Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

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.

There’s a Seinfeld episode where Kramer goes to his local firehouse and offers the station chief a bunch of neighborhood shortcuts that will enable the firefighters to get to fires faster. However, the fire chief brushes Kramer off by telling him that “just about every week some brash young hothead like yourself saunters in here talking about faster routes and snazzier colors for the trucks. Well, fact is we feel things are fine the way they are.“

We’re of course we’re supposed to be rooting for Kramer. After all, what institution couldn’t use a little help and/or advice? And the shocked look that Kramer gives the fire chief is something we’ve all probably felt at least once when we had a great idea that we felt wasn’t appreciated. But later in the episode, when Kramer “helps” drive the fire engine on the way to a fire after he mistakenly knocks out a fire fighter, he ends up causing the fire engine to crash. Meanwhile, the building they were all on the way to save ends up burning down (all of which just goes to show that good directions don’t count as much as not crashing).

I thought of all of this when I saw a short article by Henry Blodget from last week that appeared on the website Silicon Alley Insider. Entitled, “How to Save the Book Publishing Industry,” Blodget’s glib advice is short and sweet. “How can publishers fix their business?” he asks. “Not by killing more trees. By radically retooling the business model.”

And what’s Blodget’s radical (if not just plain rad) advice? Charging less for eBooks. A lot less:

$4.99 for a first run bestseller, downloadable to your Kindle, PC, or iPod — or simply readable on the Internet. The retailer keeps $1 or so, the author gets $1 or so, and the publisher takes home about $3. Some of that goes to marketing and some to overhead. And then you’re left with the typical publisher profit of less than $1 (no returns, manufacturing, or distribution costs).

As many others have already stated in their reaction to the piece, this is nothing we generally haven’t heard repeatedly since, oh, the late ‘90s. In addition, the always-smart Tim O’Reilly posted two comments on the Silicon Alley Insider website that make great sense, and hopefully will school Blodget a bit, including: “Overall, your figures seem completely imaginary. Seems to me that you picked numbers out of a hat to fit your argument, rather than figuring out real numbers and real implications.”

But this all just goes to show what publishers are up against. I mean, do people really think — in the face of enormously changing consumer habits and online trends — that it’s that simple? The fact is, many people do indeed think it’s as easy as just slashing prices. To go back to the Seinfeld episode mentioned earlier, Blodget’s idea is just about as helpful as Kramer’s usually were. That’s not at all to say that “we feel things are fine the way they are.” Not by a long shot. But we need to have ideas that do something other than just leave us and our authors with drastically reduced revenue.

Paul McCartney was one thing, but in a move that surely must be one of the signs of our impending apocalypse, longtime New York noisemakers Sonic Youth have a new celebrity-curated CD compilation that’s being made available only at Starbucks locations (Pitchfork has the details). It goes on sale next week. And while I always suspected that the “youth” part of the band’s moniker would one day be just ironic, I don’t think I would have ever suspected that SY would make a move like this. This goes to show just how much things have changed. Next thing you know, Dunkin’ Donuts will be selling a Big Black compilation entitled Songs About Dunkin’.

Via Galleycat, last week two new book blogs were launched by such august print icons as The New Yorker and Harpers. The New Yorker blog is named “The Book Bench,” while the Harpers blog is entitled “Sentences.” It’s nice to see these respected print brands enter the blogosphere, and I think it just goes to show how even the most tried-and-true company needs to embrace our increasingly digital age.

On Monday, Information Age columnist L. Gordon Crovitz had an essay in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Digital Future of Books.” The essay is ostensibly about the Kindle, but he also touches upon the general idea and nature of digital books. For instance, Crovitz writes that “perhaps a new digital device like the Kindle can help us regain the attention spans earlier devices helped us lose. If so, this could become a great era for books, or more accurately for the future of words that for centuries could be delivered only in book form.”

He also quotes a bit from my book, Print is Dead:

Much is at stake. As Mr. Gomez concluded, “what’s really important is the culture of ideas and innovation” books represent. But “to expect future generations to be satisfied with printed books is like expecting the BlackBerry users of today to start communicating by writing letters, stuffing envelopes and licking stamps.”

It’s a nice article, and I especially like its last line: “With innovations like the Kindle, digital media can help return to us our attention spans and extend what makes books great: words and their meaning.”

“They substitute the telegram with the fax machine.
What did you substitute me with?”

