Wired

Long Live “Print is Dead!”

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It has become a popular parlor trick to predict the future of the publishing industry. Friends gather at the home of some mustachioed landed gentleman, and the good host closes his eyes, rubs his temples and says, “Profits from ebook sales will represent a fifty-percent market share by 2020,” or sometimes, leaning against a shimmering black piano, the host will lower his eyes and whisper, “Print is dead.”

But for as much as we love to participate in this game, as much as we enjoy applauding with righteous indignation as heroes lament the gurgling collapse of printed books and newspapers, the future is unpredictable. We can see patterns, and we can make analogies from similar industries in the past, but the future is truly unknowable.

I have previously suggested that neither the book industry nor the newspaper industry are terminal. And now, Evan Hughes, writing for Wired.com, echoes my thoughts by illustrating some of the vast complexities of the publishing industry:

Of all the worries in the publishing world these days, the king of them is cultural irrelevance. “The fact is that people don’t read anymore,” Steve Jobs told a reporter in 2008, blurting out the secret fear of bookish people everywhere. But consider this: In one week, people who don’t read anymore bought about half a million copies of a really long book called Steve Jobs. In the past year, Vintage has sold one book from the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy for every six American adults. The Big Six publishers—Random House, Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins—all make money, and at profit margins that are likely better than they were 50 years ago.

Hughes masterfully illustrates how the interests of a variety of parties — writers, Amazon, the Big Six publishers, and readers — have become murky. New technology has altered the marketplace like a black light changes an unlit room. But to claim, as has been claimed since before Mark Twain’s day, that “print is dead” — to claim that this latest new bit of technology will destroy the others — is to make a claim inconsistent with the complexities of the present and the curious weavings of the past.

But maybe it makes sense for publishers and authors to whip together a fear frenzie about print’s impending doom? Much the way North Korean leaders have kept their starving nation in perpetual late-stage preparations for global war, maybe a constant terror stream about the future of print will keep otherwise borderline book-buyers safely in the cradling arms of writers and publishers?

So I say, why not? I say: Long live “print is dead!” It may be all that is keeping print alive.

From Dissatisfaction to Inspiration

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Jason Tanz of Wired shared this, the story Peter Molyneux. The famed video game designer behind Populous and Fable, Molyneux had fallen into the fish’s belly portion of his career, but then a fake Twitter account that poked fun at his foibles inspired him to quit his job and start afresh, to become as carefree and challenging as his alter ego @PeterMolydeux.

The story intrigues, inspires, and troubles. Most troubling, and most pertinent, was Molyneux’s struggles with his own finished products and his own disappointments:

Molyneux couldn’t fault the critics. They had a point. He too considered each release something of a letdown. For Molyneux, starting work on a new project was like stepping onto a stone outcrop, looking out over a blanket of fog, and waiting for the mist to clear and reveal what was lying underneath. He couldn’t stop himself from conjuring up the most tantalizing possibilities—the equivalent of finding himself atop a mountain, a lush landscape rolling beneath him. And so every time the fog lifted, he couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. Now, at the presumed twilight of his career, it seemed as though he’d never get a chance to create a game that was worthy of his dreams.

Few of my own writings, whether poems, essays or emails, feel finished. My father, an artist of a painting sort, says his works are never complete, never quite how he imagined them.

It is frustrating to never be able to complete the story we wanted and for which we hoped. It is frustrating, but it is also a side effect of the human frame. And it is what keeps us writing, what keeps Molyneux imagining new, bizarre worlds hewn together with pixels and code, what keeps my father practicing his craft.

Do not become satisfied with your own work. Refine it until your choices are between two goods, but not greats, and then wish it Fare thee well. And then turn to your next ambition. Turn to your next challenge. And blossom in your dissatisfaction.