Epilogue
As centuries pass by, the total quantity of works grows endlessly, and one can foresee a time when it will be almost as difficult to educate oneself in a library, as in the universe, and almost as fast to seek a truth in nature, as lost among an immense number of books . . .
—DENIS DIDEROT, Encyclopédie, 1755
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.
—VANNEVAR BUSH, “AS WE MAY THINK,”
The Atlantic, JULY 1945
THE PROBLEM WITH THE ENDING OF HISTORY BOOKS—also the beginning—is that history, unlike books, has no beginning and no end; it keeps flowing.
With remarkable frequency, the phrase is uttered, “The world is changing.” It is certainly true that the world is changing, but this sentence is often announced as though the world had never changed before. There has been no period in human history when the world was not changing. There is also a popular belief that now the world is changing more dramatically or more swiftly than it ever has before. That too is probably not true. During the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, scarcely a year passed without at least one life-changing new invention.
The invention of the cell phone has changed our lives, but has it had as great an influence as did the invention of the telephone? Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone in 1876, the same year that Nikolaus August Otto developed the first usable internal-combustion engine, which led the way to automobiles. The following year, Edison invented the phonograph, and Eadweard Muybridge the moving picture. The year after that, Joseph Wilson Swan built the incandescent lightbulb, the first bulb that would burn long enough for practical applications, and transparent film was invented. And it should be mentioned that yet another year later, the British Perforated Paper Company came out with the first toilet paper.
With fountain pens, barbed wire, machine guns, dishwashers, sewing machines, dynamite, radio, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, and more, it would seem that nineteenth-century people were reeling with change. Then the twentieth century started, with the airplane, plastic, cellophane, and still more. It was all dizzying, but it must also be remembered that many of these inventions, like the inventions of today, developed over decades, even over generations.
Today’s ideas, facilitated by the inventions of the Industrial Revolution, are taking as long to lead to new inventions as did the ideas of the Industrial Revolution. One of the reasons why we believe otherwise, why we imagine our times to be moving so swiftly, is that we live in an age of marketing. Electronic devices are built with planned obsolescence; that is, they are deliberately built not to last, so that everyone will have to buy another one soon. Every year new devices, only slightly different from the models that came before, come on the market and we are told that they are major new technological innovations. A similar technique was used to sell automobiles in the 1950s, before the laws of aerodynamics and fuel economy were widely understood. Each year, the car companies would introduce new cars that looked completely different from the old cars, even though in terms of technology they were pretty much the same. Such tactics are what make people buy.
WE SPEAK OF the electronic, computer, and digital “revolutions,” but many historians insist that there are no revolutions. Some evolutions are just faster than others. Certainly the digital revolution, like the Industrial Revolution, had no year attached to it like the French Revolution had in 1789.
As with the invention of paper, it is not really possible to say who invented the computer or when, despite this being recent history. Lately, it has become popular to attribute the invention—as Walter Isaacson suggests in The Innovators and James Essinger affirms in Ada’s Algorithm—to Ada Lovelace, poet Lord Byron’s neglected and brilliant daughter. In the early nineteenth century, she wrote the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine.
The computer age does seem to have its origins in the Industrial Revolution, and Ada Lovelace was probably the first to write about a machine that could be programmed to work on any problem. But her ideas were based on those of Charles Babbage, who had built a machine, the Difference Engine, that could make calculations. Her most famous work is an 1843 treatise on the potential of Babbage’s machine.
Forty years earlier, Joseph-Marie Jacquard had invented a loom that could be programmed with punch cards. Ada Lovelace was probably familiar with that machine because when the Luddites tried to smash them, her father, Lord Byron, famously spoke in the Luddites’ defense. Jacquard’s work probably also led Babbage to imagine his calculating machine, also programmable with punch cards.
In any event, Jacquard must be given some credit for the 1890 US Census, which Herman Hollerith was able to complete in one year instead of the estimated eight through the use of punch cards and electronics. That census marked the first time that information was processed through electronic circuits. Hollerith went on to found a company that eventually became the International Business Machines Corporation, IBM.
