Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

I was saddened by the news last week that Tom Wolfe had left longtime publisher Farrar Straus and Giroux for Little Brown, seemingly because Little Brown offered him more money for this new novel, Back to Blood. Wolfe is a writer I have long liked and admired, and when I first saw him speak in New York a couple of years ago I was as excited as when I saw Woody Allen (another hero) in the flesh walking through Central Park. I also used to work with FSG when I worked for their parent company, Macmillan, and during my time there I witnessed first-hand the amazing job they did with Wolfe and the commitment they had in general to literature. FSG is a storied company, and as Wolfe acknowledged last week to the Observer, “Roger Straus published my first book when absolutely nobody else was interested. An unknown newspaper reporter wants to publish a collection of magazine pieces, and he took a chance.” So I’m sad to see that Wolfe has decided to chuck a relationship built over four decades, and adopt a “take the money and run” attitude instead.

Not only that, but Wolfe seems to have turned into the kind of person he once used to satirize (not that a person who wears spats and custom-made white suits was ever too far from satire in the first place). With this move it seems that Wolfe is in full-on Master of the Universe mode, demanding big bucks and saying to the world that it’s all about the cash. Because there’s almost no way Little Brown can make back that kind of money. So what they’re buying, basically, is not Wolfe’s book but Wolfe himself. They want him as both an icon and a symbol of status, much the same way that the greed-obsessed characters from Wolfe’s best book, Bonfire of the Vanities, treated the Concorde as a clubhouse and complained that they couldn’t live on million dollar salaries (and those were, mind you, 1987 dollars). At a time when publishing is facing new challenges, not only to its bottomline but to its very existence (in the sixties you might have seen kids with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test under their arms, but now they have iPods in their ears instead), for Wolfe to make this be about money is extremely disheartening.

It reminds me of the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life where Jimmy Stewart is trying to convince the townspeople of Bedford Falls not to panic and pull all their money out of his Bailey Building and Loan, saying that their savings are never kept on hand but are instead invested in the property of their neighbors. But one grumpy old guy doesn’t get it (named Tom, by the way). Rather than be concerned about the town or the company, all he wants is his cash. ”I got two hundred and forty-two dollars in here,” he insists, not willing to listen to reason, “and two hundred and forty-two dollars isn’t going to break anybody.” Realizing it doesn’t have much choice, the Bailey Building and Loan hands over money it knows it can’t afford. So the old guy grudgingly gets his money, the same way Wolfe will get his. And of course later, at the end of the movie when Stewart is declared “the richest man in town,” it’s not meant literally. Instead, he has things that money can’t buy: respect, admiration and strength of character. Those bells at the end of the film signify an angel getting its wings, but right now Wolfe seems to be concentrating on the sound of a cash register.

As 2007 comes to a close, and newspapers and magazines are filled with year-end reflections and best-ofs (for the record, my favorite film of 2007 was Control and my favorite CD was Boxer by The National), I’m also pausing to think about this past year. Mostly what I’m thinking about is my new book, Print is Dead. Because even though it came out just a month ago, I’ve actually been working on it for the entire year (both in terms of writing and editing it, as well as working on this blog and the book excerpt site). And all of this, and especially the opportunities that have come out of the online exposure I created for Print is Dead, is making me think of a different book and a different time.

Ten years ago my second novel came out. It was called Geniuses of Crack, and it was a sequel to my first novel, Our Noise (which came out in 1995, and which had been a modest success). Geniuses was published by Scribner Paperback Fiction, a division of Simon & Schuster. While I was honored to have the backing of Simon & Schuster — a large and well-respected publishing house — the truth is that if you’re a small author at a big publishing company, it’s hard to get any attention. In fact, a friend of mine was published at Knopf the same month that a John Irving book came out, and he was disappointed to find that his book received only a fraction of the promotional dollars spent on Irving.

At the time I thought I’d written a decent book in Geniuses, and of course I wanted it to do well. I was living in New York, and even though there was a lot I could have done locally (staging readings and signings), I’d lived in the city for less than a year at that point and didn’t really know my way around. Plus, I’m just generally kind of shy (as most writers are; people who aren’t shy and wish to express themselves become actors), so introducing myself to the manager of St. Mark’s Books really wasn’t my style. And so as publication day approached, I found myself feeling both very excited and very helpless. I mean, I wanted the book to do well, but I felt that all I could really do was cross my fingers and hope for the best.

