Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

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.

Last week Apple introduced its newest iteration of the iPhone, the 3G, and people around the world lined up outside stores (sometimes overnight) to be one of the first ones to get it. Now, while this has become routine (people have been known to join a line outside of an Apple store without really knowing what they’re getting in line for), this is still a pretty remarkable event. I mean, people getting in line for a phone? It used to be that people bought a new phone every ten years, choosing to wait online for things like Springsteen tickets. Not anymore.

And yet, as someone who works in publishing I couldn’t help but be jealous last Friday morning as I passed a bunch of people lined up outside of a Sprint store waiting for their iPhones. After all, when’s the last time someone camped out all night to buy a book? Sure, people lined up for the Harry Potter books, but in those instances they were craving the the next installment of Harry’s story; that it just so happened to come in book form — towards the end of the franchise — was almost a beside the point.

But when’s the last time you — if you ever have — saw someone dressed up as a book itself? When’s the last time someone posed as a dust jacket rather than as a figure posing on a dust jacket? Of course, this doesn’t happen. Why? Because people don’t love books themselves; rather, they love the characters and worlds found inside of books. So despite all of the talk of books being amazing technological devices, you never see people waiting outside all night in order to buy a blank one.

Photo from Gizmodo

Via MJ Rose’s blog, today I found what seems to be the third part of a four-part conversation with Corrections author Jonathan Franzen. After making what seems to me some terribly shaky reasoning when it comes to publishing work about the lives of his friends and family (Franzen says that it hurts them less to read about themselves in print than it would hurt him not to write the material; WTF?), he then goes on give his “assessment of online reading,” which Franzen acknowledges is “harsh”:

Kafka is about as substantive as a writer can be, and it may be an interesting exercise to spell out the text of “Before the Law” in skywriting over Miami Beach, but I don’t think it will satisfy readers who care about Kafka’s substance. Part of the magic of literature resides in the making of the indelible mark — in our belief in its indelibility. Serious readers are able to invest even the crappiest, most beat-up paperback with a kind of magical permanence. To read Virginia Woolf on a little plastic screen that five seconds ago was filled with Ann Coulter is to undermine one of the basic conditions of literary reading. It’s to make all texts more or less equal and equally provisional. I admit that I may be particularly resistant to reading on a screen because I use a computer to write. When I see words are floating on a screen, I assume they’re still subject to revision. And it’s not that I assume they’re bad — I’m sure there’s plenty of interesting stuff getting published online. It’s more like the difference between fluorescence and a candle. Nothing you can do to a fluorescent fixture can make me want to have a romantic dinner by its light. Writing on the Web is at its best when it’s quick and spontaneous and in process. If there’s great fiction getting published online, I look forward to seeing it in print someday soon.

For me, Franzen basically undermines his own theory, because if “serious readers are able to invest even the crappiest, most beat-up paperback with a kind of magical permanence,” then why can’t serious readers do the same thing with a computer screen? And if they indeed can’t, all it shows is their prejudice for paper over plastic. Which is a shame since — as more and more important work begins to appear online — more and more “serious readers” are going to seriously limit themselves.

Also, for Franzen to use the example of Kafka (in terms of being a writer who must be read in print) is a poor choice. I actually think the writer of The Metamorphosis would find a certain kind of symmetry (if not downright poetry) in the fact that words he wrote on paper have been transformed to fit on a computer screen. Not to mention that the only place Kafka wanted his work to appear was a fireplace (he asked that upon his death his friend Max Brod destroy all of his work, a plea that Brod obviously ignored). So any talk of Kafka having to appear in book format goes against the wishes of the author himself.

Anyway, arguing about Virginia Woolf and Kafka is one thing, but we also need to focus on the new kinds of writing that will be created with computers, websites, blogs and RSS forming an integral part. And of course the bottom-line is that no one’s going to be forced to go digital, no more than stormtroopers are going to storm, or troop, into Franzen’s apartment and make him have romantic dinners by LED rather than candles. However, if he chooses to continue to ignore online writing, or just wait for everything to appear in print, he’s going to miss out on a lot.

