Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

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.

Over the weekend I went to an odd but fun concert. Entitled Video Games Live, it was an evening of video game music played by a full orchestra and backed up by a choir. The ensemble played the music of everything from Halo to Frogger (the clip above is music from The Legend of Zelda; they played this on Saturday, but this clip is not from the performance I saw). The concert was a lot of fun, and the music was really great; by turns cinematic and surprisingly beautiful, at one point a lone pianist played a rousing rendition of the Super Mario Brothers theme music while wearing a blindfold as the adoring crowd cheered him on (during which I was thinking, “I bet this kind of thing doesn’t happen at Carnegie Hall”).

But it was also kind of strange for me since I haven’t really played a video game in the past decade or so (except the classic ones that I collect; once I hit puberty, I pretty much stopped playing video games). When the orchestra was running through a number of themes from classic arcade games, I recognized pretty much every one of them — Front Line, Tempest, Elevator Action — but as the graphics became smoother and more realistic, and the game play more involved and sophisticated (especially in the home versions), I was hopelessly out of my element. As the orchestra played the themes to things like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy the crowd went absolutely nuts, and I observed it all very much from the outside; this was berserk, but not Berzerk. Due to the frenzied reaction of the crowd, I could tell that this music had been the soundtrack to countless hours of their lives. Much the same way that The Big Chill soundtrack epitomized the youth of an entire generation of Baby Boomers, the music to games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Metal Gear Solid has provided a similar aural backdrop. And, frankly, who’s to say that the Rolling Stones mean more than a Playstation 3?

But something else struck me as I sat there watching these truly amazing games — many of which looked better, in terms of special effects, than any movie I ever saw growing up — I kept thinking to myself, “The novel is dead.” Because how in the world could books compete with these games? What were mere words next to those incredible graphics and complicated stories? At one point there was this game called Civilizations, where whole societies were built in seconds, and I thought, “If I’d had a game like that as a kid, I would have never left the house.” Growing up I always heard stories of college students so taken with the board game Dungeons and Dragons that they started living in the sewers and playing the game all day long. And that was just with some dice and graph paper! So what’s happening now that people literally have worlds at their fingertips? It used to be that books provided an escape from everyday life by providing a portal to incredible new worlds, but today that function is handily served by video games.

True, the satisfaction one gets from a novel is more sublime and arguably deeper than one gets from a video game, but books hardly elicit the same kind of fervor or devotion. The crowd during the Video Games Live concert went bananas at just the mention of certain games; it was apparent that these characters and worlds meant a lot to them. When’s the last time you went to a book festival and heard people screaming merely at the mention of a book’s title?

Via Maud Newton, a few weeks ago I came across upon the website for Brooklyn’s Reanimation Library, which is a sort of a refuge for discarded books, which sounds like a good idea until you start poking around their website. Sounding more like a page from the Logan’s Run screenplay than the French flaps of a Nicholson Baker book, and with graphics that remind me of the menus for the Beastie Boys Criterion Edition DVD (if not for the Church of the SubGenius), the Reanimation Library is hardly a publishing utopia. Instead it’s, well, just another library. However, this is how the Reanimators see it:

The Reanimation Library seeks to assemble an inspiring collection of resources that will facilitate the production of new creative work and promote reflection and research into the historical, legal, and methodological questions surrounding the adaptive reuse of found materials. It strives to provide the necessary space and tools to allow these activities to flourish, and to foster a climate of spirited collaboration.

To me this begs the question, Who’s choosing which books to “reanimate”? And how is that decision more valid or important than the one to deanimate the book in the first place? After all, the Reanimation Library’s not taking just any discarded book. Even though the website states that the library takes donations, not every book will be accepted (just how dead does a book have to be before it’s given new life? And how ironic is that?). And, of course, what happens to the books that the Library of Lost Books simply doesn’t want? Well, “those that are not added to the collection will be sold or donated.” Which means, I guess, that the sad books that even the Reanimation Library doesn’t want to preserve get sent to the land of misfit books.

