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Print Is Dead: Books in our Digital Age
For over 1500 years books have weathered numerous cultural changes remarkably unaltered. Through wars, radio, TV, computer games and fluctuating literacy rates, the book has, somewhat bizarrely, remained the more robust and culturally relevant way to communicate ideas. Now, for the first time since the Middle Ages, all that is about to change.
232 pages, Hardcover
First published November 13, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
October 6, 2009
For some time now, I've made a big effort to understand the changes in the publishing industry. I must admit I was terrified to think that "news" would be left to fingernail blurbs on the Yahoo homepage. I was equally terrified to think that I would have to use my extensive education and valuable time to search a variety of sources for news, recent books, or publications that interest or inform me. I can do it, I know, but how many others will? And what does this mean for an informed electorate in a democracy? I was afraid, but I am much less so now. The changes are taking us to a new place.
Gomez plants us firmly in the debate about book publishing, articulating the pressures on those currently producing and selling the book as product. He discusses the electronic updates that are rocking the industry and the changing publicity and marketing avenues. Things are changing so fast, it is amazing his observations are not out of date already.
I found the book immensely useful for stimulating fruitful discussion and thought...and hope.
Gomez plants us firmly in the debate about book publishing, articulating the pressures on those currently producing and selling the book as product. He discusses the electronic updates that are rocking the industry and the changing publicity and marketing avenues. Things are changing so fast, it is amazing his observations are not out of date already.
I found the book immensely useful for stimulating fruitful discussion and thought...and hope.
April 21, 2009
For a book about books, Jeff Gomez's curious and confused tract Print Is Dead spends very little time on actual books. In fact, in the entire two hundred pages, Gomez mentions fewer then a dozen books by name, and each in passing reference. By contrast, Ghostbusters, Apocalypse Now and Shutter all get their own paragraphs. In fact, more time in Print Is Dead is spent discussing Beck's album Information than is spent on all books ever printed combined.
So perhaps print really is dead. Gomez portends that if the publishing industry doesn't change its ways, we could be living in a world without books, but he seems to have already arrived in such a zone: if one can't discuss the future of the book without multiple movie references, the case would appear to already be closed.
Gomez's thesis, at least at the outset, is simple. The tumult caused by the internet--instantly available downloads, increased portability for entertainment, the rise of the amateur, and the dawn of the mashup--has already destroyed the music industry, and threatens the movie and television industries as well. Publishing, Gomez concludes, is next.
And that really is the entirety of his argument. Gomez seems convinced that what happens to one industry, or even multiple industries, must necessarily happen to all industries. By what transference property this occurs is left unexplained; Gomez thinks the mere categorical similarity between books and music twins their fates:
In other words, the iPod for books is just around the corner.
Enough has been forecasted on account of the iPod that it might be time to draw some boundaries around the analogy. The IPod's ability to dissemble authoritative constraints and render individual songs as unrestrained units did truly revolutionize the music industry. How music is made, distributed, listened to, and related to have metamorphosised over the past five years. Further, there is a changing of the guard for those in charge of music; many giants of the record industry are falling, and deservedly so. And a band starting out right now faces an almost unrecognizable terrain compared to a band that started in 2003.
As went the album, so apparently goes the television time slot and the motion picture. If entertainment industries are falling like dominoes, it is intuitive to think that the publishing industry is next. All the signs appear to be there: newer technology favors interaction, exhibitionism, instant access, portability and low to nonexistent cost, all of which seem counter to the private, isolated, stationary act of reading. "[T:]oday's kids are not going to want to pick up a big book and spend hours in a corner silently, passively reading," Gomez writes. "Why in the world would they want to 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. Instead, they're going to ditch the hardback and head over to Facebook." (97)
Unless, of course, there really is something special about books. Gomez reserves a special bile for those who prize books in their physical form. "It's a writer's words that touch us, not the paper those words are printed on," he states. "[...T:]o talk about one format being superior to another is silly; this isn't a joust, it's about utility." Again, Gomez draws a direct line from the evolution of music technology to the death of the book. After all, the record was supposedly a treasured means of listening to music, but music fans went, and went quickly, to the CD, and then to the MP3. Gomez thinks readers will ditch their bound books with the same abandon.