Last week, a reader turned me on to an article entitled “The 21st Century Writer,” which happens to be the current cover story for The Futurist magazine. Written by the magazine’s senior editor, Patrick Tucker, the article is one of the best ones I’ve seen in a long time to discuss the evolving role of the writer in these digital times.

And while the fact that the essay is appearing in a magazine entitled The Futurist tips its hand slightly as to where the author falls in the future of the book debate (I would imagine an article on the same topic in Luddite Monthly would take the exact opposite point of view), but despite this Tucker places his argument deftly within historical and technological context:

For people who make their living selling words to readers—and indeed for readers themselves—these are times of upheaval. The information technology revolution has led to an explosion in textual content. More people are engaging in more conversations, sharing more opinions, learning more, and learning faster than anyone could have imagined just a few decades ago.

It’s a really great essay, and has many great quotes and bits of insight.

Today I came across the website Read at Work, which was created by the New Zealand Book Council in order to encourage people to, well, read at work. When you click to enter the website, it expands to fit the entire screen, and is perfectly designed to look like a PC desktop (which is a bit disorienting if — like me — you’re on a Mac). You can then explore and open various folders that contain short stories or poems which, when you click on them, are designed in Powerpoint. It’s a really ingenious idea, and is well executed.

But what’s really amazing is how effective it is. Not in the sense that you can indeed get away with reading these stories while at work (although I bet you could). Instead, what’s truly amazing is that prose and poetry — even when rendered using something as cold and lifeless as Powerpoint — manages to remain poignant and powerful.

And while the purpose and format of the Read at Work site is ostensibly just to fool bosses or co-workers, it actually proves a point that I, and many others, have been making in the future of the book debate: that words can flourish in any environment or format. Novels aren’t goldfish that will die outside of the fishbowl constraints of a book’s packaging. But rather, a writer’s words can travel anywhere and be presented in almost any format, and will remain literature.

One of the most common themes that runs through the future of the book debate is, well, the idea of the book itself. Or rather, what a book is or should be. Most people consider a work like The Great Gatsby to be a book. After all, when someone says they love The Great Gatsby, chances are they’re talking about the book (I doubt they mean the film or the opera; I’ve seen both, and didn’t love either). And yet, what they’re really reacting to are Fitzgerald’s words and story, not the paper and glue of Scribner’s. Because of this, the real heart of Gatsby is in its amazing language and timeless theme, not the page. The spirit and magic of The Great Gatsby isn’t the book itself; the book is just a prop. Indeed, the page was just the first place we experienced Gatsby, so it has now become a physical beacon or marker for us to stare at and appreciate (not unlike the green light at the end of Daisy’s pier in the novel itself). And yet, when we talk, in the future of the book debate, about physical books going away people tend to think that, along with the paper and glue, we’re going to remove the stories and ideas as well. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. To compare this to music, it reminds of a syndrome I call “banditis.”

I would define “banditis” as being when all members of a band feel the need to all play on or contribute to a song (as if every song needs guitar, bass and drums). This tends to make all songs sound predictable; you end up waiting for the chorus and the guitar solo. The truth is, not all songs need a chorus — or even lyrics — not to mention guitar in the first place (let alone solos). In fact, my favorite record of the year so far is the recently released Heartcore by Wildbirds and Peacedrums (the video above is them performing the song “Doubt/Hope”). The “group” is made up of a young married couple from Sweden, and most often the songs consist of just the husband’s inventive drumming and the wife’s haunted and haunting vocals. Of course, if you were to describe this to most people they’d say, “Uh, just vocals and drums? Where’s the rest?” as if something were missing. People react this way because they’ve been conditioned to think of songs as being defined as something that has guitars, bass and drums (if not even more instruments, like piano, strings, and backup vocals). In fact, even when musicians appear with just an acoustic guitar it’s considered a bit of a novelty (remember MTV’s show Unplugged?). But, in my mind, the less adorned the music is, the more real and true it is. The same thing can happen with stories and ideas. The same way that a song can consist of just drums and vocals, a story can just be words on a screen. Songs can still be songs, even without guitars; and novels can still be novels, even without pages.

