Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The Telegraph in the UK is reporting on a new plan by Brooklyn writer Tao Lin to sell shares of his upcoming book. He’s doing this — charging $2000 per share to potential investors — in order to raise enough cash so that he can support himself while he completes his second novel. Lin, the author of a previous novel entitled Eeeee Eee Eeee (forget funds to finish his second book; I think he needs to take up a collection in order to get a good editor), thinks doing this will somehow “motivate” him. From the Telegraph story:

Tao admits that he hopes publicity generated by his innovative money-raising strategy will itself boost sales of the book, but he also says that being publicly owned — at least in a professional sense — would boost his motivation.

Um, I don’t think being “publicly owned” is good for anything, let alone motivation (true, a whip may make you move, but probably not in the direction you want to go).

In the end, as the Telegraph asks in its headline, is this “shameless self-promotion or the future of the publishing industry?,” I’d have to say it’s probably more the former and not quite the latter. But still, it’s interesting that the Web is making it all possible.

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.

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.

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?

There’s a Simpsons episode from years ago where Mr. Burns gives a tour of his mansion to Homer, and at one point he opens a door to reveal a room filled with monkeys sitting typing away madly at typewriters. Burns explains this as a real version of the old theory that if you put enough monkeys at enough typewriters, and give them enough time, eventually their random typing and flailing away will produce Hamlet. At any rate, Burns grabs a sheet of paper from one of the typewriters and reads aloud: “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.” So close; but not literature.

I thought of this as I read a story from The New York Times on Monday by Noam Cohen entitled “He Wrote 200,000 Books.” The story is about Philip Parker, a science professor who has “written” more than 200,000 books (that’s almost as many as Isaac Asimov). But Parker doesn’t really write the books; instead he has invented a series of “computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.”

Is this what we’re really coming to? Books written by computers? True, these aren’t novels per se; no one would compare a study of bathmats in India with A Passage to India. And yet, as sad as this is, it’s part of an ongoing trend. Put bluntly, computers have been fooling us for a long time. Many of the “acoustic” sounds you hear in music these days are actually computer samples. Not to mention that pretty much every special effect you see in a movie nowadays has been computer generated.

Still, just because the rats in Ratatouille are computer generated, the idea and the story and the dialogue weren’t computer generated. Computers are increasingly helping us be more creative but, in the end, that’s all they’re doing: helping. In bands like Daft Punk (not to mention Kraftwerk), humans are only pretending to be computers in order to make art. I find it hard to believe that the opposite will one day come true: computers pretending to be humans.

The website of The Los Angeles Times recently launched a collaborative writing project entitled Birds of Paradise. This is going to be a sort of “wiki novel,” with professional writer Steve Lopez writing the first chapter but — as the Times’ website states — “It will now be up to readers to write the next chapter and the next and so on.” This is a pretty interesting idea, and I’ll be curious to read the results. Of course, Penguin UK already dabbled with this a few years ago with their own wiki-novel A Million Penguins. And while the results in that case may not have been stellar in terms of literary value, the experience showed how just how ready and willing readers are to be writers. In an age of Youtube and Wikipedia, more and more people aren’t content to just sit and consume content; they also want to play a part in creating it.

What I also find interesting about Birds of Paradise is that, a 150 years ago, Dickens had his classic works serialized in newspapers (as did many other writers at the time). And so it’s now fascinating to see, on the website of a newspaper, novelistic serialization again appearing. Of course, the difference this time is that the readers of the newspapers are now writing the book, rather than a professional writer. The Internet, the rise of user-generated content, and the trend of “crowdsourcing” has shown that we’re all professionals now. Or rather, the idea of “amateur” and “professional” is fast flying out the window.

Matt Richtel in The New York Times over the weekend had an interesting article entitled “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.” The article was about how bloggers, Internet writers and Web commentators feel increasingly under pressure to produce numerous large volumes of material for their online audiences, which then leads to fatigue, general burn-out, injury and sometimes even death.

In terms of cautionary tales, the article cites two recent cases of blogging being bad for your helath; one blogger died, while another had a heart attack. (Of course, the part that blogging played in each incident could be debated.) That being said, many everyday bloggers and Internet writers routinely complain that they feel they’re constantly running uphill, fighting a fight they know they’ll never win. As Richtel writes:

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

And this is indeed a true and real phenomenon. Our always-on wired world doesn’t leave room for contemplation, much less for catching your breath, Norman Mailer once identified writing as “feeding the goat,” and Charles Bukowski once lamented that writing poems that were published soon after felt like throw-away journalism. But in each of those cases, in bygone eras, there were at least moments of rest and reflection; goats get tired, and even printing presses — along with their news cycles — are some times dormant. But in a flattened world filled with Twitter and “live blogging,” the Web never sleeps.

And it’s not just bloggers who are feeling overwhelmed. As Richtel writes:

Even at established companies, the Internet has changed the nature of work, allowing people to set up virtual offices and work from anywhere at any time. That flexibility has a downside, in that workers are always a click away from the burdens of the office. For obsessive information workers, that can mean never leaving the house.

The nightmare that Orwell predicted in terms of Big Brother always watching us has finally come true, except it’s not the government that’s watching us. Instead, we’re all watching each other. Because the bloggers may be writing about it, but the rest of us (including you) are online reading it.

Last week the London Times reported on recent Nobel Prize winner for fiction Doris Lessing’s first post-award appearance, which took place recently in Britain. In Lessing’s Nobel acceptance speech she decried our current digital world, claiming that it has given us a “fragmented” culture. She then went on to speak about how writers in the past had discovered books and literature, and that kids today know nothing other than their computers. Well, Lessing used her most recent speech to talk about the plight of young authors in a media-saturated age, saying she “feels sorry” for modern writers who have to heavily promote their work in various media:

Now what happens is that if you are a girl who’s good-looking and has written even a passable book you can be earning enormous sums of money very quickly and are then sent on a promotional tour.

I’ve met girls who’ve said that this was the worst thing that could have happened to them. There are people who can’t write a second book because they are always on the telephone or having to do some TV thing.

But it’s not just what writers have to do (i.e. promotion), but it’s also what writers have become:

The writer has become more and more a personality. Literary festivals (for example) are enormously enjoyable but when you go into one it’s got nothing to do with your writing.

Of course, this attitude is nothing new; in the seventies Graham Greene didn’t approve of Anthony Burgess turning to TV discuss his work, and Charles Bukowski later (and rather poetically) said that going on a talk show was “like eating your own vomit.” But of course, in today’s online world, there’s more than just talk shows. In fact, many promotional outlets are now controlled by the authors themselves, and so rather than work within (or even have to rely on) the confines of the mainstream media, writers can now be in control of their own promotion.

Lessing, however doesn’t see it this way. Instead of viewing the glass as half full she doesn’t like the drink itself, succinctly summing up the current literary landscape by stating that “What’s happening is very bad for some types of new writers.” Which is of course true. However, the reverse is also true; what’s happening is very good for some types of new writers (and very bad for some types of old ones). But then again, that’s what makes it a landscape, and not a still life.

Photo above by Matthew Gold.

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.