This is a curiously ahistorical argument, something Gomez seems to sense without understanding. "Since the 1500s the evolution of books has been stuck," he writes, in a stunningly un-self aware sentence. "Except for minor variations - such as trade and mass market paperbacks - there has been very little change in books (or in the book business) in hundreds of years." (13)
Could this be because books are, in the words of John Lanchester, "an extraordinarily effective piece of technology, portable, durable, expensive to pirate but easy to use, not prone to losing all its data in crashes, and capable of taking an amazing variety of beautiful forms"? Rather than the evolution of the book being "stuck", could it be that the written word found its ideal form a long time ago? Have we not replaced the book because we haven't needed to?
Here Gomez's music industry analogy becomes a bit more potent than he probably had hoped. The album, that precious vessel so recently endangered, is also a recent invention, and one that came along precisely because of a technological opportunity. Record companies, themselves new, wanted a more efficient way to deliver music than the two-song single; thus the long player was born. Exile on Main Street may be a sprawling masterpiece, but its format came from sheer financial calculations. Before the long player, by the by, songs were sold individually--much as they are now through iTunes. The destruction of the album is lamented by music snobs who see it as the apotheosis of form, and by record companies, who reaped the profits from it, but in the space of barely six decades recorded music has simply returned to its original distribution method.
What's important here is that music was already encoded with the potential for dissembling. The same cannot be said of the book. A novel is not a collection of twelve tracks; it is a sustained narrative, and its meaning is an aggregate of its parts. Much of the technology which Gomez so trumpets works entirely in circumscribed formats that are prohibitive to the length, depth and complexity of the novel. Return, for instance, to Gomez's earlier quote, that kids today will substitute the novel for Facebook. This is a categorical mistake: the two do not function similarly, nor do they satisfy the same need. Gomez, however, continues down this strange new path: "The publishing industry needs to...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.)." (97)
Say what? This induced images of two frat boys emailing the penultimate chapter of Anna Karenina to each other. ("Dude! Under a train!")
At this point, this reader began to wonder whether Gomez has ever actually read a novel. Actually, he's written two of them, which makes this next quote all the less explicable: "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' 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." (98)
The record failed because ultimately the record was not an efficient means of distribution. They were unstable, prone to damage, did not allow access to individual songs and were not easily shareable or transportable. CDs solved some of these problems, while the MP3 seemed to solve all of them. Gomez is convinced that the same thing will happen to books, but he cannot seem to locate what an eBook will do that a normal book can't. It's the fallacy of the technological imperative: simply because the technology exists does not automatically make it good. And, sure enough, eBooks in their first incarnation were a failure, because, quite simply, they were not an improvement.
The failure of the IPod analogy is not good for Gomez, as it forms the meat of his book. What's left are some rather odd assertions ("Few would argue for the aesthetic merits of an average newspaper") and some flat out confusing segues. For instance, make sense of this: "What's the point of going into Barnes & Noble, or why should they have to wait until their shipment arrives from Amazon? Why not just go to iTunes and download half a dozen new songs, or send a friend a shot on their cell phone instead?" (4-5) Those two sentences stopped me cold. Why would a person send their friend a text message instead of going to Barnes & Noble? The two aren't remotely the same activity.
Gomez early on states that his book is meant to be more of a primer for the debate ranging around the future of books, rather than a serous treatise on the subject. This does severe damage to his arguments; when talking about the future, such as it were, leaving out the foundation of data renders one's text a series of baseless prophecies. Observe: "The mass consumption of books has not yet been replaced by the Internet, but it's only a matter of time." Says who? According to what evidence?
Since Gomez didn't do the research, I did. First, for comparison's sake, CD sales fell from 2000 to 2006 by 25%. In the same period, sales of digital singles rose 2,930%. Now, if the publishing industry were endangered by the same forces that are crippling the music industry, one would expect to see some sort of correlation in sales figures. Nope:
That settles that. Book sales did drop 2.8% in 2008. However, there has been no causal effect linking this drop to the Internet; one could easily argue the diminished sales are the result of the recession of September 2008 that affected many industries. Electronic books in 2008 saw an astonishing rise of 68.4%, though given their dismal sales every year prior, perhaps the only way they had to go was up.
