Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The other day I came across the clip above on Gawker, which is taken I guess from David Lynch’s introduction to his film Inland Empire, but here it has been Youtubed into a parody of an iPhone ad. Needless to say, Lynch is not too happy with the idea of you watching Eraserhead on your cell phone. In the clip, Lynch says that “You will never in a trillion years experience the film…you’ll be cheated.” He then goes on to call the situation, “Such a sadness.”

First of all, a trillion years is a really long time. Second of all, it’s not really up to him anymore, is it? I mean, is it better to see the movie in a crowded theater when the film is preceded by twenty minutes of previews and commercials, only to have people sitting all around you talking and chomping on popcorn the entire time (not to mention getting, and actually answering, calls on their cell phone?). This versus maybe watching it on an iPhone at home, in a comfy chair, curled up and cocoon-like. Which is the more intimate experience?

Yes, a big screen is great, but to think that true cinema can only be experienced inside a theater is going to lead people like Lynch locking us immobile into seats a la Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, forcing us to watch movies with our eyes pried open (heaven forbid we blink and miss something). Instead, Lynch needs to realize that, as a filmmaker, he has lots of control behind the camera, and none anywhere else. Where and how people watch his films is not up to him. Like when a Woody Allen character years ago joked about reading Finnegans Wake on rollercoaster; hey, it’s our choice to do so. And if Lynch, or other directors (Spielberg has been similarly dim and caustic when it comes to things like this), think that it’s not, then they’re going to limit their audience wildly, and this is going to only hurt, and not help, their careers.

In the end, a big screen is not going to make a bad movie good, nor will a small screen make a good movie bad. True, it might add up to a different experience, but so do a dozen other factors (all of which are out of the control of the filmmakers). Maybe this is just a knee-jerk reaction from directors since they get pushed around so much by the film companies (even boy-genius Orson Welles saw pretty much every post-Kane movie recut to some extent by his studio bosses). But the truth is that the control, in a digital age, is in the hands of the consumers. And if Lynch or anyone else doesn’t like that, they’d better stop making films all together. If not, they can face the alternative: their film playing in a theater, but the theater is empty.

Last week on Wowio’s blog The Reader, there was a post entitled “iPhone Reader: The Long Sessions.” The post had some great photos from their recent efforts to test-drive reading on Apple’s iPhone (which is not easy since the iPhone is pretty much a closed device when it comes to third-party applications).

Wowio itself is a company that offers free downloads of PDF eBooks from its website. They feel that “by making ebooks available for free — including copyrighted works from major publishers — we ultimately hope to make sure that every person who wants to read a book will be able to get it.” Wowio’s business model is based on the assumption that print is not dead, and that the reading of free electronic books can and does lead to the sale of printed books.

The company has only been in existence since 2006, so it’s a little early to tell if any of this is working, but they’re certainly a passionate voice in the “future of the book” debate, and they’re doing an awful lot to meet the demands of an “attention economy” society where people want to interact with content wherever and however they want. However, the selection of material on their site, at this point, is not eclectic or widespread enough to attract more than a specialized interest.

However, the Wowio blog consistently writes intelligently about eBooks and related issues, not to mention that reading on the iPhone is a bit of an obsession; they also recently wrote up a post about supposedly an even newer iPod model named the iSlate, and what that could mean to reading. There’s also a great video of the experience of reading on an iPhone. This is obviously the blog to subscribe to if this is an interest of yours.

In terms of the experience itself, a Wowio staffer pretty much gushes about the experience of reading on an iPhone:

I’ve now had several multi-hour reading sessions on the iPhone, and I’m finding that it affirms my earlier impressions that its display and touch interface are quite well suited to the purpose of reading long, text-oriented PDFs. The ultra-sharp screen and flexible zooming — combined with easy rotation to landscape orientation — allow fixed-page (non-reflowable) PDFs to display at a comfortable reading size. While I’ve generally hated reading on small devices like PDAs in the past, the iPhone’s excellent display makes it not just viable but actually quite enjoyable. I read in a variety of lighting conditions, including bright outdoor sunlight, artificial light and total darkness, and in all cases, the display performed brilliantly.

