Last month, Nicholas Negroponte, leader of the One Laptop per Child Foundation and founder and former chairman of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, warned his audience at a technology conference that printed books would be “dead” within five years. As proof of the coming revolution, he referred to a disclosure by the pioneering online bookseller Amazon.com that it now sells more electronic than hard cover books, a sign many analysts have taken as a death knell for traditional trade publishing. In the United States, ebook sales have doubled and figures for the second quarter of 2010 show that $90 million worth of e-books were purchased in the US alone, mostly by first-time buyers. Apple, one of the most competitive latecomers to electronic publishing, recently announced that since April of this year users of its iTunes service have downloaded more than 35 million ebooks – it qualified this somewhat by pointing out that most were free texts such as those available at Project Gutenberg.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, believes that his company’s popular Kindle readers have now reached a “tipping point” which will spur explosive growth and transform modern publishing. (A trend that Amazon has bravely cultivated by selling popular titles to the public for less than it acquired them.) But in the brave new world of electronic media, despite their many attractions books still have a long way to go before they can hope to match the popularity of music and video.
Statistics for online sales offer striking evidence of our collective neglect of words whenever we are also offered images and sound. The iTunes store, for example, has now processed downloads for 12 billion songs, nearly half a billion TV episodes, and 100 million movies. As things currently stand it seems quite clear that we are moving further away from words with each technological innovation, and closer to video-based communication. Two months ago, Chris Anderson, a former journalist and publisher who is now the curator of the TED talks, told his audience that “Humanity watches 80 million hours of YouTube every day [and] Cisco actually estimates that, within four years, more than 90 per cent of the web’s data will be video.” Recognizing that this epochal shift in the way we communicate is currently taking place largely via the mass recirculation of infantilizing ephemera, Anderson continued, “If it’s all puppies, porn and piracy, we’re doomed [but] I don’t think it will be. Video is high-bandwidth for a reason. It packs a huge amount of data, and our brains are uniquely wired to decode it.” If that is true, then the transmutation of books into electronic data will make little difference to the fate of the printed word. For in a world of endlessly streaming video, the solitude which lies at the heart of reading will soon seem as old fashioned as vinyl records or non-digital photography.
The declining value of print is also evident in political communication. President Obama, for example, now communicates with his supporters primarily via social media networks. Despite his reputation as an intelligent public speaker (and author of two lucid, bestselling books) it is widely acknowledged that he transmits his most effective messages via his Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts (which have 13 million, 5 million and 200,000 followers respectively). Sarah Palin – whose ghostwritten autobiography has also become a bestseller – is slowly closing the gap: she has 2.5 million Facebook friends and 250,000 Twitter followers. Unquestionably there are advantages to communicating this quickly and frequently, but the ease of messaging has a downside too. A few months ago, Sarah Palin’s “death panels” comment on her Facebook page, sidetracked the healthcare debate for weeks, at minimal cost to her political organization.
Fast, concise and frequent communication is very desirable in the complex new media landscape, but these networks are prone to distortions and sensationalism far more often than longer forms of communication were, especially those which required traditional editing, such as presidential addresses, reports and books.
Some of us may find consolation in the knowledge that new technology usually overhauls earlier forms more often than it destroys them. Television didn’t kill movies, nor did radio broadcasts make newspapers irrelevant, they simply forced the older systems to adapt. Seen in this light, the advent of cheap, portable new media devices could easily offer new possibilities for convergence, allowing the audience to momentarily leave their book to verify and contextualize information via another medium (video, audio) before returning to the original text. Or it could become an endless series of distractions which completely subvert traditional reading. It is too soon to say how our reading habits will develop, but the early signs are not promising.
In one of The Communist Manifesto’s most memorable passages, Marx warns against the bourgeois appetite for “constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production. . . and with them the whole relations of society.” This endless reinvention causes “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation . . . All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” The transformation of books and other media into disembodied electronic forms is a perfect illustration of these disruptions, but Marx’s following sentences are even more prescient: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.” Will the “death” of printed books cause such a radical shift in consciousness, or will these predictions turn out to be another example of overblown futurism (such as the now laughable promise from the 1980s of the “paperless office”)? If Nicholas Negroponte is correct, it won’t be long before we know the answers.