So, not only has Gomez not proven that "it's only a matter of time" before books go by the wayside, but he ignores some rather contrary data that suggest that books may not be feeling much of the effects of the Internet at all.
In all fairness, Gomez succeeds on some small points. It is certainly possible that travel guides, cookbooks, and other utilitarian texts will be 'microchunked' and able to be purchased according to the specific desires of the customer. Though some might lament the loss of the dog-eared cookbook or decade old coffee stained guidebook, the gain in convenience and accessibility will easily be worth it. He is also right when he says that a certain boutique brand of author will go nuts with the endless formatting possibilities afforded by electronic books; one can imagine what would have happened had David Foster Wallace been born into this era.
But Gomez fails to make an even plausible case that books as we know them are on the way out. His failure, alas, is as much spiritual as it is intellectual. "We can also see our reflections in screens," he writes, "while paper is always opaque; no matter how long you stare into a blank piece of paper, you'll never see yourself."
That statement, to borrow an old phrase, ain't worth the paper it's written on.
So perhaps print really is dead. Gomez portends that if the publishing industry doesn't change its ways, we could be living in a world without books, but he seems to have already arrived in such a zone: if one can't discuss the future of the book without multiple movie references, the case would appear to already be closed.
Gomez's thesis, at least at the outset, is simple. The tumult caused by the internet--instantly available downloads, increased portability for entertainment, the rise of the amateur, and the dawn of the mashup--has already destroyed the music industry, and threatens the movie and television industries as well. Publishing, Gomez concludes, is next.
And that really is the entirety of his argument. Gomez seems convinced that what happens to one industry, or even multiple industries, must necessarily happen to all industries. By what transference property this occurs is left unexplained; Gomez thinks the mere categorical similarity between books and music twins their fates:
"In the same way that this new generation is eschewing traditional forms of media (not bothering to go the movies [sic:] or watch television when shows are broadcast, and not buying CDs in stores), they will also be open to new methods of buying and consuming reading material. The very nature of Generation Download shows us that readers will one day (and sooner than we think) be more willing to forgo an ink-on-paper book, and will not mind cozying up to their computer screens (or the screen of some device) instead of a physcial book. We can see this coming because we have already seen how an entire generation has traded in their stereos for computers, not to mention an assortment of other portable electronic devices that keep them in constant touch with their digital worlds." (77)
In other words, the iPod for books is just around the corner.
Enough has been forecasted on account of the iPod that it might be time to draw some boundaries around the analogy. The IPod's ability to dissemble authoritative constraints and render individual songs as unrestrained units did truly revolutionize the music industry. How music is made, distributed, listened to, and related to have metamorphosised over the past five years. Further, there is a changing of the guard for those in charge of music; many giants of the record industry are falling, and deservedly so. And a band starting out right now faces an almost unrecognizable terrain compared to a band that started in 2003.
As went the album, so apparently goes the television time slot and the motion picture. If entertainment industries are falling like dominoes, it is intuitive to think that the publishing industry is next. All the signs appear to be there: newer technology favors interaction, exhibitionism, instant access, portability and low to nonexistent cost, all of which seem counter to the private, isolated, stationary act of reading. "[T:]oday's kids are not going to want to pick up a big book and spend hours in a corner silently, passively reading," Gomez writes. "Why in the world would they want to 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. Instead, they're going to ditch the hardback and head over to Facebook." (97)
Unless, of course, there really is something special about books. Gomez reserves a special bile for those who prize books in their physical form. "It's a writer's words that touch us, not the paper those words are printed on," he states. "[...T:]o talk about one format being superior to another is silly; this isn't a joust, it's about utility." Again, Gomez draws a direct line from the evolution of music technology to the death of the book. After all, the record was supposedly a treasured means of listening to music, but music fans went, and went quickly, to the CD, and then to the MP3. Gomez thinks readers will ditch their bound books with the same abandon.
This is a curiously ahistorical argument, something Gomez seems to sense without understanding. "Since the 1500s the evolution of books has been stuck," he writes, in a stunningly un-self aware sentence. "Except for minor variations - such as trade and mass market paperbacks - there has been very little change in books (or in the book business) in hundreds of years." (13)
Could this be because books are, in the words of John Lanchester, "an extraordinarily effective piece of technology, portable, durable, expensive to pirate but easy to use, not prone to losing all its data in crashes, and capable of taking an amazing variety of beautiful forms"? Rather than the evolution of the book being "stuck", could it be that the written word found its ideal form a long time ago? Have we not replaced the book because we haven't needed to?
