Digital Media

“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.”

–John Gardner

A friend, M, and I were talking about the iPad the other night. I said I thought it was going to be a huge success because it (and its successors and imitators) will become the new media consumption platform. Such a prediction isn’t in character for me because I’m not an early adopter. I usually don’t get excited by new gadgets or technology. But I’m a big Apple fan, an avid reader and overall media junkie. M. looked skeptical and said, with a somewhat mournful expression, that books will never go away. I agreed and said that, from what I had observed, a new medium doesn’t usually wipe out older forms of media. Rather than replacing them, it simply displaces them to a role that fits their strengths. TV didn’t kill radio but most people now only listen to the radio while they’re driving. The Internet didn’t kill TV, etc. It’s different in the technology world where the new replaces the old. Remember shrink wrapped software and Zip drives?

So what about the print world these days? It’s obvious that newspapers are migrating into the digital realm. The only question is how much longer will a physical paper be delivered to your home. These days I read my physical copy of the NYT with my laptop open beside it. I jump between physical content, digital content, social networks and email. The logical division between physical content and digital content seems to be based on the time sensitivity of the content. We want “news” to be as current as possible. But I don’t mind that Paul Krugman wrote his column 2 days ago. Or that an investigative piece uncovering political corruption in the Bush administration (just a random example) was written last week. As the paper gets thinner, I’m reading more and more of the NYT online. And that’ll increasingly be the case with other print media like books and magazines.

The iPad is going to accelerate that process for me, just as the iPhone changed how I use a phone. The iPad will deliver the content I want with my email and bookmarks all on one device. Not to mention my music, photos and videos. At first I was worried about its portability vs. the Kindle, (which I don’t own). But it’s the size of an 8 1/2 x 11 page and weighs a pound and a half. Even a light laptop weighs almost 5 pounds.

M. said he loved the tactile nature of books and I agree. What’s a home without a book collection, however small? Great works of literature will continue to exist as books. Dickens, Shakespeare—you want to see them on a shelf. You want to pass them on to your kids. (How does this work with ebooks? I email my sons a file of a book I liked when I was their age? I zap it to their Kindle?) Books will become rarer but more treasured as a result. I see a resurgence of sales for hardback classics as ebooks become more popular. I just bought two books through Amazon that, because I won’t care about them in 10 years, I should have bought digitally. Some content is disposable and ephemeral. Every book we read doesn’t change our lives. I’ll take a flyer on a digital album because it’s cheap and easy to delete if I don’t like it. (I never seem to be able to throw out CDs or books for some reason.) Disposable content has a place in our lives (although it’s generating a lot of noise these days at the expense of more thoughtful commentary).

Continuing his defense of books, M. said he likes being able to pull books off his shelf to look for a quotation or fact or favorite passage. (He’s a political commentator, among other things.) I responded that searching through his collection would definitely be easier if it was in a digital form. That gave us both pause.

The discussion got me thinking about the effect of digitization on other forms of media. Tivo has got me watching more TV than ever because I can control the experience. Digital photos are a huge improvement for storing and viewing pictures. The same for music. I can find songs or artists so much more easily now. Remember browsing through Tower Records?  Now when I hear a tune on the radio while I’m driving I make a note of the time then look it up on the radio station’s web site when I get home. I often buy the song or album right away. I do the same with XM Radio, which displays the song title and artist in real time. I have an MP3 server on my house audio system and we love to put it on Random and let it serendipitously create a mix of our favorites and songs we barely recognize while we’re entertaining or just sitting around. That said, I still buy some CDs, usually of artists who mean a lot to me because I like having the physical CD. But I usually burn it onto the MP3 server and that’s how we listen to it. If we had iPod docks in our cars I think I would have stopped buying CDs by now.

Books, on the other hand, have been around for over five hundred years. Even the most tech-friendly of us agree they’re an excellent way to store and distribute information. They’re appealing in their physical form—unlike record albums, cassettes and CDs.

There’s much more to think about here and so I’ve created a digital media category on the blog. Incidentally, the longtime book critic at the NYT, Michiko Kakutani, wrote in an interesting article in last Sunday’s Times about the changing value of role of content in a digital world. It’s well worth reading.