The book finally came out, got a smattering of reviews, and a couple of magazines called for interviews. But that was about it. My publisher did their part and got the book into stores, and while it was certainly nice to see it on the shelf of my local bookstore, I had hoped a little more would happen.

A few weeks after the book came out, I went to the Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side, just a handful of blocks away from my studio apartment, and just stood there as I watched people walk back and forth in front of my book. It was nestled at the bottom of the New Paperbacks display (coop dollars at work), and as people stopped to peruse other books on the shelf, I tried to mentally will them to pick up mine. (It didn’t work.)

To this day I distinctly remember just standing there, completely helpless, wanting the book to get some sort of attention and yet not knowing how to go about getting it. And while the Internet existed in 1997, it was hardly the ubiquitous presence it is today. Back then, the Web was more about tech-savvy geeks and early adopters. Whereas, today, almost everyone has an e-mail address and surfs the web at least a few times a week (not to mention that more people than ever have their own website or blog).

Anyway, that was then; this is now. It’s now a different decade and, for me, a new book. And it’s just amazing to me how different a feeling it is to be published in 2007 versus 1997. Back then being an author felt very much like being an awkward teenager hoping to get a date: all an author could do was stay near the phone waiting for the publicist to call. But now, with the Internet, I feel completely empowered. I don’t need to wait for my publisher to do something on my behalf; instead, I just need to sit down at my laptop, do a bit of online research, and from there I can do any number of promotional things for my book.

For instance, this blog. I started this blog long before I even completed the book. And in the past sixteen months, since starting and working at this blog, I’ve slowly built an audience and generated traffic, using this site to get to know the players in this space and letting them get to know me (and for a person who doesn’t like to knock on doors, it’s been an incredibly easy thing to do). Yes, it’s taken a lot of my personal time, but it’s also led to countless opportunities: interviews, conferences, writing assignments, not to mention it has put me in direct contact with my readers. Plus, just some of the comments the blog itself has received have been immensely helpful in shaping my thinking about the topic (not to mention that things that I originally wrote for this blog, I later turned into material that made its way into the final draft of the book).

Back in 1997, none of this was possible. And the only promotional activities open to me then, that I could have drummed up myself, would have been local. But now, I’m always amazed to check my Google Analytics account and see that I have visitors to this blog from pretty much every corner of the globe. And even if they never buy my book, it’s still feedback and a connection; it’s an audience.

So while we can debate the future of the book, there can be no doubt that the Internet has changed the face of publishing forever, opening up promotional opportunities that before were closed to everyone except the biggest and most popular of authors.

As James Joyce said of his characters, “Here comes everybody.” That’s how I feel about the Internet. And as R.E.M. said about the end of the world, “I feel fine.” That’s how I feel being an author today.

PS have a happy holiday; normal blogging will return early in 2008.

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.

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.

The fifth and final installment of the Print is Dead podcast, as part of the book excerpt site, has just been delivered. The podcast features me reading the book’s afterword.

Here’s a snippet of the chapter:

Given everything we know, and everything we’ve been able to witness during the decades that have brought us the Internet revolution – a dozen tumultuous years that nobody could have predicted – all of these new inventions and ways of living will undoubtedly impact reading and publishing. Indeed, they already have; witness the massive layoffs in newspapers and magazines that can be directly attributed to the Web, not to mention the overall decline in reading and book sales. It would be foolhardy, if not terribly dangerous, not to realize this and see the connection. It’s simply not possible that the Internet is going to have an effect on every area of our lives except reading books. It has already had profound effects on the way people buy, write, produce and talk about books. So why not the books themselves?

You can read the complete chapter here.

Subsribe to the podcast via iTunes, or use the XML feed.

Also, you can listen to the excerpt directly below:

Or else, download the MP3 here.

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.

The fourth installment of the Print is Dead podcast, as part of the book excerpt site, has just been delivered. The podcast features me reading the chapter “Writers in a Digital Future” from the third section of the book, “Saying Goodbye to Book.”

Here’s a snippet of the chapter:

The Internet, and the interconnectedness of its audience, is already proving to be a great place for growing and sustaining an audience online. Some authors today have huge and ravenous Internet constituencies, and in terms of their popularity the lines are so blurred between their websites and their books that it’s no longer clear which exists to support the other. And all of this comes at a time when the book business and authors are faced with more competition than ever in terms of consumer attention and competing fields of entertainment.

