Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

There’s a Charles Bukowski poem that takes place at a reading during which someone asks him, “What do you think of Norman Mailer?” To which Bukowski succinctly replies, “I don’t think of Norman Mailer.” Well, seeing as how Mailer died today, I’m thinking of him quite a bit.

As a young reader, not much into my teens, I discovered Norman Mailer (almost because of his reputation more than his books). My friends and I collected and talked about his work, and I still remember getting into fights with my English teachers over him; they hated him, which only made me love him more. And even though there are many of his books I’ve still never gotten around to — for instance, I still haven’t read The Naked and The Dead — instead, it was more the force of his personality that attracted me. As a kid in high school who never got good grades and didn’t like sports, I was attracted to Mailer in a rebellious sort of way, kind of like how the Beats took up Kerouac as their idol and role-model.

And when I finally got around to actually reading Mailer, I loved almost everything I read. Even his almost inscrutable books, from Why Are We in Vietnam? to Ancient Evenings, made me admire him because he had the drive and power and vision to write books that no one else would risk (or think of) writing.

Plus, my favorites of Mailer’s never seemed to be anyone else’s favorites, such as The Deer Park, a book which cost him a publisher and almost his sanity, and Advertisements for Myself which, in its conversational asides, contains the best advice to writers that I’ve ever read outside of perhaps New Grub Street.

Later I read Mailer’s masterworks such as The Executioner’s Song and The Armies of the Night, and when I did I sat dumbfounded at the man’s total control over words (and his less than total control over his ego), not to mention the fact that any biography of Mailer (including Peter Manso’s oral biography, which cost him his friendship with Mailer) was better than most people’s fiction.

Yes, Mailer was often a jerk and a blowhard and overall a general loudmouth, but he was also an American original and someone who played a large part in who I am today. Not only that (indeed, what he has meant to me personally is dwarfed by what he has to meant to literature in general), but I think the battles Mailer fought are finally being won thanks to the Internet and the egalitarianism of a Web 2.0 world where consumers have more choice than ever. Today, the “wisdom of crowds” can often drown out the cranky, singular critic who no longer controls fates with the slash of a pen they way they did back in Mailer’s day. For instance, here’s a passage from one of the interstitial essays in Advertisements for Myself, where Mailer casts a cold eye on the literary landscape of his time:

The day was gone when people held on to your novels no matter what others might say. Instead one’s good young readers waited now for the verdict of professional young men, academics who wolfed down a modern literature with an anxiety to find your classification, your identity, your similarity, your common theme, your corporate literary earnings, each reference to yourself as individual as a carloading of homogenized words. The articles which would be written about you and a dozen others would be done by minds which were expert on the aggregate and so had senses too lumpy for the particular. There was a limit to how much appraisal could be made of a work before the critic exposed his lack of the critical faculty, and so it was naturally wiser for the mind of the expert to masticate the themes of ten writers rather than approach the difficulties of any one.

But today, with more and more mainstream publications cutting back on review space, and more and more readers and consumers trading their opinions via social networking sites and blogs, the power of the critic is beginning to slowly whither away. What’s replacing it is the power of the individual (which goes a long way toward restoring the power of the writer). And I kind of think that Mailer would have wanted it that way.

Before the age of the Internet and the iPod, way back in the early 90’s, Nirvana ruled the charts and grunge was the hot new sound. Tower Records was still around, the term “alternative” meant something, and MTV actually showed videos. In terms of Nirvana, what had been crucial their success was their gritty history: scruffy small-town kids clad in thrift-store flannel who’d recorded their debut record for $600 bucks and then released it on the independent label Sub Pop (that not many people had heard of until then).

Kids found the fact that Nirvana was so rough around the edges intoxicating; their lack of polish and pretension ignited the fervor of a generation the same way that punk had done a dozen years earlier. Of course, the only thing the record companies cared about was finding more Nirvanas and racking up more sales, so they did everything they could to find similar bands. Sometimes, it was successful (Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains), and sometimes it wasn’t (Seaweed, Tad). But once the grunge barrel was finally empty, and all the indie bands had been signed (at the height of this madness Japanoise band The Boredoms were signed to Warners Bros, something no one could believe), the major labels started creating their own indie bands, which gave rise to something that later became known as “Scam indie.”

