Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

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.

Via Maud Newton, a few weeks ago I came across upon the website for Brooklyn’s Reanimation Library, which is a sort of a refuge for discarded books, which sounds like a good idea until you start poking around their website. Sounding more like a page from the Logan’s Run screenplay than the French flaps of a Nicholson Baker book, and with graphics that remind me of the menus for the Beastie Boys Criterion Edition DVD (if not for the Church of the SubGenius), the Reanimation Library is hardly a publishing utopia. Instead it’s, well, just another library. However, this is how the Reanimators see it:

The Reanimation Library seeks to assemble an inspiring collection of resources that will facilitate the production of new creative work and promote reflection and research into the historical, legal, and methodological questions surrounding the adaptive reuse of found materials. It strives to provide the necessary space and tools to allow these activities to flourish, and to foster a climate of spirited collaboration.

To me this begs the question, Who’s choosing which books to “reanimate”? And how is that decision more valid or important than the one to deanimate the book in the first place? After all, the Reanimation Library’s not taking just any discarded book. Even though the website states that the library takes donations, not every book will be accepted (just how dead does a book have to be before it’s given new life? And how ironic is that?). And, of course, what happens to the books that the Library of Lost Books simply doesn’t want? Well, “those that are not added to the collection will be sold or donated.” Which means, I guess, that the sad books that even the Reanimation Library doesn’t want to preserve get sent to the land of misfit books.

Not mentioned on the site is the fact that libraries are increasingly bypassed in today’s Googlepedia age. When I was a kid I had to bum rides to the library all the way across town in order to do research for school papers or to get stuff to read. But today’s kids are no doubt doing that same research from their laptop computers (if not their cell phones) while at home or in a coffee shop or at school or wherever. So why do we need to replace one kind of library with another? I would argue that the age when libraries played God is over; now they’re just trying to keep pace. The Reanimation Library website also quotes Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan’s first law of library science: “books are for use.” And yet, how useful will books in a library in Brooklyn be to anyone, well, not in Brooklyn? (There are currently no plans to digitize the collection.) So how does the Reanimation Library really differ from any library it’s probably a few blocks from? The public collection has been collected and curated, with thousands of books not making the cut. And the same goes for the Reanimation Library (if not more so). The difference, I guess, is that the Reanimation Library also has funky T-shirts and stickers. After all, who needs the Dewey Decimal System when you can have pins with hot dogs that say LIBRARY SKILLS?

Maybe the real reason I want print to be dead is so we can stop reading awful puff pieces like Rachel Donadio’s essay that appeared in The New York Times Book Review over the weekend. Entitled, “It’s Not You, It’s Your Books,” it was yet another silly think-piece about how you can’t judge a book by its cover, but plenty of people judge prospective lovers by the books that they read (or don’t read). And I don’t really have a fault with the essay’s thesis, since it’s indeed mostly true (in high school we used to joke about a girl who thought that Daniel Defoe was Willem’s brother), but the problem is that this same phenomenon occurs with just about every other form of art as well. For instance, in the world of music snobs there are guys who won’t date girls who think that Captain Beefhart was someone in the army, while film snobs will shun anyone who hasn’t heard of Cahiers du cinema (let alone some of the famous directors who once wrote for it). So while people who love books can continue to feel that theirs is the greatest love of all, potential suitors all over the world are in fact being spurned for all kinds of reasons. In fact, in NYU dorm rooms right now there are probably a whole lot more guys who are turned off because a girl has a Zune and not an iPod rather than the fact that she reads Tom Wolfe instead of Thomas. Because of this, increasingly, books are not what we talk about when we talk about love; they’re simply what we talk about when we talk about books.

The following are some random notes and thoughts from my recent ten-day trip to France and Italy:

Paris has a lot of bookstores, including ones devoted to certain areas of interest (ranging from philosophy to books about the ocean). In fact, around the Left Bank I was stumbling upon bookstores every couple of streets (I started to take pictures of them all, but gave up after the fifth one). In fact, our hotel was right next door to a used bookstore specializing in English books, and while there I bought a Zola novel which I then read throughout the trip and finished on the plane. And in the book Zola mentioned the street of the bookstore in which I bought the book and hotel we’d been staying in.

