Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Over the weekend The New York Times had two stories about books, one that talked abut them in analog form and another that discussed their more recent digital transformation. Analog showed up in the form of a small piece on playwright Tom Stoppard, who lugs with him wherever he goes a box filled with books (pictured above). The article is drenched in nostalgia, describing a world of porters and ocean-liners. And maybe this is indeed Stoppard’s world (I can see him being like Owen Wilson in The Darjeeling Limited, traveling with a myriad of monogrammed trunks). But for most us having a forty or fifty pound “portable bookshelf” isn’t an option (or even something we’d consider). Which is where electronic books come in very handy.

Which leads to the piece on digital books. Entitled “Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless,” the article is mostly a review of Amazon’s eBook device, the Kindle. But the writer also gets at the heart of the future of the book debate, and how our definition of exactly what a book is is beginning to change:

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell. Kindle’s long-term success is still unknown, but Amazon should be credited with imaginatively redefining its original product line, replacing the book business with the reading business.

It’s not hard to connect the dots between Stoppard’s “portable bookshelf” and the Kindle’s ability to hold dozens of books at a time. And while Stoppard will probably never embrace an eBook device, there are thousands of other readers out there — drawn by the ability to carry one small device instead of all those books — who will.

Slate recently had a retrospective of their ongoing discussion concerning the decision of Nabokov’s son in terms of whether or not he’s going to destroy his father’s final manuscript. It seems that the elder Nabokov wanted the book burned, but the younger Nabokov is considering publishing it instead. There’s a long history of this kind of thing; sometimes for the best, sometimes for the worst. After all, Kafka wanted his good friend Max Brod to burn all of his unpublished work after his premature death at the age of 40. Yet Brod went against the wishes of his friend, and to this date pretty much every scrap that Kafka ever wrote has been collected between covers (and, I would say, the world is better off because of it). And yet Hemingway’s legacy has been somewhat tarnished by all of the half-baked books that appeared after his death (Islands in the Stream, Garden of Eden, and even the relatively recent True at First Light), manuscripts that Hemingway never truly completed and which were sewn together after his death. However, whatever happens to the Nabokov book, his reputation will remain intact. But still, it’s an interesting question. Because, after all, whose manuscript is it anyway? The guy who wrote it or the person who now has possession of it? Which, in a way, is part of a bigger discussion of books in general. I mean, whose words are they anyway? Once the writer writes them, they’re free; certainly we’re then free to read them in whatever formant we choose. (Of course, we also have the freedom to not read them at all.) Whether that means in print, or on screen, or in funny voices or while hanging upside-down, the choice is up to us.

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.

Hot on the heels of last Fall’s depressing NEA report “To Read or Not to Read” (itself a follow-up to the equally depressing NEA report “Reading at Risk”), which showed that more and more Americans are giving up reading, there’s now a report that states that reading is heading downhill in Britain, too. According to the website This is London, “A quarter of Britons say they have not read a book in the past year and nearly half admit to lying about their reading to appear more intelligent.”

In order to try and reverse these trends, the government is now urging “bosses to set up libraries in former workplace smoking rooms to transform employees’ reading habits,” not to mention that “parents are also being urged to spend at least ten minutes a day reading with their children.” Added to this is the insane notion that “more time would be set aside in the primary school day for reading as part of a review of the curriculum” (which means the Wii elective just flew right out the window along with the controller).

I find it pretty depressing that the nation that gave us the peerless geniuses Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham now has to scramble to erect libraries the way earlier generations built bomb shelters. And yet, funnily enough, books still have some cachet. Because, as the British study found, people had lied about reading certain books “just so they could join in with the conversation.” Which begs the question, I wonder if anyone taking part in those “conversations” had read the book in question, or were they all faking it?

Some clues as to why this is happening can be found in the website’s comments section, where one guy says that “I think people would be better of trying to think of ways to improve the world rather than wasting their lives reading any sort of book,” while another chimes in with “It’s not that we don’t want to read. It’s simply this drivel they publish nowadays and try to pass it off as bestsellers. There’s nothing to read! No thanks. I’d much rather read a good article online.” And, of course, none of this is relegated just to Britain. These depressing trends are being seen in lots of countries (mine included). Print is disappearing from our schools, parents spend less time reading to their kids, and your average “man on the street” found his way there via Google Maps.

Earlier this week, Doris Lessing delivered her acceptance speech for the 2007 Nobel Prize for fiction (though not in person; the speech was delivered by her publisher). The speech has now been published in its entirety online (you can read it here in four languages.) And while not as focused as some of the other great speeches that come to mind (such as Faulkner’s, with the rousing sign-off: “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail), Lessing makes some interesting comments.

Of course, she also makes a few curmudgeonly missteps. For instance, Lessing states that both writers and writing “do not come out of houses without books.” Lessing then goes on to relate the literary awakenings found in the speeches of past Nobel-prize winners:

I have been looking at the speeches by some of your recent prizewinners. Take the magnificent Pamuk. He said his father had 1,500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition.