A colleague and fellow writer recently sent me a number of passages from The Stone Gods, Jeanette Winterson’s recent novel. The book has a section set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic (and post-print) world. In fact, the quotes below remind me very much of Bradbury’s dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451.

From The Stone Gods, page 49:

“We were flying in a strange part of the sky,” said Handsome, “and we thought we’d hit a meteorite shower, ship spinning like a windsock in a gale. I took a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree shot of the ship, and I saw that what we were flying through was a bookstorm–encyclopedias, dictionaries, a Uniform Edition of the Romantic poets, the complete works of Shakespeare.”

From The Stone Gods, page 162:

Books had been lost like everything else in the War, and Post-3 War we hadn’t returned to print media. Natural wastage was the economic argument: why go back to something that was on the way out anyway? You can order books from Print on Demand, but most people use Digital Readers now, or don’t read at all. The younger kids have never known book culture so they don’t miss it.

From The Stone Gods, page 164:

I had been in the British Library, researching the history of artificial intelligence. It was the books that saved my life. As the building collapsed I fell on to a raft of books, and stacks of books fell on to me, knocking me unconscious but casing me from further damage. I came round, pushed myself out of the mountain of books, and started to walk home through the blasted streets, in shock, aware, somewhere, that people were running and screaming, and that everywhere, like one of those archive films of detonated demolitions, buildings were falling.

I think these are great quotes, and the predictions feel very real given all that we’re going through right now.

The Economist’s June 5th edition has an article entitled “Unbound,” which sounds fairly benign until you read the sub-headline: “Publishers worry as new technologies transform their industry.” Oh, and there’s also a grinning picture of Jeff Bezos with the caption “You’re all doomed!,” as if Bezos is attacking the publishing industry Jack Torrance-style, with his goofy grin about to break out into a fiendish sounding “Here’s Johnny!”

The article was spurred by Bezos’s recent appearance at Book Expo America. Having been in the audience for the Bezos speech, I can confirm firsthand that his appearance was indeed lukewarmly received. In fact, when he told the booksellers in the room that Scott McClellan’s new book, the Bush-bashing memoir What Happened, was sold out everywhere except as a Kindle eBook, it seemed like he was gloating rather than trying to relate to publishers that they need not have warehouses and physical stock in order to make money. The point that Bezos should have made was that people just wanted McClellan’s story, not the paper.

Anyway, after setting the stage (“Books have changed very little in half a millennium, but they may now be on the verge of going digital”), the Economist article touches upon the usual topics surrounding electronic books and print on demand technology, listing the effects they could have on the industry. And while most of it is standard stuff, I find the final couple of lines to be a bit disingenuous:

Publishing has only two indispensable participants: authors and readers. As with music, any technology that brings these two groups closer makes the whole industry more efficient—but hurts those who benefit from the distance between them.

The fact that I’m reading this article, on the Economist’s website, rather than the millions or so other stories that appear on the Web everyday is because the Economist is a brand that I trust. I simply don’t have time to chase down and read every scrap of content that’s out there, so I pick and choose from reputable sources. So if the Economist’s thesis were true (and it’s nothing we haven’t already heard over and over; remember when Stephen King tried to sell The Plant for a buck a branch?), and the only major parts of the publishing process were indeed “authors and readers,” then publishing would have been put out of business a long time ago. eBooks have existed for over ten years, and vanity presses have been willing to print a book by anyone who will pay them for much longer than that.

What I find most interesting about the Economist article is that, in the same issue, there’s an article entitled “Who needs paper?” But this one’s not about publishing or books. Instead, it’s about the travel industry. The full headline reads, “Airlines do away with paper tickets,” which is something I actually wrote about last September. Here’s the first few lines of the Economist article:

IT WILL not be long before paper tickets for a plane, train or bus seem as quaint as propellers, steam and conductors do today. Electronic travel passes are already widespread in many cities.