Scam indie was the act of trying to make a major label artist seem like an independent one, which would help in generating a loyal grassroots audience, as well as lend an air of authenticity. The only problem with the scenario was that it was fake. But the major labels “neverminded” this, and kept trying to secretly funnel bands through the indie scene as if it were a kind baseball “farm system,” with the indie scene as the minor leagues while the big labels were the majors. Usually this meant something fairly benign like making a record cover look like it had been cheaply constructed with tape or Wite-Out, meaning the artists had made it themselves. The point would be that the band didn’t care about aesthetics or playing the record industry game (early Pavement and Sebadoh records were the touchstones here); they were anti-image, anti-corporations, anti-everything. But in reality, the artwork was designed by slick art departments who were trying very hard to have the sleeves appear homemade. (In fact, you still see this, even in publishing.) Another facet of scam indie involved huge conglomerates starting boutique record labels, and then trying to hide the fact that the money came not from weekends working at Kinko’s, but from shareholders in giant parent companies.

More than a decade later, with the Internet now a huge presence in almost everyone’s life, “scam indie” is back. Because now, in the age of user-generated content where anyone can produce a video or song and upload it to Myspace or YouTube, it’s even easier to pretend you’re something you’re not. The Wall Street Journal reported on this a few weeks ago with a story by Ethan Smith and Peter Lattman entitled “Download This: YouTube Phenom Has a Big Secret.” The story was about Marié Digby, a supposedly unknown 24-year old singer songwriter who had been turned into an Internet phenomenon due to her homemade YouTube videos and songs she posted on her Myspace page. On the surface it sounds like a great example of Web 2.0 “anyone can do this” egalitarianism, but it’s not.

Digby has a record deal with Disney-owned major label Hollywood Records, and had been signed to them since well before she starting posting her “Shucks, I’m just a girl in her living room” videos to YouTube. As Smith and Lattman write in their article, “Though all involved say that Hollywood Records’ role in her online rise has been limited, label executives say they did nothing to discourage Ms. Digby from conveying the impression that she had stumbled into the spotlight.” Not only that, but “Hollywood Records helped devise her Internet strategy, consulted with her on the type of songs she chose to post, and distributed a high-quality studio recording of [Rihanna’s] ‘Umbrella’ to iTunes and radio stations.” So while her fans “seem pleased to believe that they discovered an underground sensation,” what they’ve really discovered — whether they realize it or not — is scam indie 2.0.

And so while bona fide Internet sensations (of the Jonathan Coulton variety, and not the Star Wars Kid variety) will continue to exist and thrive, thereby creating huge online constituencies and hopefully full-fledged careers (Ronald Jenkees anyone?), these will be increasingly harder to spot due to the fact that so many people out there are faking it. And the reasons they’re faking it are simple: 1. It’s effective. 2. It’s cheap.

The grand prize in the online world is viral word of mouth and virtual buzz, and this has become the holy grail to major corporations. And these corporations, as witnessed from the Marié Digby situation, will do anything they can to create Internet stars that will ultimately lead to record sales. All of which, in my mind, harkens back to the cover of the Nirvana CD that started all of this in the first place: the naked baby swimming after the dollar bill dangling on the hook. A lot has changed in the music industry since then, but the hook and the money are still disturbingly the same.

On the New York Times “City Room” blog yesterday, David Dunlap had a posting entitled “Coming to Newsstands Now: A New Look.” In the posting, Dunlap writes about how newsstands around the city (which he poetically describes as “a bit of ungainly but plainspoken street furniture”) are being redesigned by Grimshaw Architects, “one of the world’s leading design companies.” In an age of growing online consumption of not just news, but all kinds of entertainment (who needs The New York Post when you have Gawker?), having famous architects spend their time designing newsstands is like having leading record labels release eight-tracks. Because, in an increasingly digital world, an RSS reader is the new newsstand.

RSS readers allow people to easily find and cherry-pick the news that they want to read, thereby constructing their own publication. In fact, I find it interesting/silly that The Washington Post will put, at the top of the stories that appear on their website, where in the paper the story originally appeared (as if it makes any difference to me that something that was on the home page appeared on page B01 or C01 of the print edition). I wouldn’t care if it was on the very last page of the very last section of the paper; if it’s content I’m interested in, it’s going to be the first thing I read.

I was thinking this about when I read Joe Strupp’s article on the Editor & Publisher website entitled “’User’ Sites Choose Different News Than Mainstream Outlets.” In the article Strupp talks about how, according to a new survey, “New York Mainstream media outlets may not be offering up the stories online users most want to read.” Instead, “user-generated news sites like Yahoo give top billing to different stories than mainstream organizations.”