IN THE BEGINNING of the twenty-first century, there was a great deal of talk about the death of paper—it was going to be replaced by new technology. Few people believe that anymore, and most students of history never believed it, because in history it is rare for a new technology to completely replace an old one. Usually it just presents another valued alternative. Paper is used less today because some things are done electronically, but for some things, paper is preferred. This book was written electronically, but with the help of many paper books and numerous notebooks used while interviewing people or for jotting down observations. In the end, the book will be published both on paper and electronically.
For a time, it was thought that paper would at least disappear from offices. But this, too, is no longer expected to happen. All research shows that even as offices grow increasingly computerized, they still value paper for certain tasks. Passing out a printed report at a meeting has more impact than emailing it. People like to write down quick notes and memos on paper even if they have a cell phone with a memo function. Different people have different paper preferences and appear to enjoy having choices. The sales figures for office paper remain fairly stable. It should have been obvious that this would be the case once printers were connected to almost every computer in homes and offices. Printers remain a popular, often essential, piece of equipment.
Mitchell Kapor, whose spreadsheet program, Lotus, is only one of his many computer innovations, said, “To me it’s a simple-minded view that technology makes paper obsolete. . . . What I think is often underappreciated in the tech community is the virtues and properties of paper. You can take a piece and put it in your pocket. Will there ever be foldable computers?” He continued: “If you look at the history of computers, they were more conceived of as a calculating engine and filing cabinet than as literary machines.” Ironically, this was also true of the written word when it was first invented and also the first uses of paper. The first function was for facilitating calculations, and the second for storing information. It seems to be the order in which people think or possibly how they prioritize.
Vannevar Bush, an engineer born in the nineteenth century, was one of the early geniuses of electronics, and was in charge of US military research during World War II. He shaped the thinking of many others, including Kapor, with a 1945 essay in The Atlantic entitled “As We May Think.” Essentially, he was addressing the same issue that Diderot had addressed 190 years earlier: as the accumulated knowledge of humans gets ever greater, won’t we reach a point where it is too much to access, too much to sift through?
In 1755, Diderot foresaw the future need for a data bank even though he did not know what it would look like or what to call it. Similarly, in 1945, after the explosion of information created by the war, Vannevar Bush realized that computers were needed. Society creates the technology that it needs. This urgent issue regarding information storage, first expressed by Diderot, is what drove computer technology forward. Computers were not developed to replace books or paper; they were developed to be a better way to store and access information.
Will computers or some other form of technology ever actually replace paper? It can safely be said that this will not happen for a long time. But will it ever? It’s hard to say. As Kapor put it, “We don’t really know what paper is going to be up against.”
Many experiments with artificial intelligence are under way. In 2014, for the first time, two people, one in India and one in France, exchanged thoughts without using words. Is wordless communication the way of the future? If it is, there will certainly be people ready to tell us that this is the end of civilization as we know it, or at least that all grace and beauty will vanish, that life will be diminished.
There is a popular assumption that technology is limitless. Computers have advanced because other inventions—in particular, microchips—have advanced them. But it isn’t necessarily true that technology has no limits, as has recently been demonstrated by what is called Moore’s Law.
Gordon Moore was a chip maker and one of the founders of Intel. In 1965 he wrote an article, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” for Electronics magazine. In it, he discussed how every new chip had more transistors than the one developed before it, and the more transistors a chip had, the faster, more powerful, smaller, and cheaper a computer could be. Computers could be—and have been—built the size of a fingernail. In 1965 the number of transistor chips had been doubling every year, so Moore predicted that in ten years, chips would have 60,000 transistors. But then a few years later, he backed off from his “law” and said that the number of chips might double only every two years. Today, there are chips with 8 billion transistors. But the chip industry is uncertain how much longer they can keep increasing that number, or at least, how much longer they can keep increasing it so quickly. Moore thinks that the increase will continue, but not necessarily at the current rate. At some point, an idea reaches its full potential.
On the other hand, some other completely new idea may come along.
