerpt:

Everything you can see happening in the reading process is not what’s important. Because the flipping of pages, or even the back-and-forth typewriter carriage-like movement of the eyes, doesn’t necessarily mean that words are being absorbed (much less understood). Anyone can pick up a book and repeatedly pantomime these movements.

In fact, scanning machines have been invented – in order to not have to destroy the books being scanned – that cradle a book and gently turn its pages while a camera takes pictures of the words and translates them into digital sentences. But no one would say that these computers are reading.

You can read the entire story here.

Earlier in the week Ben Vershbow from the Future of the Book Institute blogged about LiveInk, a company that provides “an alternative approach to presenting texts in screen environments, arranging them in series of cascading phrases to increase readability.” What LiveInk does is offer software that interprets/translates prose into short bursts of information that is then displayed on a screen in a staggered layout. The reason for this is “to promote the dynamic perception of word groups in a sentence, and to augment comprehension with multidimensional syntactic cueing patterns.” What this means to the reader is that blocks of words and clusters of sentences — all of which used to form paragraphs — become instead splintered into idea-trees that are more fractal than formal (the screenshot above is the first couple of lines of Moby Dick, as presented by the LiveInk technology).

I think this is a really great application, and would be a boon to not only adoption of electronic reading on small screens, but it would also boost comprehension of electronic reading (not to mention reading in general). Of course, since LiveInk is in essence distilling a writer’s words into a new form, erasing in the process the original construction, this will probably rub many authors and critics the wrong way. And yet, while certain writers indeed sculpt the shape of their paragraphs and sentences with the same care as an artist who works in marble or clay — not to mention that concrete poets use precise word placement on a page as not only an aesthetic element but also to convey something of the nature of what they’re writing about — for most writers paragraph and sentence construction is simply a means to an end; the size or length of these literary constructs mean no more to them than the shade or texture of the page they’re printed on.

In fact, I think LiveInk ends up doing something really amazing to prose; it turns it into poetry. Much of the writing in Thomas Wolfe’s novels was so poetic in rhythm and spirit that later editors boiled down passages of his books into poems, breaking down his long, unruly sentences into something new. LiveInk’s algorithm does something similar, and does it in a much easier way. Hidden in a lot of prose is the germ of poetry, the same way that a cynic could say that poetry is just prose with more line breaks. For instance, imagine the much anthologized poem “This is Just to Say” rendered in reverse LiveInk technology (one that turns poetry into prose); it’d come out like this: “I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold.” Instead, I can only imagine what the writing of Proust, Fitzgerald, Updike and Capote would look like rendered in the LiveInk technology. Where William Carlos Williams had the wind sucked out of him, these writers of lyrical prose would shine in new and unexpected ways.

And anyway, this already happens — to a degree — in audio books, where readers listen to a flow of words and never see the form or construction the writer used in his initial composition. In this case the actor reading the words — based on the clues found in the punctuation — performs his own algorithm in his head in terms of inserting pauses and dramatic effects. LiveInk will simply do the same thing, but utilizing technology to do so. And I think, if adapted, it could be a really wonderful thing that would end up promoting literature, and not hurting it. As Joseph Brodsky once said in terms of poetry, “The rhyme is smarter than the poet.” Maybe writers fear LiveInk’s algorithim will be smarter than them. But as long as someone is reading their words, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Among all of the recent Harry-Potter-isn’t–leading-to-more-reading stories, Heidi Benson of the San Francisco Chronicle had one over the weekend entitled “Kids reading fewer books despite Harry Potter hoopla.” Benson leads off with the typical kind of stuff, referring to the upcoming NEA study which will show that kids aren’t reading after Harry: “Despite what has been dubbed the ‘Harry Potter Effect’ — which credits J.K. Rowling’s blockbuster book series with turning Game Boy addicts into lifelong readers — reading is in serious decline among teens nationwide, according to a forthcoming federal study.” She also talks to NEA chairman Dana Gioia, who says that “The power of the electronic, commercial entertainment media seems to be taking teenagers away from reading.”

This is interesting because, in the 2004 NEA report, Reading at Risk, Gioia and the NEA was more circumspect in where the readers were actually going. At that time, the NEA concluded that “Literature [in 2004] competes with an enormous array of electronic media. While no single activity is responsible for the decline of reading, the cumulative presence and availability of these alternatives have increasingly drawn Americans away from reading.” Three years after the last study, it seems that Gioia is drawing a clear line between the rise of the Internet and the decline of reading.

What’s also interesting is what Stanford education professor Michael Kamil has to say on the subject of kids spending their time online: “You have to be careful when you say kids are reading less. It doesn’t mean they are incapable of reading. It means they choose to do other things instead.” This is of course key, and should not be undervalued. Because while a lot of time online is spent being passive, watching stuff on Youtube, etc. much more of it is spent interactively, reading and contributing to blogs and social networking sites, discovering and engaging all kinds of content.

Kamil is also the chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, described by Benson as “a group charged with updating the way reading is judged by the federal government.” The Board has defined three different contexts of reading: reading for literary experience, reading for information, and reading to perform a task. According to Benson’s article, “Kamil believes that ‘reading for literary experience’ has been overemphasized and that today ‘reading for information’ is the most crucial skill.” So just because kids won’t be picking up those paperbacks of the “great classics” that nourished previous generations, all hope is not lost. However, in terms of publishers who have content they would like new generations to buy and consume, these new habits will have to be kept in mind. And because of this, maybe books of the future won’t look very much like books as they look today; maybe they’ll be more like blogs or videogames. A horrible thought for previous generations, I’m sure, but then again they’re not the ones the NEA is focusing on or worrying about. Besides, they’ll be able to keep their books. Meanwhile, we need to create a new format and reading experience for the kids who are already on their way to forgetting books.

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.