Print is Dead

In his 2008 book, Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age, Jeff Gomez augurs that the future of electronic publishing depends on whether publishers are prepared to meet the demands of a new generation of readers he calls "Generation Download." This generation, he argues, "is the first generation to come of age not knowing anything but an existence with the web." The implication is that web users under the age of thirty do not possess the same sentimentality for print books as we do, because they have grown up with a plethora of portable devices, such as cell phones, iPods, digital cameras, laptops, and portable hard-drives. Uncannily, Gomez’s ideas echo the view both Toni Weisskopf and Eric Flint championed years before Print is Dead hit bookstores. Flint wrote:

As technology improves and electronic books become as readable as paper books, this "hardcopy preference" factor will fade away. [There] is a generational issue involved, and […] as more and more old farts like me who grew up on paper books die off, the newer generation "accustomed to reading on a screen" will set the preferences.

In a 2005 interview with Canada's National Association of Speculative Fiction Professionals, Weisskopf reaffirmed Flint's sentiments:

We are running into a new generation of people who don’t automatically turn to books for entertainment. Partly this is because the publishing establishment hasn't been giving people entertaining books to read on a regular basis. And for me, entertainment has to include intellectual stimulation. Baen hasn't lost track of that, so I don’t think we'll lose readership but instead only will grow to fill the vacuum created by others falling down on the job.

If publishers don't meet these consumers' expectations, Gomez warns, print as a format is doomed to the same fate as books in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: "Generation Download" will become apathetic to reading and nobody will care about the death of books. "Bradbury was not worried about the loss of books themselves. His main concern was with a society that killed the need for reading, replacing the act with the narcotic of passive entertainment. The disappearance of books was merely what happened when people stopped caring about them."

Toni Weisskopf remains optimistic about the future of electronic publishing, however. "Right now, all e-books are 'unenhanced' versions of the paper books. At some point, authors who are comfortable with all that the Net can do will start enhancing their text naturally as part of their process. With color, with links, with music—sky’s the limit." Because Baen Books is prepared to embrace the new media rather than run from it, the potential for engaging "Generation Download" in ways that were unfathomable to print publishers a decade ago become mere technical hurdles. But can Baen Books' optimism change a Luddite industry's stance on DRM and e-book distribution models? "Only the marketplace will do that. But I do think visionary leaders, like Steve Jobs in the music world, will eventually have enough clout, and enough market research will emerge, so the industry will change. Figure sooner rather than later," writes Weisskopf. And if it's up to the marketplace, what can readers do to help speed up the process? "Every time the issue gets mentioned in the press, email the author about Baen Books and how our groundbreaking program led the way. If you see pirated versions of the books, let the pirates know the books can be found for reasonable prices at Baen.com. Most of the time that stops them. People just want access to the books—not an unreasonable desire!"

Print is Dead

In Print is Dead, one of Jeff Gomez's arguments in the chapter "On Demand Everything" struck me as peculiar. While I haven't finished the entire book yet, I find myself agreeing with almost all of his defenses of the e-book, even when he sometimes arrives at different conclusions than I do.

The weakness in his concept of "snippet culture" in this part of the book, I think, stems from his belief that we consume multimedia the same way we consume books. After demonstrating that "Generation Upload" has forced vendors to offer real-time "on-demand environments" (i.e. iTunes), he writes on page 110:

There will also be an impressive market for smaller parts of entire books. The same consumers who buy one song at a time on iTunes, or else one episode of a TV show, may want to purchase just a chapter or even a few pages of certain kinds of books [...] While this would be rarer for novels—after all, no one's clamoring to buy half a movie—the rise of YouTube and 'clip culture' has shown that consumers are increasingly looking for non-linear, bite-sized bits of entertainments. 'Snippet culture' may not be far behind.

Just "Rarer for novels"? That's an understatement. While I can imagine a professor putting together a piecemeal textbook by picking and choosing selections from other textbooks so that her teaching aid is perfectly suited for her class, I can't imagine a former YouTube consumer deciding to herself at random: "Hey, I've always wanted to read the last fifteen pages of Running with Scissors, why don't I go online and buy a snippet?"

Novels aren't YouTube videos. Buying random chunks from a novel is analogous to buying pixels from a jpeg, or fourteen seconds from an mp3, or the middle forty-thousand frames of a music video. In other words, the novel is greater than the sum of its parts, and to consume a novel in disparate "bite-sized bits" is not to experience the novel the author wrote, but merely to read its meaningless parts.

I don't think, however, that the novel will never be amenable to Jeff Gomez's conception of "snippet culture." Out of left field, all kinds of new forms for the genre may appear as technology changes the way we interact with narrative text (as well as the way we interact with each other). Japanese cell-phone novelists are one example. I guess the emergence of a new literary form (or the evolution of an old literary form into a new one) depends upon the standardization of a technology that will enable its delivery en mass. The bound book was the novel's technology. What will be the next?