Customer Reviews

Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
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Gomez uses a provocative title to tackle a current topic of discussion in the publishing world. He combines careful research with his own insights from working in traditional publishing to produce a thoughtful and well-written book.

I love the points he includes in some of the final pages of this book where he lists five reasons publishers will still exist in a digital age:

"#1. Find talent. With millions online, finding anything worth consuming is getting more difficult.

#2. Support talent. The Internet is great for making an initial splash, but not for turning that splash into a career.

#3. Edit talent. Even geniuses need editors. (Great point in my view. wtw)

#4. Expose and market talent. As more authors are discovered online, more authors are promoted online.

#5. Pay talent. The Internet creates communities, but it doesn't pay them."

As a reader who is intimately involved in traditional publishing as shown through my Book Proposals That Sell, I found Print Is Dead worth my limited reading time. I recommend it.

Given Amazon's recent release of the Kindle ebook reader, the timing of Jeff Gomez's Print Is Dead couldn't be better. Regardless of your beliefs about print vs. e-content, you need to read this book, especially if you're in the publishing business. You might not agree with Jeff's opinions but I guarantee you he'll make you think about the industry in ways that you've never thought about it before. Even if you're just a fan of reading in general you owe it to yourself to read this excellent book.

The way I test the value of a book is by looking back and seeing how many times I've folded over a page or highlighted a passage that got my attention. My copy of Print Is Dead has so many folds and highlighter marks that it looks like it's been read by 10 different people. Here are some of my favorite excerpts:

** Many of those in publishing see themselves as guardians of a grand and noble tradition, so much so that they sometimes suffer delusions of grandeur.

** ...pretty much anyone under the age of thirty qualifies for being accustomed to a 'constant stream of digital stimulation.' And so 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.

** Today's kids are not going to want to pick up a big book and spend hours in a corner silently, passively reading. Why in the world would they do that? It's not interactive. They can't share the experience with their friends. There's no way to change the book to suit their own tastes.

** The publishing industry needs to realize this, and it needs to also find a way to get to these kids by making content available in a way that will first reach them (i.e., digitally) and then will give them the tools to interact with it and share it (post excerpts on their MySpace pages, email chapters to friends, IM paragraphs across class, etc.) If not, there are dozens of ways this generation will choose to spend their time, and none of them will involve books.

** Of course there are many who contend that books are works of art and shouldn't be reworked or touched at all. The latter is of course a silly view since readers 'rework' these books all of the time by skipping whole sections as they read, the same way that people rarely ever listen to the entirety of "The White Album."

** The ability to alter, and then share, text to this degree would mean that you could edit a book to your own liking and then send an amazing chapter or even a couple of sentences to someone, via email or a webpage, along with a message that says, 'Take a look at this; I think it's amazing.' Imagine all of the sharing of literary material that would occur if the reigns were loosened just a little.

** Most of the early ebook formats and devices tried to faithfully mimic the ink-on-paper experience, and they failed not because they didn't look like real books, but because they looked too much like traditional books.

** In the same way that Jimmy Buffett has created a multimillion dollar business around the success of his 1977 song 'Margaritaville,' so too will future authors create online communities and brands built around their works that have the potential to be even more popular than the works the communities were built to support.

** Writers who are unskilled in the ways of the Internet, or just don't want to play any part in the online discussion and want to write their books and be left alone, will be like movie actors at the end of the silent era who were forced to have elocution lessons when talking pictures were suddenly the brand new thing.

** If publishing can't find a way to tap into this need for discussion, then it's going to find itself and its product increasingly left out of the conversation.

** ...one day (perhaps soon) a printed book in a digital world will seem as quaint and as antiquated as a watch or a fountain pen feels today.

** It's simply not possible that the Internet is going to have an effect on every area of our lives except reading books.

If I had to rank the 12-15 books I've read this year this would be #1 by far. It's extremely insightful, well written and is one of those gems that makes you stop and think. I've only hit some of the highlights in this post. You need to read the entire book to appreciate the vision Gomez has for print and e-content. Highly, highly recommended!

If you cut out the author's recurring mantra "it's not the physical book we value, it's the words" then this book would be a third as long. Take out the redundant arguments about why today's "generation upload" insists on always interacting with everything on multiple levels and is both incapable and thoroughly disinterested in doing anything like "just read", or just listen to "music" (or "just" anything) and you'll cut another third out. Aside from being long winded, it's just wrong. Kids know how to consume different media, and aren't limited to just mash-ups.

Anyway, what's left is an engaging discussion about the transformation of the book as an entity, the industry behind books, and the people that read them. However, this lesson would work just as well in a much shorter book.

I just wanted a book about the Publishing Industry. Okay, what I really wanted was an eBook about the Publishing Industry, published in the five years. What I found was much, much, more.

The more you try to understand what's happening to the Publishing industry, the more you start thinking about what's already happened to the Music and Film industry. It's all part of the same story.

The Internet = Disintermediation. Taking out the middle man. Here we are, in 2011. Gone are Tower Records and Blockbuster Movie rentals. Many of their competitors have been sold off, and everything (legal and illegal) is going digital, and put up on the web, to be shot between our phones, tablets and connected TVs. This is the dream, right? But if it means Artists aren't making any money (so they quit making art, and become bankers) then what's it all for? We need to understand how creative professionals (no matter what form their creativity takes) are going to deal with the onslaught of the Internet.

