Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

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.

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?

The Angry Journalist website, which is a blog where people from the field of journalism can anonymously post their complaints about the industry, is now offering a line journalism-inspired t-shirts, such as ones that say “Angry Journalist” and “journalists get laid (off).” But, of course, the one I like the most is the one that says “print is dead” (one of which is featured above). It comes in a variety of sizes and colors, as well as both men’s and women’s versions. Needless to say, I think this is pretty cool. However, we now need a t-shirt that says, “When someone asks you if you’re a God, you say yes.”

In what could be an interesting development for publishers who fear that electronic books will cannibalize sales of print books, the CW television network is going to stop offering episodes of its popular show Gossip Girl on its website. Why? Because, it seems, the show was too popular. According to the Los Angeles Times, “The move is designed to boost ratings for the program, which has developed a loyal online following but has failed to attract a sizable TV audience.” It seems that young kids were flocking to the network’s website to watch the show, and were buying it from iTunes, but they weren’t necessarily tuning in to watch it on TV. This is a problem because television networks make a lot more money from advertisements that appear on television than on their websites.

And while networks are more than happy to have websites for their shows, and even feature episodes online, it’s clear from the CW’s actions with Gossip Girl that those websites are meant to only be a tangential experience. The computer screen was never intended to replace the TV screen, but that’s exactly what’s happening. And now the CW is trying to correct that, acting like a restaurant pulling appetizers off its menu because too many people were ordering them, and never making it to the main course.

Again, per the LA Times:

The reversal underscores a dilemma facing traditional media companies. Revenue from online entertainment is meager compared with their core business of advertising-supported television. Some TV executives have questioned whether they are cannibalizing their audience, and revenue, by making popular programs ubiquitous on the Internet.

So, in the end, they really don’t want you to just watch the show; they want you to watch it on television. This seems to me fairly ridiculous, and is a policy that will either not last or won’t be a success. Yes, some people will indeed grumble and set their Tivos to record it (and a smaller group will actually huddle around their TV sets whenever it is that the CW airs the show). But most teens will just go elsewhere, watching shows from another network’s website (places where they can stream shows), or else they’ll just click over to Youtube or Facebook, and spend their time there.

But for networks to take their audience for granted is not a good idea. This point has been recently proven by the fact that, according to an article in Ad Age, TV audiences — now that the writer’s strike is over, and new shows are starting to reappear — have not yet returned. So for the CW to try and redirect their Web traffic to TV sets, as if consumers were a flowing river that — if you just put up enough sandbags and timber — you can point in any direction, is wrong.

There’s a Simpsons episode from years ago where Mr. Burns gives a tour of his mansion to Homer, and at one point he opens a door to reveal a room filled with monkeys sitting typing away madly at typewriters. Burns explains this as a real version of the old theory that if you put enough monkeys at enough typewriters, and give them enough time, eventually their random typing and flailing away will produce Hamlet. At any rate, Burns grabs a sheet of paper from one of the typewriters and reads aloud: “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.” So close; but not literature.

I thought of this as I read a story from The New York Times on Monday by Noam Cohen entitled “He Wrote 200,000 Books.” The story is about Philip Parker, a science professor who has “written” more than 200,000 books (that’s almost as many as Isaac Asimov). But Parker doesn’t really write the books; instead he has invented a series of “computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.”

Is this what we’re really coming to? Books written by computers? True, these aren’t novels per se; no one would compare a study of bathmats in India with A Passage to India. And yet, as sad as this is, it’s part of an ongoing trend. Put bluntly, computers have been fooling us for a long time. Many of the “acoustic” sounds you hear in music these days are actually computer samples. Not to mention that pretty much every special effect you see in a movie nowadays has been computer generated.

Still, just because the rats in Ratatouille are computer generated, the idea and the story and the dialogue weren’t computer generated. Computers are increasingly helping us be more creative but, in the end, that’s all they’re doing: helping. In bands like Daft Punk (not to mention Kraftwerk), humans are only pretending to be computers in order to make art. I find it hard to believe that the opposite will one day come true: computers pretending to be humans.

Last week I read a book called Bowie in Berlin, which was all about the three records that David Bowie made in the late ‘70s with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti in Germany. It was a really good book, and it was basically 300 pages devoted to just three of Bowie’s albums, with each record getting a track-by-track dissection along with commentary and historical background. I love this sort of thing about bands, directors, etc.