The bookstores in Paris were divided by region, and I thought that was really odd. Because where would you put Lolita? In American or Russian literature? After all, Nabokov was of course Russian, but Lolita was written in English, and the story takes place in America. (Okay, maybe that’s an easy one.) But what about a writer like Josef Škvorecký, who is Czech, and writes in Czech, but who lives in Canada and often writes about Canada and Canadian characters?

Both Italian and French versions of various F. Scott Fitzgerald novels listed the author as “Francis Scott Fitzgerald.” Yes, I know that’s what the “F” stands for, but still, he never published anything under that name.

The Shakespeare and Co. Bookstore in Paris (which is where the photo above is from) was a bit of a let down; it looked a lot bigger in all of those photos of a grinning Hemingway. That being said, it’s still a nice bookstore, and I thought it charming that the resident dog was aptly named Collette.

Many Italian and French publishers publish books with practically bare covers; a lot of them looked almost like galleys. A friend of mine who is a librarian in a small French town said that the books with designed jackets get checked out much more than the ones without.

In a Parisian bookstore, when just sort of hovering of a table of books, I was drawn to a beautiful book by Julien Gracq. When I picked it up I saw something I’d never seen before: a book that had untrimmed edges at the top. I’m used to seeing those occasionally on American books (usually on John Updike novels), but when I do, the untrimmed pages are on the side. Upon closer examination, I discovered that the untrimmed pages were also uncut. Indeed, the top of each page was sort of webbed, and you couldn’t read the entire page. My two Parisian friends who were walking around Paris with me and my wife that day, knew the publisher — José Corti — and explained that the reader has to cut each of the pages in order to read the book. This seemed really odd to me, and like a lot of work (I mean, getting the plastic wrap off of a CD is bad enough; imagine having to do it for every song or bar of music).

The majority of the people sitting around me on my various flights (to Paris, to Venice, and back to New York) weren’t reading anything. In fact, a group of kids on my flight back to the States just sat in their seats for over eight hours, and not one of them that I could see (from about six of them) took out any form of reading material during the duration of the flight. Instead, they listened to their iPods, watched the movies, or talked to each other.

While staying with some Italian friends in Milan, I was surprised see them consult a phone book. We were looking up a pizzeria a friend of theirs had recommended, and instead of hopping online our host pulled out the white pages. This was shocking to me since I haven’t consulted a phonebook since the ‘90s. And then, in an age of Google Maps, as we were running out the door and someone asked if we knew where the restaurant was, once again our host consulted the phone book for the address instead of the Internet.

In Paris I was able to find wireless networks pretty much everywhere, which allowed me to find our exact location on my iPod Touch (not to mention check e-mail and read The New York Times). But in Milan and Venice, I came across practically no wireless networks, and our hosts in Milan had only limited access to the Internet via a pay-as-you-go model.

While the Italians didn’t seem very wired in term of the Internet, on a train trip from Venice to Milan I was sitting next to a teenage girl who spent the entire two hour trip glued to her cell phone. She used it non-stop to either text, talk, or play games. American teens are probably also this wired, and I just haven’t sat next to one for any appreciable amount of time. Still, I was pretty impressed with the amount of time this teenager spent using her phone. Also, while the rest of us in the six-person compartment read or listened to music, the only thing the teenager’s eyes were glued to was the screen of her phone.

And finally, the film European Vacation is indeed the masterwork I always thought it was. During the trip I kept thinking of it and referring to certain scenes over and over again, specifically the “Do you want to watch cheese or snow?” scene. This is because every time I checked into a hotel and turned on the TV, the cable had about six channels, each of them offering dubbed American shows (Happy Days in Italian; they call Richie Rickie) or else there was some weird documentary that made no sense to me. And, of course, any time I contemplated trying to speak French, I thought of this scene.