In 1995 Bill Gates put out a memo to Microsoft Executive Staff, warning that if the company didn't brace itself for what he dubbed `The Internet Tidal Wave', most, if not all, of their core businesses would be threatened. Microsoft changed, and Artists need to change too. Napster may be long gone, but in its stead is the generation of kids that grew up and went to college with the notion that Media (all media, not just music) should be totally portable and dirt cheap (preferably free).

Not only are publishers being asked to totally change what they do but artists are too. `Content creators' are now asked to use the Internet to:

a) create their own audience and community before the Publisher even thinks about signing you

b) get the rewards of their handwork in a time when almost everything is available on filesharing sites

c) decide between digital and paper/print distribution

d) contend with Environmental effects of their work (eg. paper sucks)

e) contend with the evaporation of major brick and mortar bookstores (and media resellers in general)

Part of the reason for that last point is Amazon, the ultimate online retailer. You can buy anything on Amazon, but at it's core, they are still a bookseller. And to sell more books, without any experience in hardware design, they decided to build an eReader called the Kindle. With version 4 (and a color version) hitting the... um...Internets this month, not only has the Amazon Kindle legitimized digital reading (just as Apple legitimized legally downloaded music), they've inspired copycats (like Barnes & Noble's `nook' device), overturning the entire Book-buying experience. The Kindle really has become the iPod for books (a faint dream back in 2007), with its own burgeoning line of color cases and accessories, and finally, a big brother Kindle, the Kindle Fire, will expand into the world of tablets. If you were a fan of Steve Jobs for his product designs, and his vision, you can't help but see a bit that in Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. It's just a different kind of mastermind.

And what about us, the readers? How have we had to adjust to all this super fast, super convenient, and super cheap media? Well, one quirky drawback to the disappearance of old media (like print newspapers and magazines) is that the Book Review section is getting thinner and thinner. Book reviews are being squeezed on both ends, as the demand for newspapers, and the interest in books in general diminishes (in favour of Youtube, Twitter, Blogs, etc).

Book Reviews in Magazines and Newspapers used to serve a function: An in-depth look at great books was needed precisely because there are so many thousands and thousands of books published each year, and on top of that, they take so long to read that it would be a tragedy to waste your time reading bad books. If you go in to watch a movie and it stinks, you're still going out, you're still munching on popcorn, you lean back in a soft chair, mouth agape, and it's over in a couple hours. Read a bad, boring, stupid book, and you've flushed a good 15 hours of diligent reading down the drain. So what do we have now? Well, one of the leftovers from old media is the New York Times Bestseller list.

Speaking of wasting a few bad hours reading bad books, how about burning a couple weeks reading TV hosts rant about Politics (pick your favorite hate-monger). Because the NYT has massively slashed the Book Review budget, they've essentially thrown their hands up and said, "Well, I don't know.. here's the most popular books this week. Maybe there's something good in there." And I don't blame them: after all, very few people actually read books! (As Steve Jobs once quipped), but that doesn't mean I have to like it. And it doesn't mean we have to join in the masses of illiterate zombies. This is what I love about 21tiger and the readers of this site. Not only are you guys reading, but you're doing it not by abolishing iPads, or websurfing, like some Amish throwbacks, they're making a point of adding books to their mix of media. Who knows, maybe even in a prominent place.

And you're doing it in ways that the Internet was built for: by sharing great books, great movies, and great online articles on social networks like Facebook, you're actually helping your friends find great content and great art-in many ways, the hardest thing to do online, find the very best stuff. And more than just reading great stuff, we should all aspire to create great stuff, whether you're a writer, design, musician or not. Understanding how to stay relevant and thrive in the 21st Century, when almost everything is being digitized and put on the web, matters to all of us.

Surf's up.

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I haven't read this book but I used to find the accompanying blog pretty interesting. It is ironic that the book is still for sale but that the matching blog is gone. Maybe print is gradually dying but many web sites don't last that long either.

The book makes a reasonable argument, that print will be and should be superseded by electronic books, not least because they are cheaper. But if true the why is the Kindle edition more expensive than the paperback? This book is a by its own standards a ripoff.

Ironically, I found this book in my local library and it was definitely worth a Sunday afternoon read. It has some thought-provoking ideas that sparked a blog post.

Writers today have been inspired by print books. The age of most successful writers today means they grew up without the internet, without email, without YouTube so the concept of what a book is remains with the print book. For Gen Y and beyond, they have so many other versions of what media is that the print book is just one. Creating content and posting it online immediately is reality.(Why wait 18 months to have your print book published when you can be on Kindle tomorrow? There is an audience online, you just have to be out there.)

[...]

Gomez debunks some of the oft-stated claims that "books will always be on paper" by showing how digital text is already part of our daily lives. Gomez considers the example of the music industry to shine a light on the future of publishing, while discussing the potential of electronic publications. Overall, a nice readable overview of digital publishing, but seasoned publishing professionals will find little substantive information.

Isn't it kind of ironic that you can buy a paperback edition of a book about the death of print? And what's more, people are willing to pay $16.47 so they can read it on paper.

I'll believe print is dead the day authors like Mr. Gomez can make money publishing their books without offering a print edition (though I suspect that even then a print-on-demand market will emerge to supply printed copies of online-only books).

Remember the "paperless office"? Print was dead back then too.