Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

In what could be an interesting development for publishers who fear that electronic books will cannibalize sales of print books, the CW television network is going to stop offering episodes of its popular show Gossip Girl on its website. Why? Because, it seems, the show was too popular. According to the Los Angeles Times, “The move is designed to boost ratings for the program, which has developed a loyal online following but has failed to attract a sizable TV audience.” It seems that young kids were flocking to the network’s website to watch the show, and were buying it from iTunes, but they weren’t necessarily tuning in to watch it on TV. This is a problem because television networks make a lot more money from advertisements that appear on television than on their websites.

And while networks are more than happy to have websites for their shows, and even feature episodes online, it’s clear from the CW’s actions with Gossip Girl that those websites are meant to only be a tangential experience. The computer screen was never intended to replace the TV screen, but that’s exactly what’s happening. And now the CW is trying to correct that, acting like a restaurant pulling appetizers off its menu because too many people were ordering them, and never making it to the main course.

Again, per the LA Times:

The reversal underscores a dilemma facing traditional media companies. Revenue from online entertainment is meager compared with their core business of advertising-supported television. Some TV executives have questioned whether they are cannibalizing their audience, and revenue, by making popular programs ubiquitous on the Internet.

So, in the end, they really don’t want you to just watch the show; they want you to watch it on television. This seems to me fairly ridiculous, and is a policy that will either not last or won’t be a success. Yes, some people will indeed grumble and set their Tivos to record it (and a smaller group will actually huddle around their TV sets whenever it is that the CW airs the show). But most teens will just go elsewhere, watching shows from another network’s website (places where they can stream shows), or else they’ll just click over to Youtube or Facebook, and spend their time there.

But for networks to take their audience for granted is not a good idea. This point has been recently proven by the fact that, according to an article in Ad Age, TV audiences — now that the writer’s strike is over, and new shows are starting to reappear — have not yet returned. So for the CW to try and redirect their Web traffic to TV sets, as if consumers were a flowing river that — if you just put up enough sandbags and timber — you can point in any direction, is wrong.

Over the weekend, Virginia Heffernan had an article in The New York Times magazine about the TV show Friday Night Lights. She laments the fact that, even thought Friday Night Lights is a great show, it has never become truly popular and never received great ratings. Why not? Well, because it doesn’t have a Web component. It doesn’t offer anything online that gives people the chance to interact (let alone discover) the show or its content. And, in our online age, that’s a no-no. As Heffernan writes:

An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise.

The same will someday be true for books (if it’s not already). The same way that DVDs come loaded with special features and CDs (when people deign to buy them) come with extra tracks — and now that TV shows also need some sort of added boost — literature will need to adapt as well. Because even if books don’t become digital, and stay analog, society itself has already become electronic. “This is an enormous social shift that coincides with the changeover from analog to digital modes of communication,” writes Heffernan, “the rise of the Internet and the new raucousness of fans.”

This ties into what I call Generation Upload in Print is Dead; the idea that Digital Natives are not content to merely consume content. But Heffernan describes it even better:

As the writers’ strike has made clear, art and entertainment in the digital age are highly collaborative, and none of it can thrive without engaging audiences more actively than ever before. Fans today see themselves as doing business with television shows, movies, even books. They want to rate, review, remix. They want to make tributes and parodies, create footnotes and concordances, mess with volume and color values, talk back and shout down.

What this will look like for books remains to be seen, but the idea itself will surely remain.

A recent episode of The Simpsons declared that print is dead (or at least is in trouble). This happened at a presidential debate that was being covered by a person from CNN and a writer from Slate. The final person introduced is from The Washington Post, and everyone seems embarassed to have him there (even he seems uncomfortable). Into this silence comes Nelson Muntz, who points to the guy from the Post and says, in his best nyah-nyah voice, “Your medium is dying.” Principal Skinner then upbraids Nelson, but not for saying something untrue, but for pointing out the obvious. “There’s being right,” Skinner says, “and being nice.” And if the clip above doesn’t work, you should be able to view the clip on Gawker.

Last week I blogged on the recent survey about the decline of readership in America, a study that revealed one in four Americans didn’t read a book in the past year. What I found interesting was that some commentators tried to turn this depressing statistic on its head, saying that it meant that at least three out of four people did read a book. I understand the attempt to have an “accentuate the positive” mindset, but the fact that a quarter of our population didn’t even attempt to read a book in the last twelve months is indeed cause for major alarm.

A company who seems to be trying to reverse these trends is the cable channel BET, who recently produced — according to the LA Times — an “edgy video campaign promoting literacy and black pride.” The video is entitled “Read a Book,” and looks to me to be a cross between a Schoolhouse Rock segment and a 50 Cent video. The result is profane, catchy, and pretty humorous (and, I must add, not safe for work).