Not only that, but the new, more interactive and intuitive touch-screen surface actually delivers some of the physical feeling that is missing in most eBook experiences when “turning a page” really means pressing a tiny button the size of a Tic Tac:

Touching the slippery-smooth glass to scroll through the book made the experience pleasantly tactile, somehow better echoing the positive visceral experience of turning pages of a paper book than the mechanical, button-pushing motion used on most other reading devices. Since the touch interface permits for simultaneous scrolling in both horizontal and vertical directions, I expected to have some trouble with unintentionally moving diagonally instead of straight down, but the system seems to have built-in smarts to ignore such spurious motion off the main axis of movement.

So while Steve Jobs and Apple are just getting started, it seems, with the new touch-surface interface for Apple products (I’m loving my new iTouch, but wish it had more memory), then it would seem that Wowio’s dreams on reading on an iPhone or some next-generation iPhone-like device will some day be a reality. Whether or not that means a text-based iTunes bookstore interface remains to be seen, but technology this good will have to be harnessed for reading at some point.

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.

The New York Times, along with a few other places, is reporting that the new, and last, Harry Potter novel is already beginning to surface on the Web. Writes Motoko Rich in yesterday’s Times, “Photos of what appeared to be every page of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the breathlessly awaited seventh and final installment in the wildly popular series by J.K. Rowling, were circulating around the Web today, potentially upsetting the most elaborate marketing machine ever mobilized for a book.” And this is just the beginning; right now you have lo-fi photographs of pages on Photobucket. By Sunday the entire text will be online thanks to the efforts of a very motivated group of readers who want to read and share the book electronically and, because there’s no official eBooks version, they have to create their own. (The same way they’ve done in the past with the other books.)

True, this is one of the most anticipated books of all time, but you don’t see people going out and recording their own audio editions, or trying to steal the typesetting files and pressing their own books. That’s because the Potter book will indeed be made available via print and audio. But because of Rowling’s obstinate refusal to have any of the Potter books produced digitally, she’s practically egging on hackers and would-be pirates, daring them to make eBooks out of her pBooks. She does all of this because she’s a fervent lover of books, but these days it’s getting impossible to be a lover of books but be against piracy, since this is all about the “attention economy.” Because if people want to read this book electronically, they’re going to do so; the only thing Rowling is doing by restricting access to eBooks — in what I feel is a misguided paean to Gutenberg — is making sure that all digital reading of her book will be done illegally. Crime may be a disease, but in this instance an official, Scholastic-sanctioned eBook would be the cure.

The Guardian reported earlier this week that the magazine The Economist has just announced that “From this week listeners will be able to scroll through the Economist and download audio versions of articles by section or in its entirety.” I think this is a thoroughly great idea; content is content, and whether or not it’s listened to or read, what’s important (especially in journalism) are the words. It doesn’t matter if the words are ingested via the eyes or the ears (or the fingertips, for anyone reading Braille); the only thing that matters is that someone is consuming them.

But why are they doing this? According to the Guardian: “The idea of giving Economist readers news and features to digest while they are on the move follows a move by all the major newspapers into podcasts, quasi-radio programmes that can be downloaded to a computer and transferred to a player.” What’s not explicitly said, and yet is implied (in terms of the Economist reader being “on the move”) is that a person is probably going to do both: read some stories in paper form, while listening to others as an MP3. In fact, a subscriber may start reading a story in the magazine over breakfast, get halfway through it, and then listen to the rest of it while they’re commuting to work. That situation would be a perfect example of “the attention economy” (or, in this case, “the attention Economist”). Because the battle The Economist is facing is not the facile battle of the formats (printed paper versus electronic delivery), but rather it’s getting people interested in their content in the first place; getting people to subscribe to and read their magazine.