A quick word to say that I’m leaving today for a vacation; for the next week and a half I’ll be in Paris, Venice and Milan. And I’m not taking my laptop, so the only thing being dead I’m going to worry about for the next ten days will be various saints and artists (and, of course, the American dollar). But I’ll be back in late March with new posts. Thanks.

In the classic late ‘70s and early ‘80s TV show Happy Days the phrase “sit on it” was just about the biggest insult someone could deliver. Like, if Richie ever told Fonzie to “sit on it” that was pretty much the equivalent of saying “go to hell.” I was reminded of this recently when I saw another one of Cory Doctorow’s “books aren’t just for reading” posts at Boing Boing, a series in which Cory highlights how various designers are choosing to use books as construction material. The latest example (pictured above) shows books being crammed into the underside and back of a wooden bench. I suppose that an optimist might say that by stuffing books into the nooks and crannies of this bench someone sitting on it could simply reach between their legs and find something to read. But in reality I think that all of those books are going to go untouched, and will probably just act as lifeless decoration for the people sitting on the bench watching TV.

When I was a kid, living through the Star Wars-soaked late ‘70s and early ‘80s, my friends and I did everything we could to interact and live within the Star Wars world. First on the list, of course, was seeing the movies. But since they came out in three-year increments (‘77, ‘80 and ‘83), that obviously left lots of down time between installments. And since this was pre-VHS or even cable, we weren’t left with too many other options. There were the occasional (and mostly subpar) television specials and animated series (something to do with Ewoks and droids, respectively). Beyond this my friends and I made do with picture books and soundtrack records and even a bootlegged audio cassette of the movie a friend of a friend had made (of course, during the battle scenes it was nothing but muffled sound effects but still, I must have even just listened to Star Wars half a dozen times). But the biggest thing that filled the gap was the toys. With our plastic reproductions of Tie Fighters and X-Wings, we were able to recreate battles and scenes from the movies, or else just make up our own.

What amazes me about Star Wars is that it’s still alive and growing. Indeed, with the three most recent installments still fresh in peoples’ minds, it’s bigger than ever. And yet, whereas the original trio of movies were the catalyst for the phenomenon, the second trilogy of movies were really just yet another cog of the overall franchise. And there’s now a whole new dimension for Star Wars fans to participate in: video games.

However, even Star Wars-themed video games are nothing new. Back in the ‘80s there were numerous home and arcade videogames that used aspects of the Star Wars world as their plot. But those games were just, well, games. They consisted of crude pixilated versions of our cinematic heroes: a blocky Hans Solo or Luke Skywalker doing battle against similarly jagged Storm Troopers, while in the background an 8-bit version of the John Williams score bleeped and blurped. And while these games had enough of a backstory to get you going, they were really just tests of hand-eye coordination and skill. They were only immersive in the sense that, when a game was going well, we were in our own little world. But when the game only lasted between 5-10 minutes, it was obviously a passing experience.

But we now live in a world where video games have advanced graphics and multiple storylines, not just cursory plots. In fact, in terms of Star Wars, there’s a new game coming out this summer called The Force Unleashed. The game is already talked about as being a huge leap in gaming, not to mention being a kind of ad hoc new installment in the Star Wars saga; a game so rich with detail and story that it gives fans a chance to directly interact and experience the Star Wars world. Frank DiGiacomo recently wrote about the game’s development for Vanity Fair:

The character of Darth Vader is fleshed out further, and, in a plot twist almost as good as the “I am your father” moment from Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back, the game also contains surprising information about the birth of the Rebel Alliance. And like the dramatic arc of the six-episode saga within which it’s nestled, The Force Unleashed is ultimately a tale of redemption.

Compare this with earlier home video games of previous eras, such as Pitfall, which gave us an Indiana Jones-like explorer searching for treasure in a jungle. And yeah, it was fun to guide Pitfall Harry through various dangerous traps and adventures, but we never really knew who he was or why he was there. Compared to the cinematic (if not novelistic) storylines of modern day videogames, the age of Atari increasingly seems like mere canonical babbling.