ANOTHER POPULAR PREDICTION in the early twenty-first century was that electronic books—ebooks—would replace printed books. But it turns out that people like printed books. Even computer people enjoy printed books. Young people in particular enjoy printed books over ebooks. In the early 2000s, the ebooks industry grew at a rapid rate. But people always forget, as Moore forgot with his “law,” that growth is greatest when you start at zero. If you sold one ebook last year and two this year, that is a 100 percent growth rate. But as the numbers grow higher, the growth-rate percentage slows. By the second decade of the century, it seemed that ebooks were well established but not growing. This actually came as a disappointment to book publishers, who had been counting on growth in ebook sales to counter the declining sales in other formats—for example, the paperback.
There are some kinds of books that work well as ebooks and other books that people want to have in their physical library. This has actually made books better. Before ebooks, publishers, feeling cost pressures, had started to lower expenses by using lesser-quality paper; paper usually represents one-third or somewhat less of the publisher’s cost of producing a book. Attempts were made to use a white coating on paper that had too much lignin, but the browning from lignin leaked out of the cut edges, producing pages that were white in the middle but brown around the edges. Today, most publishers believe that for a printed book to compete with an ebook, it needs to be a better-quality object, and so they make a great effort, at some expense, to make their product handsome.
A noticeable change that the digital age has made in the book industry is that books are being published in smaller first printings. This is not because publishers are selling fewer books, but because they are able to reduce warehousing costs; a new printing can now be ordered up in two weeks or less. The technology of printing books has completely changed, but as is so often the case, this “new technology” is really about recycling old technology. Books used to be printed through photography, laser impressions on film. Now they are printed on aluminum plates with oil- and water-resistant materials—in effect, a lithograph. Modern bookbinders use hot glue and then cool the books on revolving carousels, the idea copied from bakeries, which use them to cool cakes. Why not? Gutenberg copied a wine press.
In 1965, J.C.R. Licklider, one of the original creators of the Internet, wrote a report on the future of libraries. He concluded that works of art and literature were unsuited to electronics, that books were needed. Like Vannevar Bush, he believed that computers best served for storage, sorting, and accessing pure information. Electronics were never supposed to be a substitute for books.
THE MOST RAPIDLY declining type of paper being used in this century is newsprint, the least expensive category of communication paper. The sale of newsprint in the twenty-first century has been dropping at a rate of about 10 percent a year. This is not only due to the decline of newspapers. Newsprint is also used for telephone books and catalogues, trades that have been nearly killed by electronics. If accessing information is what computers do best, publications that are so purely informational are doomed.
Unquestionably, newspapers are in trouble too. It is not that people don’t want to read them anymore; it is that they were built from their beginnings on an economic model that is no longer working. As was distinctly stated by Roy Howard, one of the founders of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, in Detroit in 1921, “We come here simply as news merchants. We are here to sell advertising and sell it at a rate profitable to those who buy it. But first we must produce a newspaper with news appeal that will result in a circulation and make the advertising effective.”
The formula was always to sell as many newspapers as possible and sell them for cheap and make money on the advertisers who would pay more for higher circulation. Newspapers are so tied to selling ads that the number of pages of news is determined not by what is going on in the world or the town but by the amount of advertising that has been sold. A reporter knows that the least-favored features have a chance to run on holidays because of the extra pages created by holiday advertising.
Today the problem is that advertisers would rather spend their money on electronic advertising than on print newspapers. Ad revenue is steadily evaporating from print media. By 2014 more than half of the revenue earned by the New York Times came from selling newspapers themselves, rather than from advertising, representing a historic shift in the company’s finances. The only bright spot in their faltering ad revenues came from the circulation of their online newspaper, which was steadily attracting more advertisers.
According to Ken Doctor, a longtime newspaper editor who now runs a company called Newsonomics, which monitors the newspaper industry, “Sixty-two percent of the New York Times is reader revenue. It used to be 80 percent advertising revenue.”
The same thing is happening all over the world. The decline in advertising revenue has been devastating for British newspapers. According to Doctor, the Daily Telegraph, which derives an unusually high percentage of its earnings from paid subscribers, is the only paper in London showing a significant profit. “All over the world there is the same problem for newspapers. India is a little more stable than others because India has a steady growth of the middle class. Also the Times of India and other newspapers are companies with wide commercial interest. So they can survive difficulties in their newspaper division.”