And, of course, with the headline “Who needs paper?” you could imagine that the article would be about books, probably reading something like:

IT WILL not be long before paper novels for fiction, non-fiction or reference material seem as quaint as propellers, steam and conductors do today. Electronic content devices are already widespread in many cities.

And yet, in either one of those stories — whether you’re writing about traveling or reading — the fact that paper is going away isn’t having an adverse effect on the thing itself: people are still traveling, despite not having paper tickets. And people will continue to read, even when paper formats begin to go away.

This week on the the website Red Room, writer Naomi Bock has posted the first of what’s planned to be a two-part article entitled “The Future of the Book.” That this article is appearing on Red Room (a site whose tagline is ”Where the writers are”) makes perfect sense; more and more authors are heading online, so it’s a great place to discuss and debate whether or not books are similarly Internet-bound. Indeed, as Bock writes in her opening paragraph: “But just as digital literary endeavors like [Red Room] gain momentum, print reading is said to be losing its mass appeal, considered less a cherished pastime and more an activity of the past. What could be the future of the book?”

I’m quoted a few times in the article, both from Print is Dead and an e–mail exchange I had with Naomi a few weeks ago. Here’s a bit of the article where I’m mentioned:

Interestingly, [Gomez] acknowledges that more people have been buying his book in print rather than e-reading it, and he himself hasn’t yet made the switch either (although he does all his periodical reading online). He’s “not a fan of existing eBook devices” and, like most, finds it too much of a strain reading long-form on a traditional computer screen. He recognizes the irony of this. He also devotes a chapter of the book to explaining the late ‘90s e-book revolution that wasn’t, and why he thinks the time is finally ripe: Society wasn’t as wired (and wireless) then as it is now. The digital music revolution and its ubiquitous devices have set the stage, and just as other arts are following suit, literature must also do or die. If the e-reader market has yet to offer a truly “great device” in his opinion, he expects to see it in the next two or three years.

“When it comes, I look forward to reading The Great Gatsby on a screen; I’m convinced it’ll still be a great book.”

It’s an interesting and well-written article, so take a look if you have a chance. Part Two of the article will appear over the weekend.

Last week I wrote about my experiences at the recent Video Games Live concert, and how the interactivity I saw in the video game footage, not to mention the reaction of the crowd at the mere mention of the names of some of these games, presaged — in my mind, anyway — the death of the novel. Well, after last week’s release of the ultra-successful game franchise Grand Theft Auto, I can’t help but continue to think that, for at least a certain generation, books are on the way out and these new, hyper-realistic and interactive games are in (and are here to stay). According to an article last week in The New York Times, “The [Grand Theft Auto] release is expected to be one of the biggest video game debuts ever, extending a franchise that has already sold 70 million copies since its arrival in 1997.”

But wait; there’s more:

But customers’ intense desire for video games extends beyond Grand Theft Auto. Despite pressure on consumers’ entertainment budgets, they keep spending more money on games. Over all, the industry is having a banner year. Software sales were up 63 percent in March compared with March 2007, according to NPD Group, which tracks sales. Equipment sales were up 46 percent over the same period.

“People say that if consumers are down to their last $50, the last three things they’ll buy are milk, eggs and video games,” said Colin Sebastian, a video game industry analyst with Lazard Capital Markets.

When’s the last time you heard people talk like that about books? Well, specifically, it was last July, when the final book in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series came out. But that was almost a year ago, and no more Potter books are set to appear. In fact, she’s finally off the bestseller list for the first time in a decade. And yet, whereas studies have shown that — despite the phenomenal interest in and success of the Potter books — literacy rates among children have continued to decline, the success of games like Grand Theft Auto are a gateway to the playing of yet more games (and probably the reading of even fewer books). Potter may not lead to Pynchon, but Auto certainly leads to Halo. You can argue about whether or not this is good for society, but you can’t deny that it’s a trend that shows no sign of reversing itself.