The story lists a number of surprising conclusions, among them that “online users gravitated toward different topics than those from traditional news outlets.” All of which goes to show that, when the New York Times claims that its paper contains “All the news that’s fit to print,” what it’s really saying is “All the news we feel like printing.” But Web 2.0 technology, and websites like Digg and Reddit, allow the users themselves to vote, endorse and share the stories that they’re interested in. The same way that on-demand television shattered prime time, the term “front page news” is now in for a bashing.

In Dunlap’s posting, he acknowledges this to a degree, asking in the end, “Perhaps more to the point, will [New Yorkers in three years] be going to newsstands at all?” My answer is, yes, of course, New Yorkers will continue going to newsstands, but the numbers will be way down from what they used to be. Or rather, they’ll be going to the newsstands for just gum and candy (and what architect in the world would like to spend their time designing a work of art for that?)

When I first attempted to write novels almost twenty years ago, I did so in a vacuum. Neither parents, roommates or girlfriends knew what I was writing. All they knew, as I locked myself behind closed doors, was that I was furiously typing away on my Mac Classic. I worked in secrecy, never showing my work to anyone. When I felt my stories were ready to be seen by eyes other than my own, and after scrapping several attempts, I started a zine in 1993 named Our Noise. It was sold for $2 via mail order, and I placed ads for it in the back of tiny magazines that had some national exposure (Maximum Rock and Roll, etc.). I also sent a dozen or so copies to other zines to get mine reviewed. The big review I was waiting for was from Factsheet 5, which back then was the bible of zines, as well as sort of a lo-fi Google (in terms of indexing and exposing zines). According to the NecroKonicon site, “Even though each issue of [Factsheet 5] was very out of date by the time you got it … getting your zine reviewed and listed was a mark of honor. It also meant you’d get a ton of mail from people all over the place trying to order your zine, send you their crappy poetry, or sell you a book on high colonics or how to legally evade taxes.”

My zine finally got reviewed in Factsheet 5, and for the next couple of months I had a great time trading zines and mail with people all over the world. Of course, this took weeks and weeks to happen, forcing me to make daily visits to my post office box (not to mention numerous trips to Kinkos to Xerox new copies, and to the post office to buy mailing supplies). And while the zine heyday of the early ‘90s was fun, all of this activity has since been replaced by websites in terms cataloging all of the new content that’s out there, in addition to redefining the way that people create content in the first place. So while it may be incredibly banal to say that blogs are the new zines, that doesn’t make it any less true. And in terms of fiction, an emerging set of online tools has led to new ways for young writers to create their works and shape their incubatory talent. Websites such as Glypho, Ficlets and Portrayl use the interconnectedness of the Internet, as well as the interactive tools of Web 2.0, to create global communities where new authors can create, collaborate and comment on stories. So while the rise of the Internet is leading to the death of books, it’s also giving birth to a new generation of writers.

Recently I saw two great articles about the Bob Stein and his Institute for the Future of the Book. One of the articles was written by Buzz Poole, and appeared on the blog The Millions. Entitled “Ride the Shuffle: The Institute for the Future of the Book,” the article takes a long look at the work of the Institute, as well as summarizing its general philosophy and attitude towards book.

Initially, however, here’s how Poole describes the organization: “The Institute for the Future of the Book is on the bleeding edge of [the book’s] evolution. Headquartered in Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, the Institute is redefining the act of reading, with the ultimate goal of democratizing how information is created, conveyed, maintained and understood. The Institute is not the first on the block to try to make the best of technology for such a purpose, but it is making its ideas reality.”

Poole then gets into a few of the Institute’s specific projects, such as Sophie and GAM3R 7H3ORY (which, in fact, is not the sequel to THX 1138). Poole’s article is a great place for people to start if they’re interested in what Bob Stein and the others are up to. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting most of the guys at the Institute, and can say that they’re all really smart and are doing great work. I’m glad to see them get this kind of coverage.

In addition to this, I was pleased to see that Bob had been featured in last week’s New York Magazine as part of their “Look Book” feature, wherein they find interesting and well-dressed people, and write about what they’re wearing. It’s a little surreal to see fashion and electronic reading written about on the same page, but I think it just goes to show that you can be digital, but also be stylish.

On Sunday I’m flying to California to attend the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference, which is taking place in San Jose from Monday to Wednesday. This is a new conference, which has been established in order to “provide critically important analysis, hands-on workshops, and thought-provoking sessions for publishers looking to recognize and help shape the future of publishing.”