Whenever I get into an author I read all of their books, a few biographies, and then watch any documentaries about them and/or movies based on their work. All of this gives me a great context from which to view the author’s work, and it puts both the books and the author’s life into historical and literary perspective. And yet, if mega-successful Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling gets her way, I can’t help but thinking that this kind of a thing will come to an end. Why?

Because this week she’s in town to testify against tiny RDR Books, trying to stop the small independent publisher from issuing an encyclopedia of her Harry Potter characters and world. And if she, along with Warner Bros. (the film studio who owns the rights to the Harry Potter films), is victorious in shutting down RDR, it could have chilling consequences. According to The New York Times, “Legal analysts say the outcome of the case could set a crucial precedent in the literary world, one that determines the extent to which fans can use and build upon the works of their favorite authors.”

This doesn’t make any sense. No one is going to read the encyclopedia rather than Rowling’s books; the book that RDR is trying to publish will be a celebration of Rowling’s ideas, not the theft of them. But Rowling doesn’t see it this way, and she’s now doing everything she can to stop publication. All of this also begs a bigger question: Whose books are they anyway?

I’ve always thought of my own books as children and, when they’re published, they turn eighteen and leave the house (and my protection) and thus begin a life of their own. I wish them well, and hope they don’t get into trouble, but of course if they do there’s nothing I can do about it.

For instance, for right or wrong J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye has become somewhat of a magnet for strange people (Mark David Chapman had a well-thumbed copy on him when he murdered John Lennon; in fact, it’s become a bit of a cliché to say that the book is in the hip pocket of every would-be assassin). But the fact that the book was in Chapman’s hands is surely out of Salinger’s hands; when any author elects to publish their work, it’s like releasing smoke into the air: there’s no way to control or contain where it goes.

True, it’s a different story when someone is using your exact words, repackaging them for their own profit. But if what’s being written about is instead your world, then that’s not only fair game (and fair use), but it’s good thing and not a bad thing. In Rowling’s case, her books are going to sell no matter what. But if she’s allowed to succeed in stopping RDR, think about all of the books about books (not to mention books about movies and plays and music) that won’t get written as a result. Bands could protest books being written about their songs, and directors could claim infringement when books about their movies appear. Part of the pleasure, and indeed the understanding, of art comes from putting it into context and perspective — not to mention just plain celebrating it — but if Rowling has her way nothing would exist but the works themselves.

But Rowling isn’t thinking of her fans; she’s only thinking of herself:

“My prime concern, if not my only concern,” she added later, “is these characters who have meant so much to me and continue to mean so much to me over a very long period of time. It’s very difficult for someone who is not a writer to understand.”

She should instead try and look at it from the point of view of a reader (if not a fan). People — including RDR — are doing this because they love the characters; not because they hate or want to hurt them. And what’s most funny or ironic (or just plain sad) about all this is that Rowling and Warner Bros. have in recent years slapped Harry Potter’s name all over almost every kind of memorabilia (I’m waiting for the Harry Potter calculator that comes with no seven or eight). And now she minds someone putting Harry Potter’s name on a book?

The website of The Los Angeles Times recently launched a collaborative writing project entitled Birds of Paradise. This is going to be a sort of “wiki novel,” with professional writer Steve Lopez writing the first chapter but — as the Times’ website states — “It will now be up to readers to write the next chapter and the next and so on.” This is a pretty interesting idea, and I’ll be curious to read the results. Of course, Penguin UK already dabbled with this a few years ago with their own wiki-novel A Million Penguins. And while the results in that case may not have been stellar in terms of literary value, the experience showed how just how ready and willing readers are to be writers. In an age of Youtube and Wikipedia, more and more people aren’t content to just sit and consume content; they also want to play a part in creating it.

What I also find interesting about Birds of Paradise is that, a 150 years ago, Dickens had his classic works serialized in newspapers (as did many other writers at the time). And so it’s now fascinating to see, on the website of a newspaper, novelistic serialization again appearing. Of course, the difference this time is that the readers of the newspapers are now writing the book, rather than a professional writer. The Internet, the rise of user-generated content, and the trend of “crowdsourcing” has shown that we’re all professionals now. Or rather, the idea of “amateur” and “professional” is fast flying out the window.

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.