Burning the Page

The print revolution in Gutenberg’s time was truly revolutionary because it allowed knowledge to be distributed to masses of people. It was no longer necessary to hoard parchment, and books weren’t only available for the elite. Printing has undergone changes since then, but most of them have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

For example, when mass-market paperbacks emerged in the mid-1930s, they weren’t revolutionary. Mass-market paperbacks were pioneered by the Penguin publishing house, which took the novel approach of producing books from cheap pulp, hence the term “pulp fiction.” In fact, the mass-market paperback books themselves could be recycled into pulp and reused as paper for the publisher’s next mass-market paperback. All the books you see in grocery-store checkout aisles and airports owe their existence to the mass-market paperback format. The idea was evolutionary because it allowed books to be sold for even cheaper prices and for incrementally more people to read them.

Don’t get me wrong; we need evolutionary improvements.

But revolutions are acts of genius. They take multiple evolutionary improvements and compress them into one new product. Gutenberg’s printing was revolutionary because it combined multiple evolutionary improvements (moveable type, the printing press, and oil-based inks). The iPhone was revolutionary in the same way (large touchscreen phone, apps, GPS, and unlimited data plans), and so were ebooks.

As a culture, we can’t go back to the pre-iPhone days of the mere cell phone. And we can’t go back to the pre-ebook days of Borders, B. Dalton, and your local bookseller. In part, that’s because these stores are closed, bankrupted. The immediacy of digital ebook downloads and the convenience of a cloud-based library have replaced them. Moreover, ebooks are eternal.

Classical scholars may hope one day to find a lost work of Aeschylus in the bindings of an Egyptian mummy or Shakespeare’s Love’s Labors Won in an old English priory. But ebooks democratize and extend the longevity of books. Your aunt’s self-published volume of cat poetry will survive the eons, and your grandpa’s autobiography will help your descendant in the twenty-fourth century to build a family tree. Our words aren’t dependent on penurious scribes or budget-minded librarians or choosy auditors at the Library of Congress. Our words are liberated—that is, if we choose to write them in the first place.

Paradoxically, even though ebooks have ushered in a revolution in reading, the digital culture of our internet age is making writing more difficult.

The flip side of digital reading is digital creation. I’ve written a lot here about how ebooks are changing the way we read, but how is digital technology changing how we write?

We’re getting more used to the idea of ebooks, but many artists still prefer to sketch on paper instead of the digital medium, and many writers still prefer to carry journals with them in which to record their ideas and impressions.

Digital journals still haven’t become mainsteam. However, some companies are providing an interesting bridge between print and digital for writing. For example, Moleskine and Evernote have recently partnered to create a hybrid system that lets you write or draw on a special kind of paper inside Moleskine notebooks. The paper lends itself to automatic digitization and cloud upload through Evernote, a company that aims to let you archive and revisit all your memos and ideas online. I think this is great because it can make content more searchable and reusable. Content from a journal can be copied and pasted into a term paper or business plan rather than having to be retyped. Innovations like this make us more efficient.

I’d like to say that I’m an early adopter and I’m deliberately choosing to write 100 percent digitally from now on, on principle. But the reality is otherwise—I had to learn from my own misfortune to go fully digital.

Sometime over the weekend in summer, on a rare vacation, I lost my own journal. It might have been at a bakery or a farmers’ market. It might have been at a bar or a gallery, but I lost it. I no longer have my journal.

It was a blue journal, the size of a regular notebook, with drawings and writing inside. It’s worthless to anyone but me. It has everything I wrote over the last two years. There are no passwords or bank account numbers in my journal. But there are illustrations I made and ideas I had about digital media.

What is the lesson of losing my journal?

I need to go fully digital.

I learned that you can’t back up your journal to Dropbox or any other cloud backup service. And who knew? There’s no kiosk in a mall where you can back up or scan in regular, everyday objects so you can restore them if you lose them. There would be such a service in the ideal world, in the best of all possible worlds, but there isn’t here. Dropbox is great, but it won’t work for real-world artifacts, for things. Only bits.

Because of the experience of losing my journal, I decided to go fully digital in my writing from now on. The experience of losing my journal has turned me into that guy in the corner of Starbucks who wears headphones and talks to his iPad, dictating his thoughts in a public place and making a fool of himself. It has exiled me to the shady corners of coffee shops and bus stations, away from the happy patrons who I might otherwise annoy with my dictational monologue. Losing my journal has made me mutter to myself like an old, drunken crazy man.

There’s a benefit to this, of course. I can now back up whatever I write. If I have a kid one day, I’ll give her all my blank journals and let her draw in them. Or maybe I’ll give my kid a secondhand iPad, so her scrawls last a thouand digital years. The digital mode of creation immortalizes us; the analog mode humbles us.

I’m not the first writer in history to lose a journal. Some writers have lost more. Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano, retired to the coast of British Columbia to write his second novel. He spent seven years writing in a cabin he built out of driftwood, but when he was about to mail his manuscript to his publisher, his house burned down and he lost everything. He had to spend another seven years rewriting and reconstructing the book, which was finally published as Ultramarine but which even the author himself admitted was a bit of a flop. Something about the loss affected his writing, and the book was never as good as the original. Reconstructions rarely are.

