“All truths are not meant for all ears; not all lies can be recognized as such by pious spirits. The book is a fragile creature, it suffers from the use of time.”–Benedictine Monk, The Name Of The Rose (Umberto Eco)
Back in the day books were the domain of the privileged and the elite. Books were very expensive and therefore scarce. Each book made had to be individually hand-written, hand-drawn, hand-stitched and hand-bound. Scribes diligently scrawled literary works onto parchment by candlelight, the least educated of them charged with the binding and detailing. Then one day someone arrived with a new machine which replicated this work exactly and quickly. No longer was information clenched in the fists of the powerful and rich. Now everyone would have access to knowledge. The world changed that day. And no doubt some monk somewhere belligerently waved his inky quill in protest.
Ironically it was the medium that, until then, had done the most damage to the supremacy of the printed page that named Johann Gutenberg number one on A&E's Biography: 100 Most Influential People of the Millennium. But if Gutenberg were alive today he would most certainly (I like to think) scoff at the invention that made him immortal as he downloaded a new app.
Let’s be clear … to question or underestimate the importance of moveable type would be beyond absurd. The invention of the printing press and mass media changed the course of human history, tearing down barriers to information and knowledge that enabled the progress of mankind in ways we may never fully appreciate, and paved the way for media as we know it today. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the printing press in the history of human progress, and we are all far better off today because of it.
But the press, the printed page, is the means, not the end … it is merely a device designed to serve a greater master: ideas.
Perhaps it’s just a sign of the times, or a normal reaction to fast, consequential change, but some of you out there have taken up the mantle of the The Book to the detriment of The Content. You are, quite literally, missing the forest for the trees. You people, the members of what I like to call the Dead Tree Society, who bemoan and resist the inevitable, are missing the point completely. The book was never about “the book”. It is, and always has been, about the words. The book is but a vehicle (a very, very successful vehicle in its day) used to deliver a product. And like all technologies, this vehicle’s time in the limelight was finite, and is now drawing to a close. We should let it die with the dignity it has earned.
“No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.” –Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
Not too long ago I was in a client meeting observing a colleague pitching his marketing program, which revolved around a coffee table book of sorts. He pointed out that if the client purchased the 50-book package that they could expect “over seventy people” to see each book over the course of its lifetime, as he pushed a sample across the table, rubbing the corner of a page between his fingers and inviting the prospect to feel the quality of the paper. This was 2010, and he was not being sarcastic and showed no visible signs of embarrassment. Remarkable. Another person told me that their company was not interested in digital marketing because their boss insisted on seeing actual tear sheets from each campaign … for those of you fellow digitarians, a tear sheet is an actual piece of paper, ripped out of a publication. Yes, some people apparently still use those. Yet another friend on Facebook spoke lovingly of the weight and the smell of a printed book, protesting that the experience of a digital book just isn’t the same. That’s easy, I told her, just tear out a couple of pages, roll them up and stick them in your nose, then fire up an iPad and read any of the hundreds of thousands of available books or magazines, or watch a movie, or listen to music, or send an email, or call your mother, or do some work, or chat with friends, or surf the internet, or play a game, or whatever. There are more examples, but you get the picture.
When challenged to provide reasons why they prefer paper books, DTS members inevitably present some ham-handed reason why digital just doesn’t cut it, and the reason is always subjective or nostalgic in nature, and always based on a lack of knowledge or outright misinformation.
By all objective measures, when it comes to content, the digital channel is a vastly superior delivery system in every way. Not only is it easier to produce content for digital distribution, but it is also much cheaper. The same goes for the delivery of the content. In addition, the digital medium provides a platform for sharing, creating discussions around content and enabling information to go viral and to spread out across the world, finding its way organically into the hands of people who want it. While traditional media is a one-to-one monologue used to talk at people, the digital medium is a scalable, many-to-many multilogue in which anyone can easily participate. As such, the digital channel gives life to content that print cannot.
Even the most traditional of media are learning that they must adapt. Nigel Portwood, Chief Executive of Oxford University Press, told The Sunday Times of London in a recent interview that the market for print dictionaries “is just disappearing” and “falling away by tens of percent a year.” When asked about whether the upcoming (due in about a decade) third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary would still be available in print, Mr. Portwood replied, “I don’t think so.”
Consider the life-cycle of that magazine in your hand: someone went out into a forest and cut down a tree, which was floated down a river and loaded onto a truck and taken to a mill, where it was debarked, cut, chipped, cooked and digested, washed, bleached, beaten, refined, screened, wired, pressed, dried, pressed again, rolled, reeled and cut. The end result was loaded (again) onto a truck and taken to a printing plant where it was fed into a large, loud, belching machine and chemically-treated, inked four times, dried, compiled, assembled, cut, bound, packed and loaded (yet again) onto another truck to be taken to a warehouse, then loaded (again) onto another truck to a store where it sat on a shelf waiting for you to notice it, pick it up and read it. And after you’re done reading it, you will likely toss it aside. In the time it took to write this paragraph the previous one could have been distributed online with the push of a button, making its way around the world, being shared and discussed, potentially, by millions.
If content is king, then why make him ride that rusty, old unicycle? Give your content the royal treatment it deserves. Roll out the red carpet. Roll out the magic carpet. As Dr. Emmett Brown said, “Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.”
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