You can read the complete chapter here.

Subsribe to the podcast via iTunes, or use the XML feed.

Also, you can listen to the excerpt directly below:

Or else, download the MP3 here.

Last week, I was very flattered to be asked by Richard Charkin, the head of Macmillan in the UK, to write up some thoughts for his Charkinblog on what it’s been like to be a person who works in the publishing industry who has just gone through the process of writing and publishing a book. Charkin is a very smart and nice guy, so I was only too happy to oblige. After spending a couple of hours thinking about this, I sent him my thoughts in a short essay entitled “Some Experience Necessary: Looking at publishing from both sides.” Here’s a portion of the essay:

One of publishing’s dirty little secrets is that, increasingly, it’s not about the books. Or maybe, it’s too much about the books (meaning books as objects, or even books as a number on a balance sheet). In the publishing process we find ourselves sometimes getting removed from the ideas and stories found in our books; the words that provide the power to deliver amazing and transformative experiences to readers (and are therefore the kinds of books we read growing up that made us want to get into this business in the first place).

One of the reasons this happens is because people who work in publishing, for the most part, have not had the experience of writing and publishing a book.

The rest of the essay has been posted on Richard’s blog, which you can view here.

Matthew Kirschenbaum, writing in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, had an interesting essay entitled “Hamlet.doc? Literature in a Digital Age.” The essay touches upon the fact that, even though most literature is consumed via physical products — i.e. printed books — most words are created digitally, with writers composing using computers and word processing programs. Kirschenbaum uses this idea to imagine what we could tell if perhaps Shakespeare had written his greatest play using a laptop instead of a quill: “We might be able to know, for example, the precise date on which he began composing Hamlet…indeed the precise minute and hour, time-stamped to the second. We would be able to know how long he had spent working on it, or at least how long the file containing the play had remained open on his desktop. We would very likely have access to multiple versions and states of the file, and if Shakespeare had ‘track changes’ turned on while he wrote, we would be able to follow the composition of a soliloquy keystroke by keystroke, each revision also date- and time-stamped to the second. We might discover the play had originally been called GreatDane.doc instead of Hamlet.doc.”

While this is of course just playful speculation (along these lines, I’d be more interested in what Shakespeare’s plays would have been like if the characters all had cell phones), it does look at a different aspect of the “print is dead” argument, namely that books of course start first with authors, and for most writers the “analog versus digital” debate has long been settled (with digital being the clear winner). As Kirschenbaum writes, “Today nearly all literature is ‘born digital’ in the sense that at some point in its composition, probably very early, the text is entered with a word processor, saved on a hard drive, and takes its place as part of a computer operating system. Often the text is also sent by e-mail to an editor, along with ancillary correspondence. Editors edit electronically, inserting suggestions and revisions and e-mailing the file back to the author to approve.” By the time a manuscript finally ends up in a printed format, the book is really an afterthought of the composition process (much the same way that Shakespeare’s First Folio was just a catalog of his stage work, a mere souvenir from the Globe).

Kirschenbaum also talks about the benefits that could accompany a world in which all writers compose digitally: “What if we could use machine-learning algorithms to sift through vast textual archives and draw our attention to a portion of a manuscript manifesting an especially rich and unusual pattern of activity, the multiple layers of revision captured in different versions of the file creating a three-dimensional portrait of the writing process? What if these revisions could in turn be correlated with the content of a Web site that someone in the author’s MySpace network had blogged?”

This is a great point, and it reminds me of the film The Mystery of Picasso, which featured Picasso painting on a sheet of glass that was filmed from the audience’s perspective (so that the screen looked like an Etch-a-Sketch with Picasso at the dials). As I watched the film, witnessing Picasso’s fevered creation, I remember being dumbstruck every time one of the painter’s forceful slashes of his paintbrush obliterated an earlier streak of paint, thereby changing — and in some cases, in my mind, ruining — the painting. I kept wanting to be able to get back to those earlier paintings that had existed during the process of creation, somehow hitting “undo” on Picasso’s canvas so that earlier versions of his painting would bubble to surface. Well, in some ways, digital collections of future writers’ works may allow us to do something similar. As Kirschenbaum sums up, “We may no longer have the equivalent of Shakespeare’s hard drive, but we do know that we wish we did, and it is therefore not too late — or too early — to begin taking steps to make sure we save the born-digital records of the literature of today.”