Here Gomez's music industry analogy becomes a bit more potent than he probably had hoped. The album, that precious vessel so recently endangered, is also a recent invention, and one that came along precisely because of a technological opportunity. Record companies, themselves new, wanted a more efficient way to deliver music than the two-song single; thus the long player was born. Exile on Main Street may be a sprawling masterpiece, but its format came from sheer financial calculations. Before the long player, by the by, songs were sold individually--much as they are now through iTunes. The destruction of the album is lamented by music snobs who see it as the apotheosis of form, and by record companies, who reaped the profits from it, but in the space of barely six decades recorded music has simply returned to its original distribution method.
What's important here is that music was already encoded with the potential for dissembling. The same cannot be said of the book. A novel is not a collection of twelve tracks; it is a sustained narrative, and its meaning is an aggregate of its parts. Much of the technology which Gomez so trumpets works entirely in circumscribed formats that are prohibitive to the length, depth and complexity of the novel. Return, for instance, to Gomez's earlier quote, that kids today will substitute the novel for Facebook. This is a categorical mistake: the two do not function similarly, nor do they satisfy the same need. Gomez, however, continues down this strange new path: "The publishing industry needs to...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.)." (97)
Say what? This induced images of two frat boys emailing the penultimate chapter of Anna Karenina to each other. ("Dude! Under a train!")
At this point, this reader began to wonder whether Gomez has ever actually read a novel. Actually, he's written two of them, which makes this next quote all the less explicable: "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' 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." (98)
The record failed because ultimately the record was not an efficient means of distribution. They were unstable, prone to damage, did not allow access to individual songs and were not easily shareable or transportable. CDs solved some of these problems, while the MP3 seemed to solve all of them. Gomez is convinced that the same thing will happen to books, but he cannot seem to locate what an eBook will do that a normal book can't. It's the fallacy of the technological imperative: simply because the technology exists does not automatically make it good. And, sure enough, eBooks in their first incarnation were a failure, because, quite simply, they were not an improvement.
The failure of the IPod analogy is not good for Gomez, as it forms the meat of his book. What's left are some rather odd assertions ("Few would argue for the aesthetic merits of an average newspaper") and some flat out confusing segues. For instance, make sense of this: "What's the point of going into Barnes & Noble, or why should they have to wait until their shipment arrives from Amazon? Why not just go to iTunes and download half a dozen new songs, or send a friend a shot on their cell phone instead?" (4-5) Those two sentences stopped me cold. Why would a person send their friend a text message instead of going to Barnes & Noble? The two aren't remotely the same activity.
Gomez early on states that his book is meant to be more of a primer for the debate ranging around the future of books, rather than a serous treatise on the subject. This does severe damage to his arguments; when talking about the future, such as it were, leaving out the foundation of data renders one's text a series of baseless prophecies. Observe: "The mass consumption of books has not yet been replaced by the Internet, but it's only a matter of time." Says who? According to what evidence?
Since Gomez didn't do the research, I did. First, for comparison's sake, CD sales fell from 2000 to 2006 by 25%. In the same period, sales of digital singles rose 2,930%. Now, if the publishing industry were endangered by the same forces that are crippling the music industry, one would expect to see some sort of correlation in sales figures. Nope:
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has today released its annual estimate of total book sales in the United States. The report, which uses data from the Bureau of the Census as well as sales data from eighty-one publishers inclusive of all major book publishing media market holders, estimates that U.S. publishers had net sales of $25 billion in 2007; a 3.2 percent increase from 2006 with a compound growth rate of 2.5 percent per year since 2002.
That settles that. Book sales did drop 2.8% in 2008. However, there has been no causal effect linking this drop to the Internet; one could easily argue the diminished sales are the result of the recession of September 2008 that affected many industries. Electronic books in 2008 saw an astonishing rise of 68.4%, though given their dismal sales every year prior, perhaps the only way they had to go was up.
So, not only has Gomez not proven that "it's only a matter of time" before books go by the wayside, but he ignores some rather contrary data that suggest that books may not be feeling much of the effects of the Internet at all.