Books, in a lo-fi way, already exist like this since people can listen to an audio book or read the print book. Of course, the selection in terms of audio books is not nearly the same as it is for print books, and most people choose one or the other: print book or audio. But what if they were given both, for one price, and they could then switch back and forth as they wanted, when they had time and when the situation called for it? For instance, you read the print book in bed, but listen to the audio book while you’re working out. During his keynote speech at last month’s O’Reilly TOC conference, Chris Anderson suggested that the buyer of his next book might receive a code that would allow him or her to a free MP3 download of the audio book. To stretch this concept a bit, if a book was also made available electronically it would be a third way to consume the content: read a few pages of the book, listen to the audio version a little, and then read the electronic one for a while. In chapter three of Ulysses a character says “Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh?” So why not read seven pages a day in two or three different formats?

Over the weekend The New York Times had an article by Matt Richtel about last week’s Blackberry outage. Entitled “It Don’t Mean a Thing if You Ain’t Got That Ping,” the article talked about how (and why) Blackberry users felt so frustrated, stranded, and lonely without Blackberry service (after all, there’s a reason that the devices are nicknamed “Crackberries”). But the article also ties the Blackberry outage, and its feelings of withdrawal-like symptoms, to a more fundamental need of humans to stay connected in an increasingly electronic age. Writes Richtel: “Experts who study computer use say the stated yearning to stay abreast of things may mask more visceral and powerful needs, as many self-aware users themselves will attest. Seductive, nearly inescapable needs. Some theorize that constant use becomes ritualistic physical behavior, even addiction, the absorption of nervous energy, like chomping gum.”

In terms of the “print is dead” debate, electronic content and networked books will undoubtedly help feed the “visceral and powerful” needs which digitally-connected people are feeling more and more. In fact, the quest for new stories that once drove readers to devour mountains of books now manifests itself in the young technophiles who feel the ardent tug to constantly be in contact via their electronic gadgets. But it doesn’t stop there; this drive has spilled over into content itself. Users want to also interact with what they’re reading, watching or listening to; they want to shuffle their playlists, remix their music, and alter how or when they watch movies and TV shows.

The article talks also about a condition known as “acquired attention deficit disorder,” which is used “to describe the condition of people who are accustomed to a constant stream of digital stimulation and feel bored in the absence of it.” Well, I would say that pretty much anyone under the age of thirty qualifies for being accustomed to a “constant stream of digital stimulation.” In our digital society, there’s no escaping it. Ten years from now, this will be true for nearly everyone. And so to expect future generations to be satisfied with printed books is like expecting the Blackberry users of today to start communicating by writing letters, stuffing envelopes and licking stamps.

NY Times: It Don’t Mean a Thing if You Ain’t Got That Ping

Yesterday the world’s third largest record company, EMI, announced that it would begin selling music from its artists as digital downloads without any kind of Digital Rights Management (DRM) or copy restrictions. The songs will have a higher sound quality than your typical iTunes download, but will cost $1.29 instead of the usual $.99. The company made the decision after hearing numerous complaints from its consumers that they preferred having format-less music that could be listened to on any computer or any device, using a multitude of programs. Eric Nicoli, EMI’s chief executive, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “It was clear what we had to do because we hold the consumer at the center of our focus.”

This is an amazing move, and is exactly what big media companies should be doing. EMI has taken the exact opposite approach to Viacom, who recently sued YouTube for copyright infringement. EMI wants their music to reach as many ears as possible, while Viacom would rather sue people who try to do their marketing for them. It seems to me that EMI fully understands the “attention economy,” while Viacom clearly doesn’t get it, and would rather create plaintiffs instead of an audience.

In terms of the “print is dead” debate, the decisions about DRM that are now being made in the music world could mean a lot for trade publishers and eBooks in the years to come. After all, one of the big problems which has restricted eBook adoption is the restrictions of DRM. True, publishers are only reacting to authors and agents who are very leery of digital delivery (and the devilry they fear it will bring: copyright theft, loss of revenue, mass piracy). But compared to the alternative — no one wanting to read their books — it’s apparent that the time has come to experiment and put the power in the hands of the consumers. After all, as Tim O’Reilly says (and which I repeat all of the time), “The enemy isn’t piracy, the enemy is obscurity.”