Take V.S. Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write. And when he got to England by right he used the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition.

Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes: taught by that wonderfully brave bold mind.

In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the Tradition

And while it stands to reason that men and women who came of age during the period of what we may end up calling “Literature 1.0” will have a very print-based view of things, the “Tradition” as Lessing describes it is changing in real and profound ways. Indeed, she laments this in her speech, saying that we currently live in a “fragmenting” culture, and that “it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”

Here Lessing makes a huge mistake; she makes it sound like people who spend time with computers are all just staring at nothing but circuits, wires and plastic. Instead, people spend their time using their computers to learn about a variety of topics (including, of course, books). And they’re not just learning; they’re also contributing, interacting, and participating (things that were hardly possible in the world of Lessing’s “Tradition”).

Instead, today’s Digital Natives are forging and creating their own traditions. Indeed, as James Joyce (a great writer who never had the chance to win a Nobel; my mind reels wondering what his acceptance speech would look like) wrote at the end of his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” The same way that Dedalus and countless others like him created their own worlds and works of art, so too will upcoming generations shatter and remake our age-old Traditions to fit their new world. And, one day — perhaps soon — both writers and writing will indeed come “out of houses without books.” But, I guarantee you, they won’t come out of houses without computers.

On his 1988 concert record The Off-White Album, comedian Dennis Miller has a fake routine where he imagines what the Civil War would have been like if, instead of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union army had been under the command of Cary Grant. But, of course, it’s just a ruse; Miller (at least, the Dennis Miller of the ‘80s) would never stoop to such a comedic low. He explains that what he likes to do is ”get right up to the precipice, pivot and then jete back to Coolsville.”

Well, this is exactly what I hoped was happening when I read a blog entry by Shirley Dent on the Guardian book blog earlier this week. Entitled, “Tolstoy and Dickens. Who’d win in a fight?,” with the subtitle, “War and Peace and Our Mutual Friend are literary heavyweights in more ways than one. This one’s going to go a few rounds,” it sounds pretty silly, right? Well, I guess all of this was spurred by something known as the Bookshop Barnies’ Balloon Debate. Dent describes this spectacle as an “annual event [that] involves half-a-dozen terrified pundits arguing terrifically for two minutes for the book they think is the best EVER, before being interrogated and voted out by an ever-so-merry, ever-so-up-for-it, ever-so-informed mob.” And what’s the literary death match that will be debated this year? Tolstoy versus Dickens.

Now, of course, discussing the merits of various literary figures has a modicum of worth (and Dent, at least in her blog posting, has some intelligent things to say: “Dickens grasps the story, squeezes and twists it into shape. Tolstoy lets it flow through his fingers, his touch on the characters barely perceptible”), but with all the challenges and changes facing publishing, literacy, writers and writing, is this really how booklovers choose to spend their time? Coming up with insular and inane competitions between long-dead writers that most of the general public couldn’t care less about because they’re all too busy spending their time on pretty much anything except Tolstoy and Dickens?

So to waste valuable energy with this kind of academic minutiae seems like a crime. (Like, I wonder if Gogol could beat Chekhov in a sprint?! I think it’d be Gogol, by a nose.) This kind of thing reminds me of how the band kept playing while the Titanic sank. Except, in this scenario — while literacy rates are tanking, and books become more and more marginalized in society — booklovers aren’t just enjoying the music while the waves start to lap at their feet, they’re also spending these last moments playing “name that tune.”

The other day on the design website A Brief Message, designer Chip Kidd had a short essay entitled “Notify the Next of Kindle.” In the essay, Kidd disparages Amazon’s new Kindle eBook reader by bestowing upon it the usual kind of narrow-minded bibliophile dismissal that culminates with the rather Proulxian declaration that “PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN.” This is, of course, news to all of those people out there who DO ACTUALLY WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN. (Not to mention that Kidd doesn’t really seem to comment on the fact that both his words and my words are BEING READ ON A SCREEN RIGHT NOW.)

Anyway, Kidd is obviously a brilliant and talented guy, but he’s coming at this from the point of view of a designer and, dare I say it, he has a chip on his shoulder when it comes to discussing the topic. First of all, here’s how he explains away the success of the iPod: “The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a ‘thing’ in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to.” This is pretty ridiculous. Kidd is failing to realize that, yes, music used to also be objects. In fact, when you think of the elaborate packaging of something like The Beatles White Album, with its embossed gatefold sleeve, fold-out poster and full-size color portraits, it was very much a “physical object,” a “thing.” And yet, after being downgraded to flimsy CD packaging a dozen years ago, it will soon be available as a completely digital download, meaning all you’ll get for your $20 is the music and an invisible package. And it will still be a great record.