There are a number of great speakers, including Tim O’Reilly himself, as well as Wired editor and Long Tail author Chris Anderson. I’ll be chairing a panel on Wednesday entitled “Back to the Future: Major Publishers Revisit Digital Publishing. Joining me will be Matt Shatz from Random House, Claire Israel from Simon & Schuster, and Theresa Horner from Harper Collins. Here’s a description of our session:

“Six years ago every major New York publisher became involved with eBooks on some level, only to see them fizzle in a cloud of overheated expectations and foolhardy predictions. But now, more than half a decade later (after the rise of the iPod has shown that consumers are indeed interested in digital delivery and consumption of entertainment), publishers are getting back into digital publishing in a big way. Granted, the industry is still dealing with some of the same issues that felled eBooks last time around, such as price, DRM, and format/reader confusion, but we’ve also learned the harsh lessons of 1999-2000, which means that the publishers who apply those lessons to 2007 (and beyond) are the ones who are going to successfully segue into a profitable digital future.”

Should be a great session, so if you’re attending the conference, stop by a say hi.

O’Reilly Tools of Change website

As a child of the seventies who grew up alongside the original Star Wars trilogy (I was seven when the first one came out, and just getting into girls when the last one finally appeared six years later), George Lucas’s space epic has always held a dear place in my heart, second only perhaps to Atari. And Star Wars, while not only immensely popular in terms of revenue, was immensely inspirational as well, with devoted fans over the years dressing up as their favorite characters for conventions or Halloween, or else drawing scenes from the movie in hours of wasted art classes. But now, in this new digital age, fans not only pay homage to the Star Wars universe (i.e. Chad Vader), but they can actually interact with it (for instance, the version of The Phantom Menace in which a fan erased Jar Jar Binks). However, these have always been illegal enterprises which, more often than not, have led to either lawsuits or pressure from Lucas to remove them from circulation. But now, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, “Lucasfilm plans to make clips of Star Wars available to fans on the Internet to mash up — meaning to remix however they want — at will.”

The 250 clips will be taken from all six Star Wars movies, and will be paired with an editing program that will allow fans the ability to “cut, add to and retool the clips. Then they can post their creations to blogs or social-networking sites like MySpace. More clips will come out from time to time over coming months.”

This is totally the right thing to do, and I’m pleased to see that Lucas realizes that the creativity of his fans are an asset and not a liability; for years all he wanted was their wallets, but now he wants their minds as well. And at a time when so many big companies and directors are taking an “us versus them” mentality when it comes to things like Youtube and mash-ups, it’s nice to see that someone of Lucas’s stature (and former views) is changing his mind. As the Journal puts it: “While Lucasfilm could fight what amounts to the theft of its property, it has now decided to take the opposite tack. In doing so, it is tackling an issue that faces all media companies today: how to keep some semblance of control over intellectual property in the digital age.”

Wall Street Journal: Make-It-Yourself ‘Star Wars’

Clive Thompson, writing in The New York Times over the weekend, had a great article entitled “Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog.” The article talked about a new breed of music performers who have built huge fan bases (as well as modestly successful careers) by releasing their work on the Internet, in addition to keeping up with fans through blogs and encouraging them to become part of the experience by interacting with the music this new breed of musician creates. Thompson labels this new kind of entertainer “Artist 2.0.” Gone is the recluse, the moody dilettante who has no interaction with his or her fans; in a digital world musicians, and to a lesser degree filmmakers and writers, rely on their fans to not only buy their work, but also to offer advice, cover their songs, make their videos, and help them even book their tours and be a part of their live shows.

“In the past — way back in the mid-’90s, say — artists had only occasional contact with their fans,” writes Thompson. “If a musician was feeling friendly, he might greet a few audience members at the bar after a show. Then the Internet swept in. Now fans think nothing of sending an e-mail message to their favorite singer — and they actually expect a personal reply.”

In the seventies, as a young kid living in the California suburbs, I was a huge fan of the rock band Kiss. Kiss was one of the first bands to actively cultivate a rabid following of fans who flocked to their shows and bought their records. Labeled the “Kiss Army,” these legions of fans would apply make-up to their face before the shows, and knew all the words to Kiss songs by heart. And every Kiss record came with an insert which sold paraphernalia to the Kiss Army acolytes: t-shirts, headbands, patches, buttons, jackets, etc. The army had a uniform, but that was about it. The Kiss Army was all about consumerism and buying products; being, well, a member in an army and just another soldier blending into the crowd. (I myself was a proud member of Kiss Army, and despite this I never got closer to Kiss than an album cover.) Whereas today, the Internet is actually allowing interaction with musicians; fans aren’t just part of the act, they’re crucial to the act being there in the first place.