The video has incited a storm of protest, with some commentators on the BET website (as well as on Youtube, which is where I found the clip) either shocked by the video’s content or else amused by its satire. Greg Braxton, writing about the video last week in the LA Times in an article entitled “BET brouhaha,” writes that “Denys Cowan, senior vice president of animation for BET, said in an interview Thursday that he was ‘a little surprised’ that ‘Read a Book’ has elicited such a strong reaction. ‘We were doing it from the point of this being a fun, profound song,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know it would take on this life.’”

Whether or not the “Read a Book” video ever gets anyone to actually do so will remain to be seen, and whether or not the entire enterprise is in good taste is of course in the eye of the beholder, but at its very core this is yet another admission that large swaths of the American population are increasingly turning away from books and reading.

There was an essay in Forbes last week entitled “Television 2.0,” which talked about how “television as we know it today is about to disappear.” And what is causing TV to disappear after more than a half-century of cultural dominance? The Internet: “The convergence of TV with the Internet is transforming a technology that has gone largely unchanged for 60 years — a one-way, TV signal broadcast to a screen, whether that screen is a TV, PC or cellphone. Television is on the verge of becoming completely personalized, interactive and enjoyed on-demand.”

As someone who has had a DVR cable box for the past couple of years, I can safely say that it’s an amazing and wonderful thing, and it has completely changed the way I watch and think about TV. For starters, I rarely watch programs when they’re broadcast. Most often, I’ll record something and watch it at least a day later (if not a week later). And of course, when I do, I don’t watch the commercials; I fast-forward right past them. Even the nightly news I don’t watch until I get home a little past 7PM. It’s a great feeling to know that I don’t have to rush home to catch a TV show, that I can actually live my life and still watch the occasional TV show I want to watch (when I want to watch it).

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. From the Forbes story: “Imagine a news broadcast where you as the viewer pre-select the types of stories you want to watch; television programming with interactive multiplayer gaming; personalized viewer-specific content and advertising embedded within national television broadcasts; highly localized and efficient Emergency Broadcast System and Amber alerts; viewing and interacting with the vast and growing catalog of high-quality, user-generated content.”

As I read things like that, I get really excited thinking about what Publishing 2.0 is going to look like, and how it’s going to change the industry. That is, if the industry is willing to embrace change and allow itself to be reinvented. Because if it doesn’t, and publishing “disappears” the same way as our notions of television are today similarly being erased, it might not be replaced.

Forbes: Television 2.0

As reported by USA Today, “CNN will give away access to an online video service that now costs $25 a year, becoming the latest news organization to revamp its revenue model on the Web.”

This is pretty interesting since it’s yet another media company changing its mind from a paid-subscription model to a free one. This is both good and bad in terms of the “print is dead” debate. One of the main problems facing eBooks since the beginning has been pricing. No one’s been quite sure what to charge for something that doesn’t really exist. A few bucks? Full price? And in the midst of this confusion, not to mention loads of DRM, competing formats, and less-than-elegant technological interfaces, consumers have — for the most part — stayed away in droves.

So while big media companies begin to give away more of their product online, while that’s of course good for information that yearns to be free (if you believe in that argument), it makes it more difficult for publishers charging consumers for digital content. In terms of why CNN made their change, a company spokesperson is quoted as saying, “People don’t like to pay for stuff on the Internet.” This is unfortunately true. And even though the success of iTunes has shown that consumers are indeed willing to pay for digital content — provided the price point makes sense, and it’s easy for them to do so — publishing has yet to figure out what to charge for the virtual computer file of a hardback book that costs $27.95.

USA Today: CNN.com dropping fees for live video

A story from a week or so ago in the Washington Post entitled “Video Visionaries Meld Traditional TV and the Web” talks about how, in a very “attention economy” way, more and more television networks are offering bits of their shows to online audiences. This is of course due to the growing popularity of on-demand video recording, and the rise of “clip culture” spawned by YouTube and other video sites. In terms of what this means for the “print is dead” idea, it shows that, more and more, the boundaries between what’s considered “content” and “product” are being thoroughly broken down. For instance, does NBC broadcast a half-hour sitcom once a week at a certain time and that’s it? Or does it chunk up the episode so viewers can see them for free online or on cell phones, and sell the episode on iTunes for $1.99 (as well as producing web-only content that acts as entertainment all by itself, but also fosters the original brand)? And of course for traditional trade publishers, this will mean thinking beyond the covers of a hardback book…

Excerpt: “It’s a nontraditional approach to broadcast television that’s been growing in popularity in recent months: broadcasting shows on both the Internet and traditional TV to give advertisers as many viewers as possible. At the same time, the blurred line between traditional and online video is accommodating a growing variety of viewers: those who prefer to watch on a TV, those who gravitate more toward the Web and even those who like to watch on their mobile phones or TiVo recorders.”
Video Visionaries Meld Traditional TV and the Web