There’s something about the surety of the Save button. When I save a document—like this one, as I type it on my computer—I know it’s instantly copied to the cloud. I’m safe, my writings are backed up, and I rest easy. Until, at least, the cloud topples over one day, and what was once in the much-vaunted cloud is reduced to digital dust. I imagine a collosal implosion, like that in the season finale of Lost where Locke destroys the Dharma Initiative’s Swan station. In the buildup to the countdown on Lost, you see computers toppling over, steel walls imploding, all the girders creaking and straining, the countdown clock itself imploding, knives flying, metal struts rending and shrieking, and you hear the high-pitched whine of metal, the catastrophonic sounds of electromagnets bending the walls, and a woman’s voice announcing systems failure, before Locke admits, “I was wrong.” Easily the best three minutes in TV history.

But the digital cloud won’t topple for a while.

Maybe it will in fifty years or so, once we can no longer afford to power the many clouds. Facebook has its cloud, and so do Amazon, Apple, and Twitter. Basically, it’s new gold-rush country, but instead of gold, people are mining clouds. Old stalwart companies like Adobe and even Walmart need to have their own clouds. There are even companies selling devices to small businesses so they can manage their own clouds.

It’s faddish, and it may all fail one day.

Maybe then people will return to a simpler mode of life. Return to writing with pen and ink and, yes, the peril of permanently losing what you’ve written.

Both print and digital are ephemeral. Our works can be destroyed in an instant with either. But at least digital versions give you backups.

All these backups do introduce one casualty, however. With digital writing, there will be fewer manuscripts for sale. There used to be a healthy after-market among collectors to buy not only the first editions of a given novel, but also the author’s own manuscript. With digital manuscripts, this kind of collecting is pointless. Since value is typically related to scarcity, there’s no value to a unique good if it can be duplicated an infinite number of times.

Though I’m bullish on digital writing, I do want to note that in the process of writing this chapter, my word-processing software crashed. Twice. I almost lost everything I wrote. Even after recovering what I could, a lot had to be rewritten from memory. So take this paean to the benefits of digital writing with a grain of digital salt!

That caveat aside, now that so much is digitally composed, authorship is flourishing.

Writing digitally instead of on old-fashioned typewriters lends itself to faster publication. Ebooks can be self-published in just hours. Retailers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon and Smashwords, who have their own self-publishing portals, have created ways of disconnecting authors from publishers. Authors who are savvy enough to use the newer self-publishing tools are flourishing.

It’s been said of the American Revolution, in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, that it was a revolution of the people, for the people, and by the people. But let me tell you something about the ebook revolution: this is a revolution of the publishers, for the readers, by the retailers.

Strangely enough, the roles of authors are mostly unchanged in this revolution. They’re still going to write on their computers or typewriters. Yes, some manuscripts are still typed out on old typewriters, although composing books digitally lends them a felicitous fluidity that enables them to be published faster. They’re more immediate now than ever before.

In fact, digital authorship is alive and well! So many wonderfully obscure and unknown books are published on Kindle’s self-publishing platform, ranging from “lost books” of the Odyssey to bizarre theories of the universe. The rise of self-publishing and ebooks is giving little-known authors a megaphone. And sometimes the authors are heard. A few of them start out as self-published and then resell their books to big publishers, where they actually can be more successful.

Such authors may have gotten their start with self-publishing, but they become truly successful only when courted afterward by a traditional publisher, who helps the author craft the raw content into a polished product that readers really want. Traditional publishers also provide such initially self-published authors with a bigger and better marketing platform, a broader reach, and frankly, legitimacy.

I joke sometimes that self-publishing is mainly about cat poetry, but the universe of self-published content is truly vast. If only it were possible to surf through all these words easily, if only I could have a buffet of this content all at once—and truly, I do love to read, because to me reading is like being a starving omnivore at an all-you-can-eat buffet!

There’s no better time than now to be a reader.

And it’s a truly democratic time now for being an author, in that anyone who can use Microsoft Word or blog-authoring tools can quickly publish a book—but with democracy comes altogether too many options. In some ways, this is a case where the paradox of choice reigns supreme. Two or three hundred years ago, your choice of authors might’ve been limited to Daniel Defoe or Jonathan Swift, but now there are too many authors, too many choices. Almost too many choices, in fact.

There are so many choices now that we may be afraid to make a choice. This is known as the paradox of choice. It’s easier to choose between chocolate and vanilla than to choose between fifty-seven flavors at your local Baskin-Robbins. You’ll stare at all the flavors, numbed and likely to leave in despair, overwhelmed by all the choices.

In addition to swamping readers with a surfeit of great books, the ebook revolution will place demands on authors. Especially authors who choose to use larger publishers.