In all fairness, Gomez succeeds on some small points. It is certainly possible that travel guides, cookbooks, and other utilitarian texts will be 'microchunked' and able to be purchased according to the specific desires of the customer. Though some might lament the loss of the dog-eared cookbook or decade old coffee stained guidebook, the gain in convenience and accessibility will easily be worth it. He is also right when he says that a certain boutique brand of author will go nuts with the endless formatting possibilities afforded by electronic books; one can imagine what would have happened had David Foster Wallace been born into this era.
But Gomez fails to make an even plausible case that books as we know them are on the way out. His failure, alas, is as much spiritual as it is intellectual. "We can also see our reflections in screens," he writes, "while paper is always opaque; no matter how long you stare into a blank piece of paper, you'll never see yourself."
That statement, to borrow an old phrase, ain't worth the paper it's written on.
April 20, 2019
This book is a glimpse at the future from the perspective of 2008. When I discovered this book at the academic library I work in, I knew it would either be fascinating or have a completely outdated feel. It turns out, it's both. To put this book into context: the first iPod was released in 2001, the first iPhone was released in 2007, and Gomez refers to Netflix as a DVD rental service. 2008 doesn't seem that long ago, but from the POV of technology, it's a retro year!
I learnt a lot about the history of the electronic book. They've been around since the late 90's, but by 2008 they are considered a failure. JK Rowling apparently refused to allow her Harry Potter series to be put into e-book format, the publishing industry had no idea how to price these "files", and potential readers found it tricky to transfer the ebook from PC to device. The very first commercial e-reader was called the Rocket eBook and could hold only ten books.
My biggest issue with this book was the tone that Gomez used when referring to Millennials (he calls us the Download Generation as I don't think the term Millennial had caught on yet). He talks about how young people don't want to read books as we find it boring and how we would prefer to look at a quick blog entry. Gomez talks about technology like TiVo and the iPod and mentions that young people are more interesting in watching TV or "surfing the web" than committing to a book. I'm no expert on reading habits in the early 21st century, but interestingly the only books Gomez refers to in this book are either classics, or Avant-guard fiction...nothing about YA or contemporary fiction at all.
One theory that Gomez puts forward is that the format of the novel will have to change in order for younger people to be interested at all...he talks about being able to download separate chapters and read them individually, and interactive e-books with lots of links, or even ones that give the reader the ability to switch up the main character. This last one made me think of the rise of fan-fiction, where fans of a book or series can write their own versions of their favourite stories.
This book was such an interesting one to read. The tone of the book is fairly hopeless for the future of both reading for pleasure, and books in any format. Since this book was written, pretty much all books are available in e-book format, e-readers have become easier to use as well as cheaper, and reading and book buying is on the increase. Gomez has some valid points to make about the book industry, and there are lots of comparisons to the music industry since the invention of the iPod. The e-reader was the biggest thing to happen to reading since the mass-market paperback and I'm glad I was around to see the shift in reading habits
I learnt a lot about the history of the electronic book. They've been around since the late 90's, but by 2008 they are considered a failure. JK Rowling apparently refused to allow her Harry Potter series to be put into e-book format, the publishing industry had no idea how to price these "files", and potential readers found it tricky to transfer the ebook from PC to device. The very first commercial e-reader was called the Rocket eBook and could hold only ten books.
My biggest issue with this book was the tone that Gomez used when referring to Millennials (he calls us the Download Generation as I don't think the term Millennial had caught on yet). He talks about how young people don't want to read books as we find it boring and how we would prefer to look at a quick blog entry. Gomez talks about technology like TiVo and the iPod and mentions that young people are more interesting in watching TV or "surfing the web" than committing to a book. I'm no expert on reading habits in the early 21st century, but interestingly the only books Gomez refers to in this book are either classics, or Avant-guard fiction...nothing about YA or contemporary fiction at all.
One theory that Gomez puts forward is that the format of the novel will have to change in order for younger people to be interested at all...he talks about being able to download separate chapters and read them individually, and interactive e-books with lots of links, or even ones that give the reader the ability to switch up the main character. This last one made me think of the rise of fan-fiction, where fans of a book or series can write their own versions of their favourite stories.