–”Chocolates”
The Aluminum Group

The Aluminum Group are one of my favorite bands. Every since their landmark 1999 record Pedals, I’ve been hooked on their blend of literary references, crooning vocals, and glitchy production techniques (if Burt Bacharach joined Tortoise, it’d sound like The Aluminum Group). The song “Wheat and Tare” from their last record, 2003’s Morehappyness, might be one of my top-ten favorite songs of all time; every time I hear it I kind of wilt. I have all of their records, and since their two previous releases were installments of a trilogy entitled “Happyness“ (with the first record named Happyness and the second being Morehappyness), I was of course looking forward to yet another record from them. In fact, each of the Happyness records have similar artwork and packaging, so while I wanted of course to hear the new songs, I also wanted to get the new record so I could add it to the shelf alongside its musical mates.

So when I read a positive review of the new Aluminum Group record on Pitchfork a month or so ago, I was excited and couldn’t wait to get my hands on the new record. The first thing I did was go to Amazon and search for the group. I was pleased to see the new record (entitled Little Happyness) listed alongside all of the other records I own, including the first two Happyness records. However, the new record was listed only as a bunch of MP3 downloads, not as an actual record. Not satisfied, I went to the record label’s website, Minty Fresh.

On the Flash-filled site I found a purchase page for the record (can’t include a link to it since the whole site’s in Flash, which is annoying), but — again — this was just for the MP3’s, and not the CD. Growing a bit frustrated, I went to the band’s website, which had an announcement for the new record as a splash landing page; from this page you could read the band’s bio, contact them, and listen to the new record. But I still could not find a link to buy the CD (nor any language saying “this is a download only release”). Finally, feeling a bit exasperated, I e-mailed someone at the label who promptly wrote me back saying that, at this time, there’s no plan for a physical release of Little Happyness.

This was a bit of a let down for me. Because, while what’s of course most important is the music, it does seems strange not to be able to have a physical product. I mean, the group itself is named after a line of furniture, and in their songs they name-check all kinds of artists and works of art (ranging from Tom of Finland to Erte). So while I’d just put CD instantly into my iTunes, I still want to own the actual product.

Even Radiohead augmented it’s digital release of their last record with actual CDs for people who wanted the physical items for their collections. So while I’m all for the instantaneous gratification that downloading an entire record with the click of a mouse offers, for the bands that I really like, and whose work I’ve been collecting for years, I’d still like to have — in addition to the MP3s — a physical copy of the record. For books, this will probably be the same. Books that people consume like candy — thrillers and murder mysteries; the kinds the airport bookstores are chock full of — will be similar; the content will be delivered digitally, and that’s where it’ll end. But for certain die hard fans, record companies and publishers alike need to realize that substituting CDs with MP3s may not always suffice. Yes, video killed the radio star, but digital delivery won’t completely replace physical goods.

This weekend the live-action version of the ‘60s animated series Speed Racer is hitting theaters. Or rather, given the overwhelmingly negative reviews the film has so far received, it seems more like it’s crashing into theaters. One of the reviews that caught my eye was Richard Corliss’s in Time Magazine. Entitled, “The Future of Movies,” Corliss seems to think that the multitude of computer-generated special effects in the film are a sign of things to come (for a long, long time): “Speed Racer announces the arrival of the virtual movie. If you watch the film overwhelmed by the assault of seductive visual information and wonder what you’re seeing, here’s the happy answer: the future of movies.”

I don’t agree with this, mainly because it doesn’t have to be as either/or as Corliss describes. Just because moviemakers now have computers to help them make films, it doesn’t mean that the ensuing movies need to be wholly computer created. (Even Tron, oh so many years ago, featured more of Jeff Bridge than it did the light cycles.) So instead of creating candy-colored worlds where human heads are the only real thing on the screen, while everything else is computer-generated, moviemakers will use computers to tell their stories, not be the stories.

For instance, I recently watched Charlie Wilson’s War on DVD, and during the movie Tom Hanks visits a refugee camp in Afghanistan where he’s horrified at the tens of thousands of people living in squalor. In the past, this scene would have been a David O Selznick moment: a wide-angle crane shot gradually revealing more and more bandaged extras; dozens becoming hundreds until you finally wonder where they could have even found so many people, not to mention get them all into costume and array them on the battlefield. But today, with modern technology, computers can help create just as effective a shot (without having to rely on hundreds of extras). In the refugee camp scene in Charlie Wilson’s War, as the camera pulls back, you see all the tents with all the people and even though you can slightly tell that the scene has been not only digitally altered but computer-created, it’s okay; the scene is using computers to do something easily (and cheaply) that would have been too expensive and painstaking to do for real. Besides, it’s just one shot in a movie filled with flesh-and-blood actors.

Yes, this is same technology the Wachowski brothers use in Speed Racer to create an entirely synthesized world, but the Charlie Wilson’s War example shows that special effects need not batter us upside the head. Instead, they can be used for accents and nuance, not as bread and butter. (Remember that in even the ultra-influential sci-fi noir film Blade Runner, the amazing special effects and set design were in aid of what was a pretty kick-ass story.) So when another review — this time in the San Francisco Chronicle — declares about Speed Racer that, “If this action extravaganza represents the future of movies, it’s going to be a sad, dead and awful future,” I think there’s plenty of time to make sure this doesn’t happen. The future’s a long way off, and hopefully by the time it arrives we’ll have learned to put story ahead of effects, and people above computers.

