I just finished reading Print is Dead: Books in our Digital Age, by Jeff Gomez. It wasn’t a terribly well-argued book, IMHO (Walt Crawford has taught me to be very wary of large numbers of global statements), but damn did it spark a copious number of questions and ideas for me.
The basic premise of the book is that it’s the content, not the medium, that matters, and for the most part I agree. Gomez posits that it’s inevitable that people will shift to reading books in some electronic medium, and that publishers aren’t paying enough attention to this inevitability.
I got the distinct impression that the spark for the book was ignited by the quote from Hesse’s Steppenwolf (too long to include here) Gomez uses to close the book in the afterward, which I believe kind of dilutes his entire argument by degrading the quality and utility of the delivery mechanisms around ebooks, but there you go.
I liked Gomez’s explanation about why digital copies of ebooks (specifically those that wouldn’t include
DRM) shouldn’t cost way less than their print counterparts, an opinion I’ve always had. He points out that the bulk of the cost of a book isn’t in its material and shipping costs, but in the costs of editing, promotion, and related
quality enhancing features. In fact Gomez suggests that people might be willing to pay more for an ebook if they truly can read it on any device, access it instantly, search it, and give it to their friends when they’re done with it. That last option seems unlikely to me, but we’ll see. Note, the cost of the Amazon Kindle edition of this book is $9.99, while the print edition is $16.47.
Reading this book made me think back to the minor brouhaha over Kevin Kelly’s 2006 New York Times article, Scan this Book. That argument seemed to mostly be around the different ways fiction and non-fiction are read, a topic that is briefly addressed in Gomez’s book. I think arguments probably really should centre around these genres though; I think this book would’ve been much stronger had it made the arguments around non-fiction exclusively. But it wouldn’t sell as well then…
It also reminded me of the innovative things O’Reilly media is attempting with many of its offerings, including the ability to buy PDFs for a little less than the print, and individual chapters (DRM-free) for $3.99. See for instance the store page for last month’s recommended title, The Myths of Innovation. And also tweaked my memory of an article from Technology Review in 2005 where Jason Epstein described what must have become the Espresso POD machine.
And I’m afraid this part may get lost down here at the bottom of the post, but nicely tying all these thoughts together for me was Larry Lessig’s 2007 talk at the TED conference on How creativity is being strangled by the law:
(incidentally, the TED conference is held in Monterey, CA, and I recognize the stage Lessig is standing on as the Steinbeck Forum in the Portola Plaza; I spoke on that same stage during Internet Librarian in 2006 – I don’t suppose I can say I shared a stage with Larry Lessig, can I? 😉
Some other related stuff I came across while reading the book, if you want to dive deeper:
- The Slow Reading blog, by John Miedema.
- 30 mostly spurious benefits of ebooks, from Off the Mark, in response to:
- Read an e-book week (March 2-8, 2008)
- I guess I should really re-subscribe to if:book!
Comments
8 Responses to “Some Thoughts on the Future of Print”
Good thoughts Paul. The way I’m leaning right now is that the Kindle might not be the iPod, but it may be the Newton, which is mixing my metaphors a bit (maybe Palm vs. Newton is better) I mean in the sense of being the first most-feasible iteration of a device.
I can’t really guess how exactly it’s going to go — let me put it this way — I own Pulp Fiction on dvd and I have a netflix account, but I usually end up watching it on TNT or something, so go fig.
how’s the GWN treating you?
Karl
forgot one thing: did you read it in print or ebook?
K
Hi Karl, read it in print of course, ’cause the Kindle’s not available up here. Plus, you know, I don’t actually buy very many books! 🙂 Hmm, if the Kindle is the Newton, what would that make the Sony Reader, or the Rocket ebook reader? I think the Kindle really is at least a 3rd generation device already, but I know what you mean 🙂 So you have at least three copies of Pulp Fiction available to you, which you could theoretically watch on multiple devices, but the sad thing is you’re paying three times for those three copies 🙁
Hi, thanks for reviewing this book. I have been reluctant to purchase it, anticipating some of the problems you mention.
You mention his “basic premise of the book is that it’s the content, not the medium, that matters”. You mention that you mostly agree, and I respect that. From my view, separating content and medium makes a big difference. Reading Walden Pond on a cell phone just won’t do. This works in reverse too, I don’t want a print book to read today’s stock quote.
Thanks for noticing my site. Regards, John
Hi John, I think it’s still worth a read – though maybe check your library for a copy instead of actually purchasing 🙂 Yeah, I think non-fiction lends itself to ebooks more than fiction, though with the right device (likely not a cell phone) I could see myself reading from a screen. Haven’t actually *seen* that screen yet myself, but I think I will before too long. TWT.
I’m counting the Kindle as 1st gen with regards to being the 1st e-ink device (or is it?, I’m not sure)
Maybe if I watched 3 pulp fictions at once, I’d finally understand the timeline
Thanks for the comment–and an interesting post. I just finished writing a take on Kindle and ebooks in general for the April Cites & Insights, so I’ve been thinking about this stuff again. Some day, I might read the book you mention, but as soon as “inevitable” comes up my eyes glaze over–since that almost always means the person using the term doesn’t really have solid arguments.
And, frankly, at this point anyone arguing the inevitable death of print books strikes me as coming out of the 1980s/1990s and wholly missing the fact that most new media/new technologies complement older media/older technologies, not replace them–unless the older versions are fatally flawed. I have yet to hear any plausible arguments that print books are fatally flawed (except for people who seem to find text-only narrative unsatisfactory). Lots of good uses for etext and even ebooks as complementary to print books; “death of print” isn’t likely to be on the agenda.
And, no, Kindle isn’t the first E Ink device. The Sony Reader precedes it by a year or so. Sony still doesn’t release any sales figures, which tells me all I need to know about the wild commercial success of that device.
[The April C&I won’t be out until at least mid-March, maybe later, but you may be surprised by the essay. I don’t come down anti-Kindle or anti-ebook, but then, I never have been anti-ebook: Just anti-oversimplification.]
Thanks Walt, I probably oversimplified myself; Gomez does admit that books aren’t going to completely go away, but he does eventually relegate them to a collectible niche item. So with the complementary idea, would you say that, if the Kindle was crowned king and that’s the device that folks chose to use, DRM issues aside, would Amazon’s model be logical? Offering the same title in both formats for the people to choose? Guess if all books were offered that way, over time we’d learn if *everyone* wanted one or the other…
Looking forward to your April issue!