This book was such an interesting one to read. The tone of the book is fairly hopeless for the future of both reading for pleasure, and books in any format. Since this book was written, pretty much all books are available in e-book format, e-readers have become easier to use as well as cheaper, and reading and book buying is on the increase. Gomez has some valid points to make about the book industry, and there are lots of comparisons to the music industry since the invention of the iPod. The e-reader was the biggest thing to happen to reading since the mass-market paperback and I'm glad I was around to see the shift in reading habits
February 14, 2008
If you're an Ann Coulter fan, you'll definitely enjoy this poorly organized rant! If valid claims aren't your thing, pick this up for a good dose of mind-numbing claims.
I'll agree that there might be a market for online book sales, but watch yourself when you start making claims that anyone who thinks that printed books deserve to be cherised are misinformed fools.
I'll agree that there might be a market for online book sales, but watch yourself when you start making claims that anyone who thinks that printed books deserve to be cherised are misinformed fools.
Read
November 8, 2021Fast, smart read. Any book that leaves me optimistic about the future of reading AND the future of my publishing career is worth recommending.
September 1, 2009
This book brings up important points about reading and books in our technology-driven world, including the increased lack of interest in reading as a pastime, especially for young people. I agree with some of the arguments, especially that we should embrace digital distribution of books to get kids interested in reading again--though I found myself doubting that any teenager who sees reading as a chore would suddenly be interested in books just because they can be read on the computer or their newest wireless device.
A somewhat informative read, though I often found myself very annoyed at the criticism of authors not willing to release their books digitally. His jab at J.K. Rowling is hypocritical and borders on a personal attack: "J.K. Rowling is yet another author who believes that the only place for words is on the page. Because of this, she has resolutely insisted that each of her blockbuster Harry Potter books not appear in digital form. Of course, for someone who writes long books in longhand, not to mention spending all of her time in a fantasy world, her viewpoint is understandable if not predictable."
I might point out that James Patterson, who Gomez refers to several times in the book when talking about bestselling novels, writes his stories by hand first, to later be typed and printed into hugely popular novels. These arguments discounting the merit of established authors and other successful people in the industry left me dissatisfied with a book I had hoped to contain a reasonable and informed argument. Yes, there is a new wave of digital media currently overtaking the world of books and reading, but I still remain quite unconvinced about many of these predictions.
A somewhat informative read, though I often found myself very annoyed at the criticism of authors not willing to release their books digitally. His jab at J.K. Rowling is hypocritical and borders on a personal attack: "J.K. Rowling is yet another author who believes that the only place for words is on the page. Because of this, she has resolutely insisted that each of her blockbuster Harry Potter books not appear in digital form. Of course, for someone who writes long books in longhand, not to mention spending all of her time in a fantasy world, her viewpoint is understandable if not predictable."
I might point out that James Patterson, who Gomez refers to several times in the book when talking about bestselling novels, writes his stories by hand first, to later be typed and printed into hugely popular novels. These arguments discounting the merit of established authors and other successful people in the industry left me dissatisfied with a book I had hoped to contain a reasonable and informed argument. Yes, there is a new wave of digital media currently overtaking the world of books and reading, but I still remain quite unconvinced about many of these predictions.
April 1, 2010
3.75 stars
Reading this book certainly made me feisty--Gomez writes some things that made me nearly scream in frustration. But his opinions also gave me new things to think about in the digital debate. While I'd already decided that book digitalization heralded some positive possibilities, and thus somewhat tepidly (but with some excitement too) accepted it, I hadn't really considered it as necessary to the culture of reading. Gomez points out that generations now growing up completely online will be unlikely to want to read anything in a format beyond their digital standard, and if digital books are not a fundamental part of the literary landscape, they simply will not read. Here is another reason to embrace digitalization, I suppose.
A few of his points do strike me as silly: he tends to continually compare books to music, and and while I understand that both industries may reflect some similar patterns, I don't think that they are perfectly parallel. I do not believe, as does Gomez, that just because we like to play songs in whatever order we like will mean that we will want to jumble pieces of stories in such a fashion. At least, not as a rule. I hope future generations won't be so daft.
Yet aside from a few false notes, his arguments are thoughtful and provided good material for consideration, and I'm glad I read this book.