What’s also amazing about the EMI situation is that the price-per-song is higher, proving that people will (hopefully) be willing to pay for the convenience that digital delivery provides. $.99 locks you to your iPod, but $1.29 lets you take it anywhere you want. This could one day be the same for books. So instead of electronic books being priced ridiculously low (as some people have called for, wanting eBook prices to be somewhere in the $1-$2 range), consumers will instead pay comparable if not premium prices for digital downloads of books. Why? Because — if the files are not straitjacketed with DRM — then the users can read the files on any device or on any computer, at any time or in any place that they want. This could prove liberating, and would finally be one in the win column in the “books vs eBooks debate,” since a digital file is a virtual item that can live in many places at once, while a printed book is a physical thing that has to be dragged in hand from place to place.

In terms of music, it remains to be seen how many of the other major record labels — if any — step forward and make a step similar to EMI’s, but at least it’s a start.

EMI Dropping Copy Limits on Online Music

Oliver Bullough, writing the Guardian’s Book blog, lask week lamented the recent news that Powells Books is producing a series of short movies starring authors that will serve as promotional features for their books. The first person to “star” in one of these is the British writer Ian McEwan. Bullough seems to bemoan all this, titling his blog entry “prepare for all-singing, all-dancing book promotion.” To this I would say, Yes, exactly, and follow this up with, Why not? If you subscribe to the notion of the “attention economy,” and agree that books now compete not only with films and television for cultural relevance and interest, but now must also beat out new media such as blogs, MP3s, Myspace and Youtube for human bandwidth, then why shouldn’t authors use every marketing tool at their disposal? People criticize this because it will, of course, change the landscape of the world of literature. These short films will be posted all over the Internet, embedded on blogs and traded on file-sharing websites, and all of the sudden a charismatic but not-very-talented writer will find himself more popular than a wonderful writer who freezes up in front of a camera. But this is nothing new; writers like Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe were the first writers to regularly appear on television talk shows, becoming as famous (or, in the case of Mailer, as infamous) as rock stars. Later generations of smart, attractive writers such as Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis continued in this tradition, appearing in newspapers and magazines as the cover stars of a new literary generation.

Now the Web will take this even further. And writers who are unskilled in the ways of the Internet, or just don’t want to play any part in the online discussion and want to write their books and be left alone, will be like movie actors at the end of the silent era who were forced to acquire new skills when talking pictures were suddenly the brand new thing. For some actors, the advent of sound allowed them to shine in a way that silent films never did. For others, however — those who didn’t have good voices or couldn’t act in the way that talking pictures demanded — they found themselves suddenly without a career. Many modern day writers will find themselves in similar circumstances, unable to deal with the ramifications and changes that a new technology has brought to their art form. But this is, unfortunately for some (though not McEwan, who I’m sure will be fine), the new truth of our current literary age, and nothing can bring us back to the era of Grub Street.

Prepare for all-singing, all-dancing book promotion

New York Magazine this week has a really interesting article where it features “media diaries” of three New Yorkers, listing every bit of media that they read, look at, consume, etc. And of course what I find interesting is how digital their lives are (especially the woman who bought an episode of “Gray’s Anatomy” on iTunes and watched it on her laptop; that’s totally cool, and a great example of the “on-demand everything/Attention Economy” times in which we now live). Also, you don’t see many diary entries like “1PM-6PM, sat in a bay window and read Tolstoy.” True, these are New Yorkers, and so may not be representative of the rest of the country, but I think it’s not too far off the mark of how lots of young people are living in our increasingly digital world.

Article intro: “When Time magazine put a crinkly, vaguely toxic-looking fun-house mirror on its cover and named ‘you’ the person of the year for 2006, the Establishment weekly was more or less cheering on its own diminution. After all, like most purveyors of mass media, from TV (see the nightly news) to the music industry (Tower Records, R.I.P.) to daily newspapers (which have lost over 20 percent of their stock valuation in the past four years), Time is facing both a vexing shift in consumer behavior and the rise of self-generated content. Of course, amid all this apocalyptic hype, young people are consuming more media than ever. But what is it they’re reading, watching, and listening to, exactly? We asked three members of the coveted 18-to-34 demographic to keep a diary of their habits for a week.”

NY Mag: The Media Diaries

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