Not mentioned on the site is the fact that libraries are increasingly bypassed in today’s Googlepedia age. When I was a kid I had to bum rides to the library all the way across town in order to do research for school papers or to get stuff to read. But today’s kids are no doubt doing that same research from their laptop computers (if not their cell phones) while at home or in a coffee shop or at school or wherever. So why do we need to replace one kind of library with another? I would argue that the age when libraries played God is over; now they’re just trying to keep pace. The Reanimation Library website also quotes Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan’s first law of library science: “books are for use.” And yet, how useful will books in a library in Brooklyn be to anyone, well, not in Brooklyn? (There are currently no plans to digitize the collection.) So how does the Reanimation Library really differ from any library it’s probably a few blocks from? The public collection has been collected and curated, with thousands of books not making the cut. And the same goes for the Reanimation Library (if not more so). The difference, I guess, is that the Reanimation Library also has funky T-shirts and stickers. After all, who needs the Dewey Decimal System when you can have pins with hot dogs that say LIBRARY SKILLS?

Maybe the real reason I want print to be dead is so we can stop reading awful puff pieces like Rachel Donadio’s essay that appeared in The New York Times Book Review over the weekend. Entitled, “It’s Not You, It’s Your Books,” it was yet another silly think-piece about how you can’t judge a book by its cover, but plenty of people judge prospective lovers by the books that they read (or don’t read). And I don’t really have a fault with the essay’s thesis, since it’s indeed mostly true (in high school we used to joke about a girl who thought that Daniel Defoe was Willem’s brother), but the problem is that this same phenomenon occurs with just about every other form of art as well. For instance, in the world of music snobs there are guys who won’t date girls who think that Captain Beefhart was someone in the army, while film snobs will shun anyone who hasn’t heard of Cahiers du cinema (let alone some of the famous directors who once wrote for it). So while people who love books can continue to feel that theirs is the greatest love of all, potential suitors all over the world are in fact being spurned for all kinds of reasons. In fact, in NYU dorm rooms right now there are probably a whole lot more guys who are turned off because a girl has a Zune and not an iPod rather than the fact that she reads Tom Wolfe instead of Thomas. Because of this, increasingly, books are not what we talk about when we talk about love; they’re simply what we talk about when we talk about books.

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.

In the classic late ‘70s and early ‘80s TV show Happy Days the phrase “sit on it” was just about the biggest insult someone could deliver. Like, if Richie ever told Fonzie to “sit on it” that was pretty much the equivalent of saying “go to hell.” I was reminded of this recently when I saw another one of Cory Doctorow’s “books aren’t just for reading” posts at Boing Boing, a series in which Cory highlights how various designers are choosing to use books as construction material. The latest example (pictured above) shows books being crammed into the underside and back of a wooden bench. I suppose that an optimist might say that by stuffing books into the nooks and crannies of this bench someone sitting on it could simply reach between their legs and find something to read. But in reality I think that all of those books are going to go untouched, and will probably just act as lifeless decoration for the people sitting on the bench watching TV.

When I was a kid, living through the Star Wars-soaked late ‘70s and early ‘80s, my friends and I did everything we could to interact and live within the Star Wars world. First on the list, of course, was seeing the movies. But since they came out in three-year increments (‘77, ‘80 and ‘83), that obviously left lots of down time between installments. And since this was pre-VHS or even cable, we weren’t left with too many other options. There were the occasional (and mostly subpar) television specials and animated series (something to do with Ewoks and droids, respectively). Beyond this my friends and I made do with picture books and soundtrack records and even a bootlegged audio cassette of the movie a friend of a friend had made (of course, during the battle scenes it was nothing but muffled sound effects but still, I must have even just listened to Star Wars half a dozen times). But the biggest thing that filled the gap was the toys. With our plastic reproductions of Tie Fighters and X-Wings, we were able to recreate battles and scenes from the movies, or else just make up our own.

What amazes me about Star Wars is that it’s still alive and growing. Indeed, with the three most recent installments still fresh in peoples’ minds, it’s bigger than ever. And yet, whereas the original trio of movies were the catalyst for the phenomenon, the second trilogy of movies were really just yet another cog of the overall franchise. And there’s now a whole new dimension for Star Wars fans to participate in: video games.

However, even Star Wars-themed video games are nothing new. Back in the ‘80s there were numerous home and arcade videogames that used aspects of the Star Wars world as their plot. But those games were just, well, games. They consisted of crude pixilated versions of our cinematic heroes: a blocky Hans Solo or Luke Skywalker doing battle against similarly jagged Storm Troopers, while in the background an 8-bit version of the John Williams score bleeped and blurped. And while these games had enough of a backstory to get you going, they were really just tests of hand-eye coordination and skill. They were only immersive in the sense that, when a game was going well, we were in our own little world. But when the game only lasted between 5-10 minutes, it was obviously a passing experience.