Reading used to be considered an interactive pastime; parents encouraged kids to turn off their videogames and pick up a book. But reading looks positively passive next to something like The Force Unleashed. Indeed, in a world with entertainment choices like this for kids and teens, there’s a chance that the only reading they’ll ever do is looking over the instructions for these games.

Via Gawker, Real Simple’s website — as part of a feature entitled “101 New Uses for Everyday Things” — has a top ten list of things that newspapers can be used for (hint: reading is not one of them).

Here’s the list:

1. Deodorize food containers. Stuff a balled-up piece of newspaper into a lunch box or thermos, seal it, and let sit overnight.

2. Ripen tomatoes. Wrap them individually and leave them out at room temperature.

3. Pack delicate items.Wrap frames and figurines with several pieces of newspaper, then crumple the remaining sections to fill extra space in the box.

4. Wipe away tough streaks on glass. Use newspaper with cleaning fluid to clean mirrors and windows.

5. Preserve antique glass. Some older frames have finishes on the glass that can be damaged by cleaning solutions. Remove smudges by rubbing with newspaper dipped in a solution of one part white vinegar and one part warm water. Let air-dry.

6. Dry shoes. Place crumpled paper in them overnight.

7. Wrap gifts. Use the comics to wrap a child’s birthday gift, or try the wedding announcements for an engagement gift.

8. Create a home for slushy snow boots. During the winter, keep a pile of newspaper near the entryway. When your little snowmen and -women come home, they can toss their winter wear onto the newspaper instead of creating puddles on the floor.

9. Prepare a garden. In the fall, mow a patch of lawn to make room for a dedicated bed. Cover it with four layers of newspaper, then a four-inch layer of shredded leaves or bark mulch. Hose it down. Come spring, the compost blanket will have smothered the grass roots, and the bed will be primed for planting.

10. Keep the refrigerator vegetable drawer dry and free of smells. Line the bottom with newspaper.

Earlier today I was part of the annual We Media conference, which is put on by the iFocos organization. The conference is taking place in Miami, Florida, and I was honored to be part of the first day’s keynote address, which consisted of a conversation between me and designer Roger Black. The crowd was really smart, and the conversation flowed well and smoothly. In fact, the session after mine was called “Print Reincarnated.” And, of course, something can’t come back to life if it hasn’t already died. Because the conference was wired, there were people liveblogging the event, and I think there’s going to be video on my entire session, but for now here’s a good link. I’ll update this post as I or if I get more links.

Update: audio from the morning sessions.

Update: new photo.

Update: more blog coverage.

Update: yet more blog coverage.

Adrian Tomine (who, incidentally, way back in the day illustrated the cover of the third issue of my zine Our Noise) has a New Yorker cover this week entitled “Shelf Life.” It basically traces the trajectory of a book’s life, starting with the writer composing it and the publisher accepting it, then showing the book being published and someone reading it, until it finally ends up being tossed on a fire to keep homeless people warm. It’s a sad, but of course sometimes correct, depiction of what happens to books. However, the same thing could be done with cars, toasters or iPods. Every product starts out as inspiration, moves to the drafting board, the production line, and then goes into someone’s hands before ending up, finally, on the scrap heap. There’s nothing much out there that evades this fate, and books are no different. So what the Tomine cover needs is a few extra panels that show either the writer, or one of the book’s readers, sitting on a park bench with a thought balloon above their head that encloses the book. Because what the New Yorker cover conveys perfectly is that books are physical objects that have a life span. What the cover completely misses, however, is the fact that writing, words, and literature have a soul that transcends any physical object. So whatever was between the covers of the book that Tomine depicted will continue to live on, even after the book itself goes up in flames. In fact, the book’s the least interesting thing about the process. As William Burroughs said, “Language is a virus.” Well, in a way, stories are also viruses. We catch them when we read them, and then we pass them on to others when we talk about them, or else when their ideas infect us in a way that changes our behavior. Basically, words and stories leave their trace in us long after the book that initially spread the ideas in the first place is gone.