Reading this book certainly made me feisty--Gomez writes some things that made me nearly scream in frustration. But his opinions also gave me new things to think about in the digital debate. While I'd already decided that book digitalization heralded some positive possibilities, and thus somewhat tepidly (but with some excitement too) accepted it, I hadn't really considered it as necessary to the culture of reading. Gomez points out that generations now growing up completely online will be unlikely to want to read anything in a format beyond their digital standard, and if digital books are not a fundamental part of the literary landscape, they simply will not read. Here is another reason to embrace digitalization, I suppose.
A few of his points do strike me as silly: he tends to continually compare books to music, and and while I understand that both industries may reflect some similar patterns, I don't think that they are perfectly parallel. I do not believe, as does Gomez, that just because we like to play songs in whatever order we like will mean that we will want to jumble pieces of stories in such a fashion. At least, not as a rule. I hope future generations won't be so daft.
Yet aside from a few false notes, his arguments are thoughtful and provided good material for consideration, and I'm glad I read this book.
March 15, 2008
Un-ironically, I read this 'book' as an eBook on my way to New Zealand. Definitely find his argument that the fetish of the book prohibits publishers and old school readers from seeing how 'reading' has changed and how we need to begin rethinking how the book will emerge from the holding pattern of the pages between the covers.
I'm actually a fan of the Sony eReader as an alternative medium on which to read. It's easier to travel with since it doesn't increase the weight of my luggage. For the most part, I use it to read articles on the web in a much more pleasing format, as well as a more mobile format. My advice to eBook companies - de-emphasize the book. Focus on what what eBooks do better, such as reading articles that lots of us print out from the web. Again, it's more pleasant to read than on paper or a standard computer screen and the format is much more mobile than reams of paper. Then, people might be more likely to read the occasional book on eBooks too.
Such is the kind of thoughtful discussion PRINT IS DEAD stimulates about where reading is headed, rather than the reactionary (false) moral debates you read too often in the pages of newspapers and magazines.
I'm actually a fan of the Sony eReader as an alternative medium on which to read. It's easier to travel with since it doesn't increase the weight of my luggage. For the most part, I use it to read articles on the web in a much more pleasing format, as well as a more mobile format. My advice to eBook companies - de-emphasize the book. Focus on what what eBooks do better, such as reading articles that lots of us print out from the web. Again, it's more pleasant to read than on paper or a standard computer screen and the format is much more mobile than reams of paper. Then, people might be more likely to read the occasional book on eBooks too.
Such is the kind of thoughtful discussion PRINT IS DEAD stimulates about where reading is headed, rather than the reactionary (false) moral debates you read too often in the pages of newspapers and magazines.
August 22, 2013
I anticipated being inevitably disappointed, but instead discovered a deeper understanding of myself and ergo why I love books. I am profoundly obsessed with not just writing stories, but sharing a perspective in its most raw form. I must say that for the life of me I never did feel like I could ever find le mot juste to cut it. Now I understand why. I don't write books. I write experiences. I want to be experienced. I continually seek means to utilize these new technologies and yet my form (the printed word) remains anachronistic refusing to evolve with the times. Why?
"It's important to remember that pages were invented to hold words; words were not invented to fill pages."
That's it! Thanks Jeff! Nail on the head. Jeff Gomez manages to say a great deal more about the history of this art form of self-expression than I could of ever anticipated. And this world of ever budding technology still manages to be pertinent today. I regret my arrogance and I am thankful for my conquering open mindedness which afforded me this opportunity to learn.
"It's important to remember that pages were invented to hold words; words were not invented to fill pages."
That's it! Thanks Jeff! Nail on the head. Jeff Gomez manages to say a great deal more about the history of this art form of self-expression than I could of ever anticipated. And this world of ever budding technology still manages to be pertinent today. I regret my arrogance and I am thankful for my conquering open mindedness which afforded me this opportunity to learn.
February 26, 2008
Yes, it's sort of ironic that it's a PRINT BOOK about print being dead, but this book is fascinating, engrossing, and, I think, really important. If people don't rethink the way we read, print--more importantly, the ideas encapsulated within books--actually WILL die. Some of the ideas Gomez discusses are really exciting (some take the concept a little too far, but most of them are pretty solid).