But we now live in a world where video games have advanced graphics and multiple storylines, not just cursory plots. In fact, in terms of Star Wars, there’s a new game coming out this summer called The Force Unleashed. The game is already talked about as being a huge leap in gaming, not to mention being a kind of ad hoc new installment in the Star Wars saga; a game so rich with detail and story that it gives fans a chance to directly interact and experience the Star Wars world. Frank DiGiacomo recently wrote about the game’s development for Vanity Fair:

The character of Darth Vader is fleshed out further, and, in a plot twist almost as good as the “I am your father” moment from Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back, the game also contains surprising information about the birth of the Rebel Alliance. And like the dramatic arc of the six-episode saga within which it’s nestled, The Force Unleashed is ultimately a tale of redemption.

Compare this with earlier home video games of previous eras, such as Pitfall, which gave us an Indiana Jones-like explorer searching for treasure in a jungle. And yeah, it was fun to guide Pitfall Harry through various dangerous traps and adventures, but we never really knew who he was or why he was there. Compared to the cinematic (if not novelistic) storylines of modern day videogames, the age of Atari increasingly seems like mere canonical babbling.

Reading used to be considered an interactive pastime; parents encouraged kids to turn off their videogames and pick up a book. But reading looks positively passive next to something like The Force Unleashed. Indeed, in a world with entertainment choices like this for kids and teens, there’s a chance that the only reading they’ll ever do is looking over the instructions for these games.

Adrian Tomine (who, incidentally, way back in the day illustrated the cover of the third issue of my zine Our Noise) has a New Yorker cover this week entitled “Shelf Life.” It basically traces the trajectory of a book’s life, starting with the writer composing it and the publisher accepting it, then showing the book being published and someone reading it, until it finally ends up being tossed on a fire to keep homeless people warm. It’s a sad, but of course sometimes correct, depiction of what happens to books. However, the same thing could be done with cars, toasters or iPods. Every product starts out as inspiration, moves to the drafting board, the production line, and then goes into someone’s hands before ending up, finally, on the scrap heap. There’s nothing much out there that evades this fate, and books are no different. So what the Tomine cover needs is a few extra panels that show either the writer, or one of the book’s readers, sitting on a park bench with a thought balloon above their head that encloses the book. Because what the New Yorker cover conveys perfectly is that books are physical objects that have a life span. What the cover completely misses, however, is the fact that writing, words, and literature have a soul that transcends any physical object. So whatever was between the covers of the book that Tomine depicted will continue to live on, even after the book itself goes up in flames. In fact, the book’s the least interesting thing about the process. As William Burroughs said, “Language is a virus.” Well, in a way, stories are also viruses. We catch them when we read them, and then we pass them on to others when we talk about them, or else when their ideas infect us in a way that changes our behavior. Basically, words and stories leave their trace in us long after the book that initially spread the ideas in the first place is gone.

After posting a photo recently of a designer who suggested stuffing books into slats in the ceiling (printed pages being used as a form of ersatz insulation), Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing this week had another photo that shows how books are being used in some people’s lives; this time it’s as decoration for a staircase. According to the designer, “Limited by space, we melded the idea of a staircase with our client’s desire for a library to form a ‘library staircase’ in which English oak stair treads and shelves are both completely lined with books. With a skylight above lighting the staircase, it becomes the perfect place to stop and browse a tome.” However, it also becomes the perfect place to stick large amounts of a medium that is becoming increasingly unused in our everyday lives. I mean, knowledge may be power, but books are increasingly becoming lumber. And while scaling this staircase no doubt gives the owners of this Victorian row house a certain tweedy and nostalgic thrill — “Hey, sweetie, remember when we had time to read books instead of spending our time having a designer decorate our Victorian row house?” — I can’t help but think that they’re going to be doing a lot more treading the stairs than reading the books.

Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing recently had a post featuring a new storage idea for books. And while this is, as the website Apartment Therapy describes it, an “ingenius book storage idea,” it is also yet another sign that books may no longer be about ideas that fill minds, but are instead becoming just props to fill our space. After all, if you’re going to stick something where there’s normally only spider webs or insulation, then it must not be a big part of your life.