Last week I wrote about my experiences at the recent Video Games Live concert, and how the interactivity I saw in the video game footage, not to mention the reaction of the crowd at the mere mention of the names of some of these games, presaged — in my mind, anyway — the death of the novel. Well, after last week’s release of the ultra-successful game franchise Grand Theft Auto, I can’t help but continue to think that, for at least a certain generation, books are on the way out and these new, hyper-realistic and interactive games are in (and are here to stay). According to an article last week in The New York Times, “The [Grand Theft Auto] release is expected to be one of the biggest video game debuts ever, extending a franchise that has already sold 70 million copies since its arrival in 1997.”

But wait; there’s more:

But customers’ intense desire for video games extends beyond Grand Theft Auto. Despite pressure on consumers’ entertainment budgets, they keep spending more money on games. Over all, the industry is having a banner year. Software sales were up 63 percent in March compared with March 2007, according to NPD Group, which tracks sales. Equipment sales were up 46 percent over the same period.

“People say that if consumers are down to their last $50, the last three things they’ll buy are milk, eggs and video games,” said Colin Sebastian, a video game industry analyst with Lazard Capital Markets.

When’s the last time you heard people talk like that about books? Well, specifically, it was last July, when the final book in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series came out. But that was almost a year ago, and no more Potter books are set to appear. In fact, she’s finally off the bestseller list for the first time in a decade. And yet, whereas studies have shown that — despite the phenomenal interest in and success of the Potter books — literacy rates among children have continued to decline, the success of games like Grand Theft Auto are a gateway to the playing of yet more games (and probably the reading of even fewer books). Potter may not lead to Pynchon, but Auto certainly leads to Halo. You can argue about whether or not this is good for society, but you can’t deny that it’s a trend that shows no sign of reversing itself.

There’s a film from my youth called Over the Edge, which is a pretty good movie about teenage life and my generation that ranks somewhere between The Outsiders (a true classic of the genre) and Sixteen Candles (lightweight, but fun). The movie was shot in 1979 and is set in a planned community in the southwest, a desolate place where kids have nowhere to go and nothing to do, so mainly they just get stoned, have parties and get in trouble. Late in the film, at a town meeting held in a school auditorium where everyone has gathered to discuss the problem, a local businessmen talks about how the kids are ruining the reputation of the town. The parent of one of the film’s main characters begins to question this, to which the businessman says, “Your son and some of his friends are a part of this problem.” The father then fires back, “My son and his friends are a part of this goddamn town!”

I thought this the other day when I read a story in the New York Times about British teens and libraries. Entitled, “Shh! In British Library Reading Rooms, Flirting and Even Giggling,” the story, by Sarah Lyall, is about how many older Brits are upset that teens aren’t behaving themselves in the British Library. And while I’m envisioning the battle being something like the railway car scene at the beginning of A Hard Day’s Night, I think the people who are complaining about the behavior are missing a critical point: teens are actually in a library! In an age where a cell phone, Side Kick, iPhone, or laptop computer is a gateway to the world’s knowledge, and kids can access information from almost anywhere, I think it’s great that teens are still going to the library at all. In fact, the interaction that teens are having with each other in these libraries shows that, for all its marvels, there’s something that the Internet can’t do: provide face-to-face interaction. And while it’s no doubt mildly annoying to older generations, would the people complaining about the behavior of teens rather the kids were out knocking over liquor stores or holding up a Tescos at knifepoint?

True, the kids should behave themselves a bit more, but it hardly sounds like Lord of the Flies (I mean, a teen answering a cell phone, but then going outside to actually talk? That’s hardly the height of rudeness). Because if teens want to go to the library, and talk to each other, and discover words, books, authors and ideas, then the last thing that should be done is to chastise them. Also, we should resist trying to force them to act like previous generations; that was then, and this is now (another good movie about teens, speaking of). Instead, the library experience should adapt to this new generation. After all, Lady Antonia Fraser (a writer who is mentioned in the article as having to wait for a desk) is not the library patron of the future. The kids, like the ones in Over the Edge and the ones written about in the Times, are the future. And if we try to sideline them now, or make them conform to our ideas of what constitutes good behavior, all they’re going to do is rebel and recede even further from literary (not to mention polite) society. I mean, it’s their library, too. And if we can indeed get kids into a library in the first place, they shouldn’t be ssshhed. Instead, they should be shown where the books are in as loud a voice as possible.

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?