So why won’t it be different for books? As Kidd sees it, “Books were always physical objects, and the printed book as a piece of technology has yet to be improved upon.” I completely disagree with this. Books were always physical objects, yes, but that’s because they were, well, books. What Kidd fails to realize is that books have a marrow and a DNA that go far beyond the paper they’re printed on. In fact, as I’ve said many times, the “book” aspect of a book, meaning its physical structure (pages, ink and binding) is always the least interesting thing about a it. (Unless, I guess, you’re a designer.) I mean, the reason Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite writers is because he’s an amazing storyteller who takes me — through his words — to different and wonderful worlds. And while Kidd’s jackets (on Murakami’s books and others) are nice, they’re just part of the package (think of them as icing on the cake; nice, but not essential). I could read Murakami’s novels with different covers, or plain covers or no covers, or as a series of cocktail napkins, and they would still be chilling and amazing stories. So while Kidd can insist that the Kindle changes nothing, I think he’s dead wrong. And I also think the time for the snobbishness of saying no one wants to read books on a screen, when we live in a digital world and plenty of people do, has got to end.

Now that Print is Dead is out, I have a number of friends and relatives sending me their best wishes for my efforts. But what’s interesting about all of these kind words is that almost all of them add that they hope my predictions for the demise of books doesn’t come true. I guess they think I’m predicting that print’s going to die, but what I’m really saying is that print’s already dead.

Indeed, print is dead in the sense that it’s no longer as vital or relevant as it once was. It used to be that print was a broadcast medium, a way to convey knowledge and information across long distances and to all ranges of social and economic groups. But that’s all been replaced by the Internet. (If Jerry Maguire wanted to distribute his manifesto today, he wouldn’t go to a Kinko’s and have copies made; he’d start a blog, which of course means he’d end up get Dooced in addition to being fired.) So the point isn’t to debate whether or not print is going to die, but rather the question is, What do we do with its corpse?

In hundreds of small ways print is already giving up the ghost. Yet more proof of this is the fact that Picador UK is going to stop publishing hardback books, except in special limited editions. Instead, books will be published directly in paperback format. As Nicholas Clee wrote in the Guardian Book Blog a few weeks ago:

Until now, a small market has just about upheld the other arguments for literary fiction in hardback. But that market has almost reached vanishing point. The paucity of sales of novels even by acclaimed authors was an awkward book industry secret until this summer, when it was broadcast that eight of the novels on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize had sold fewer than 1,000 copies.

So it seems that the invisible hand of the consumer has been quietly brushing books aside for years, to the point where even the most feted novels in the UK won’t escape print’s ultimate fate. In fact, Clee’s blog entry is titled “Cover story: hardbacks have their uses,” to which I would reply, “Yes, of course hardbacks have uses; so do horses, even though we’ve stopped riding them around for transportation.” Books will always exist, but they will be produced in much smaller numbers than we may have been used to in the past. And it won’t be technology companies that do either the pruning or the killing; indeed, the fact the Booker Prize nominees have sold in such small quantities shows that the public has been silently — with its very apathy — killing books for years. So with Print is Dead I’m not predicting that print will die; instead I’m drawing chalk around its edges.

Over the weekend, Motoko Rich had a piece in The New York Times entitled “A Good Mystery: Why We Read.” Using the recent NEA report “To Read or Not To Read” as a springboard, Rich asks a very basic question: “Why do we read?” But first, in the shadow of the NEA’s pessimistic report, she sets the stage by also asking the following: “But is all hope gone, or will people still be drawn to the literary landscape? And what is it, exactly, that turns someone into a book lover who keeps coming back for more?” She then, in order to find the answer to why people read, asks a few people how they were initially turned on to reading. And while many writers of course have eloquent thoughts on the subject (including Junot Diaz, who is quoted in the piece), the problem with such tales is that the fan of every conceivable art form (not to mention hobby) has one. Yes, people discover things, and then get into them and love them. And yes, people will always do that with books. But that doesn’t mean that books are relevant, alive, or important in our society. Far from it. After all, someone, somewhere is discovering Desmond Dekker for the first time, and because of this will get into ska music. But that doesn’t mean that ska is either popular or relevant (indeed, it’s quite the opposite). That being said, there are currently small enclaves of fervent fans who are still into ska, and for them it’s their music of choice. But they exist outside the mainstream of music and the discussion taking place around it. And this, to a certain extent, is what’s going to happen more and more with books. (Indeed, the fact that we’re discussing readers as a potentially dying breed shows that it’s happening already.) So instead of asking, “Why do we read?,” what’s more interesting to ask is, What is everyone doing instead of reading? Because the Web, and all its attractions (from Myspace and Facebook to Youtube and iTunes), is luring away the younger generations for whom a computer provides the entry to another world. As Norman Mailer once said of his generation, “fiction was everything.” And now, even though young kids will of course still discover writers the way that Diaz describes in the Times piece, more and more kids are having their time sapped, and their imaginations snatched, by other, more immersive technological interfaces. And older generations can debate the merits of electronic versus print books (with ardent fans on both sides), but younger generations are skipping the debate altogether. So while the “literary landscape” that Rich refers to in her essay will always exist, that landscape — instead of looking like a Where’s Waldo illustration stuffed with figures — will increasingly resemble a sparsely populated Hopper painting.

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