Publishers will eventually require their authors to log in to websites that show statistics about their books. For a given chapter that the author wrote, the sites will show statistics about what percent of people read that chapter, which pages were highlighted the most, which pages were shared most on social networks, and spelling mistakes or anachronisms that readers pointed out.

The author will need to use this data in making revisions for a second or third edition of the book. Or perhaps this data will be available to the author as he or she plans a new book—to see what content engaged readers most and what sections were too difficult for the target audience to read. Editors may not even be part of the process. Authorship may be a direct relationship between readers and authors, mediated by these web pages of statistics culled from the thousands of readers and their reactions to the content.

In the years ahead, authors will have to become amateur statisticians.

Likewise, these stats will open up worlds of possibility for the writing process itself. It will mean that the process of writing an ebook is no longer static.

When traditional brands launch a new ad campaign, they usually create multiple versions of the ad for what’s called “A/B” testing. Version A of the ad gets shown to one group of people online in a test market, and version B gets shown to another group. After a few days, the results are tallied, and whichever ad is more effective is picked to go national. The same process will happen with ebooks. An author will be able to publish version A of an ebook with a plotline that differs slightly from version B. Once results are in from readers, the author can pick the more effective ebook.

The ebook you read may be different from the ebook your friend reads, even if it has the same title. Ebooks are no longer static, in the same way that your experience of a given website is different from my own because the ads are customized, different for each of us. For an author, writing an ebook will be like a visit to the optometrist and getting fitted for new glasses. Better A? Better B?

The future of writing is changing and requires authors to be part engineer, part marketer, part statistician, and oh yes, part writer too.

Bookmark: Degraded Text

Monks in medieval monasteries worked hard to preserve the writing in scrolls and parchments whenever they’d recopy them. The same thing is true of the Arabs who cared for most of the Greek texts that we now have from the era of Plato and Sophocles. They were very wary of making textual missteps and introducing errors, concerned as they were with the wisdom of the past and the purity of the written word.

But now we’re in a more capitalistic time. There’s a frenzy of digitization going on with ebooks, and everyone’s rushing out of the woodwork to profit from books. As these profiteers rush to the market, the texts that they’re bringing us are getting degraded.

For example, there’s a wholesale rush to take all the books in free web archives that have been around for decades—like Project Gutenberg—and repackage them for Kindle and iPad. People are doing these conversions because such books, while not as popular as bestsellers from The New York Times, still have fans who would pay a modest premium to buy such a book. Although these books are likely to garner fewer sales than a more contemporary, popular book, a lot less effort is needed to ready them for sale to consumers. After all, the book has already been written and already digitized. It just needs to be reconverted to ebook format.

Because there’s such a frenzy happening now, however, many people are converting the same books over and over again and offering multiple versions of the same book for sale. Sometimes scores of different versions of the same text exist. But each version is corrupted in different ways. Because people are processing these books in bulk, they are rarely edited, and conversion errors rarely get caught. As a result, the books often get adulterated, and sections are chopped up or lost.

In extreme cases, the book is no longer readable. More frequently, explosions of bizarre symbols from the outer reaches of your keyboard appear in the text for no reason whatsoever, like someone swearing at you in a foreign language. There’s a great Japanese word for this: mojibake. This phenomenon is often seen on international web pages when they’re rendered badly in browsers, but it’s happening a lot in ebooks too. While this problem is usually more noticeable in public domain content, you’ll sometimes see it even in books from top-tier publishers, such as when an ebook is rushed to publication with insufficient time to review the quality.

You can’t blame the top publishers for moving fast. In a way, everyone involved with publishing is a bit of a hustler these days. There’s a wealth of opportunity to digitize the world’s content, an opportunity that will only come once to our culture as a whole.

Some of these hustlers and opportunists are very crafty. I know a Russian guy who took a flatbed scanner into the Kremlin archives and scanned away relentlessly at all the books in the archives, with the intent of selling them digitally. After doing this for three years, he had enough books to sell as cheap print reproductions of the originals, but he couldn’t convert them into digital books. That’s because his scanners only did black and white, with none of the shades of gray in between, and the quality was just too poor to convert the scans into digital books.

There’s a whole spectrum of opportunity for would-be mojibake hustlers these days. So go out and get yourself a flatbed scanner, fly to Iceland or Norway for a couple of years, and see what you can digitize! The gold rush is on to digitize content, and while you’re prospecting for gold, you might find entirely new minerals that no one is even aware of and for which there soon will be a market.

I’m thinking in particular about sheet music scores, old pamphlets, or postcards. There’s a wealth of material to scan in and digitize, and books are just one part of this. Newspapers and magazines are part of this gold rush, although frankly—and I’m completely unbiased here—books are sexier than anything else.

In addition to books, countless pamphlets, comics, newspapers, ’zines, and ephemera of every age could be digitized and made available. Books are only the surface of what’s possible. The printed word goes much deeper than the surface, and there’s a vast shadowy biosphere of words that’s currently unexplored and undigitized.

But what do you think? What would you really like to see digitized? What ephemera from our print past—from cereal boxes to greeting cards—do you think needs to be preserved for perpetuity?