I think the most important idea to take away from this book is that the future of reading and writing is in trouble, and as publishers, we need to focus on what can be done to keep people reading and how best to serve them. The internet is a powerful tool, and we need to learn how to fully use it to benefit our noble profession.
The author has a blog too: www.printisdeadblog.com
I think the most important idea to take away from this book is that the future of reading and writing is in trouble, and as publishers, we need to focus on what can be done to keep people reading and how best to serve them. The internet is a powerful tool, and we need to learn how to fully use it to benefit our noble profession.
The author has a blog too: www.printisdeadblog.com
March 11, 2011
Print is Dead suffers from problems similar to The Cult of the Amateur's, albeit in the opposite direction. Too much time spent making analogies with music, which isn't really comparable to books—at least those meant to be read as a whole; too dismissive of people who continue to prefer pbooks even when they admit that ebooks might objectively seem "better" (more features, etc.). Jeff Gomez does make some good points about how new kinds of storytelling will develop for digital reading environments, but he doesn't think enough about what we'll lose if the form/structure imposed by the pbook disappears.
February 5, 2008
I understand the push-back against ebooks (books are great objects and much warmer and fuzzier than digital media), but the more I read about the possibilities of digital books, the more open and excited I am about them. As the author says, ebooks (or web-books) could open the linear nature of narrative for writers -- and make possible innovations in stories which we may never have imagined. So although as a reader, I could take or leave digital books -- as a writer, I'm awakened to a new definition of what story could become.
March 15, 2010
A not-so-academic book about a rather academic subject. It's nice to see someone take on what many might consider a "stuffy" topic with a tone that makes it a quick and easy read. Yes, Jeff Gomez does dedicate a lot of space to pop culture references, but the digital world is filled with pop culture references.
Came out with a few interesting thoughts and quotes which may be useful for the masters paper. At least I'm hoping so.
Came out with a few interesting thoughts and quotes which may be useful for the masters paper. At least I'm hoping so.
March 21, 2010
This was actually a book I had to review for a class but it's a fast read and really an interesting snapshot of the transition from print reading to screen reading. There were a few of his arguments that I found to be a bit overzealous and reactionary (as well as a couple of things that I Seriously hope are exaggerations) but otherwise it was a really interesting and worth while read, and I do recommend it.
November 6, 2011
This nonfiction work details Gomez’s observations on the move from digital to print. Staunchly in favor of digital reading, Gomez writes to say that though book-reading might change and books, too, might change, we still need books more than ever: books aren’t dying, but print is dead. Gomez taught me to open my mind to the digital world of books, to consider how my work will be read in the future and how that affects my message.
July 6, 2014
As loathe as I am to admit it, Jeff Gomez makes a very tight, supported argument, albeit a little repetitive. Anyone invested in the book industry - whether through emotion or livelihood - should read this book, even just to understand this argument and be conscious of the changes going on around us.
April 4, 2008
This book was thoroughly upsetting for a book cover/print designer working in the publishing field. But it the arguments were well thought out, with substantial support. I don’t believe that “Print is Dead,” but I do realize that the field is evolving faster than some of us can imagine or admit.
May 3, 2008
I actually read the whole book this time. Here's my previous response from audio excerpts.
March 30, 2009
While it was a little simplistic at times, I thought the author asked some good questions about the future of reading, and how organizations like libraries or publishers provide services to book consumers.
September 13, 2014
An Ebook manifesto.
Though Gomez's argumentation is one-sided, he does a good job of pointing out critical evidence that suggests the end of printing as we know it.
I would reccomend this to any Ebook sceptics.
Though Gomez's argumentation is one-sided, he does a good job of pointing out critical evidence that suggests the end of printing as we know it.
I would reccomend this to any Ebook sceptics.
November 24, 2007
This book is absolutely in my shopping list, really attractive cover, descriptions, and reviews about this book. Can't wait to read it soon..
April 12, 2008
Revolution will be uploaded.
November 30, 2010
Aangenaam leesmateriaal, nogal naïef en over-the-top, maar wel goed geschreven.
October 13, 2011
Boooooooring and didn't have a good argument for his point other than discrediting those who opposed him
June 6, 2012
Good insights, but already starting to feel dated.
February 20, 2011
It was okay. I still don't buy his argument, but he had a lot of interesting points.
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