“This is not merely an illusion of intimacy,” writes Thompson. “Performing artists these days, particularly new or struggling musicians, are increasingly eager, even desperate, to master the new social rules of Internet fame. They know many young fans aren’t hearing about bands from MTV or magazines anymore; fame can come instead through viral word-of-mouth, when a friend forwards a Web-site address, swaps an MP3, e-mails a link to a fan blog or posts a cellphone concert video on YouTube.”

All of this goes a long way toward answering the recent question that has come up increasingly in the debate over the loss of book reviews: where will readers hear about new books if they can’t read a review? Well, they’ll hear about them the way a whole new generation is hearing about music: online. And not only that, but this new era will allow for more interaction between readers and authors. Because of this, the Internet will foster more literacy, not less. And while print may indeed be dead — with laptops and a wireless connection, who needs books? — writers and readers will be very much alive.

The New York Times: Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog

Last week, Art Winslow had an essay on the Huffington Post site’s Eat the Press section; entitled “The New Book Burning,” the essay revolved around the recent reduction of book review sections in a handful of major American newspapers. Writes Winslow: “In the new book burning we don’t burn books, we burn discussion of them instead. I am referring to the ongoing collapse of book review sections at American newspapers, which has accelerated in recent months, an intellectual brownout in progress that is beginning to look like a rolling blackout instead.” First of all, I think Winslow is being more than slightly hysterical when he tries to portray the disappearance of book review sections as being “the new book burning.” That’s not only a ridiculous suggestion, but a dangerous one. Burning books is about the totalitarian eradication of what the ideas in books represent, whereas book review sections being slimmed down or phased out is about simple economics and the fact that, in our Internet age, things are rapidly changing and book reviews are no longer needed. But Winslow prefers to take a darker view, rhetorically asking, “How did we arrive at what seems to be a cultural sinkhole?” Instead of answering that, I’d like to ask Winslow a question: “Where have you been for the past ten years?”

But what I find most interesting about Winslow’s essay is that he’s a “former literary editor and executive editor of The Nation magazine and a regular contributor to Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Bookforum and other publications.” So it seems that Winslow, and many critics and writers like him, are really just clamoring to keep their jobs. In the end, they don’t want things to change because they don’t want to give up the power they currently have. In the past, Winslow and the other book reviewers out there acted as the arbiters of literary taste: when they would write a good review of a book, their review had the power to propel that book into the national spotlight (and vice versa; a bad review could ruin a book, and sometimes an entire career). So while the importance of movie critics has lessened over the years (gore-fests like Hostel and Saw, which are routinely ravaged by reviewers, go on to make millions at the box office despite what any critic says), in the book world, reviewers have — until fairly recently — retained their clout. (As New Order put it in a song, “We’re not like all those stupid people/who can’t decide what book to read/unless a paper sows the seed”). But with the Internet, blogs, the rise of “citizen journalism” and user-generated content, book reviewers are seeing their little corner of the world erode and fall into the sea, and they don’t like it.

And even though Winslow and others plaster their arguments with the righteousness of fighting for culture, what they really can’t stand is that things are changing and they’re being left behind. Yes, book reviewing is an art, but that art is going away. I hate to say it, but it happens. For example, the skills that it took to produce a rotogravure or daguerreotype was also a art, but things changed, the culture shifted; new machines were invented and new ideas were minted, and those skills went away. So while Winslow and others can lament the loss of book review sections in newspapers around the country, social networking sites like Library Thing, Shelfari and Gather are proving that literary discussion, sharing and discovery is still taking place. And when Winslow himself writes that the loss of book review sections will “[choke] off such discussion of books,” he couldn’t be more wrong. There is now, because of the Web, probably more discussion of books than ever before. But what really infuriates Winslow, and many of the other critics, is that all of this discussion is happening without them. So it’s not that books are being burned; instead, what’s happening is the self-importance of book reviewers is going up in smoke.

Eat the Press: The New Book Burning

The fine folks at The Future of the Book have just launched a new interactive online version of McKenzie Wark’s book Gamer Theory, which is published in a physical format by Harvard University Press. While I thought the first online iterations of this book were splendid, this 2.0 release continues to add amazing features. For instance, one of the coolest things about the new site is the ability to graphically visualize the text; not since Anthony Burgess suggested putting Finnegans Wake on a big wheel that constantly spun around have I seen such a wonderful graphical representation of words and ideas. Plus, it’s just exquisite to look at; Peter Saville would be proud. Check out the site, and the book, if you haven’t already…

GAMER THEORY / McKenzie Wark / Institute for the Future of the Book