In the United States, newspapers are charging readers more to boost circulation revenue. Readers have generally accepted the hikes without complaint. The papers also try to earn more from advertising on their online editions. The New York Times and Financial Times both now have more online subscribers than print subscribers. But online newspapers and magazines have not been attracting as much advertising as companies with a larger Internet presence and vastly greater resources, such as Google and Facebook.
Some newspapers have folded, but not a huge number. Doctor estimates that about 1,450 daily newspapers were published in the United States in 2000, and 1,389 in 2014, a decline of only about 60. But the real loss, according to Doctor, is not newspaper closings, it is newspapers shrinking their operations and staff. There are 30 percent fewer newspaper journalists today than there were in 2000. And the papers, having less advertising, have become noticeably smaller.
Doctor guesses that eventually print newspapers will disappear and all move online because it is a better economic model. They can charge readers as much as they have in the past for a print paper and deliver it for much less money. Their profits will increase substantially. That is, unless advertisers rebel.
JERRY DELLA FEMINA is a longtime advertising man, said to be an inspiration for the popular television series about advertising, Mad Men, and famous for successful campaigns, such as his first in 1970, when he made the mediocre German wine Blue Nun a household name in America. He advertises online because his clients want him to.
The first tenet of advertising is that you must know your market. You are appealing to a specific gender of a certain age bracket and a certain income and a certain level of education. You identify those people with a particular newspaper or a particular television show—television is generally thought to be the best way to advertise—and that is where you place the ad.
But about online advertising, Della Femina says, “No one really knows how good digital advertising is. You reach a zillion people, but do any of them buy the product? No one knows what happens on Facebook. There are no success stories. . . . With print ads, I see results, sales jump 5 percent the following day or week. You don’t see that with digital. There is no proof that it is working. But you will die if you go into a meeting with a client and don’t talk about how great your digital group is going to be.”
David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said that this was old thinking. “My job is to get it to readers the way they want to read it. I can’t insist on one technology. Go online and subscribe in one click and save on subscription or you can read it on a phone. I am in the wine business, not the bottle business.” The New Yorker has been changing not only their bottle, but also how they pay for it. The magazine was never focused on advertising. They earned 80 percent of their revenue from the price of the magazine itself. But now they earn half of their revenue from advertising, in part because of their digital presence.
Remnick’s experience with NewYorker.com supports Della Femina’s argument, however. The print magazine has 1,050,000 subscribers, and the magazine’s staff knows a great deal about who these people are. They know, for example, that the average magazine is passed on to four people, meaning that their circulation is actually about 4 million. Their website gets 10 million visits a month, but they don’t know as much about these readers. They don’t know if they are one-time visitors, or if they are a totally different group of visitors every month, or if the same readers habitually visit month after month. They might have 10 million online readers or they might have 120 million. They don’t know their reading habits, let alone their spending habits, or if they are serious consumers at all.
Remnick has a bright, airy corner office with a view of both the old copper-roofed New York Times building with its stone masonry and the glass high-rise next to it where the Times lives today. From this perch, he told me that he spends a great deal of time pondering what he should be doing about the digital age. He said, “I cannot afford to be sentimental about paper. J. D. Salinger defined sentimental as when you love something more than God does. I cannot afford to love paper more than God does.”
AS IS ALWAYS true with change, there are some winners, some losers, and some who are not affected at all. Fashion magazines remain a lucrative draw for advertisers and are unaffected by the problems of the twenty-first-century press. But the paper business is getting tougher, due to fewer people demanding paper, and stiffer competition.
Harry Gould, who has been trading and distributing paper since 1969, said about the future, “There will be far fewer players, but when you are in the commodity business like steel or aluminum, if you are one of the five left standing, you will make a pretty good buck.” He also had a number of other predictions to share about the paper industry, including that some small paper mills will survive and that the sales of art paper will remain stable. “Office paper sales will drop about 3 percent a year, but that is not a serious amount, and with less competition the prices can go up.” Sales of business letterhead will decline, but personal stationery, especially that made of high-quality linen, will do well. “Diapers and paper bags,” according to Gould, “are recession-proof.”
One of the bigger winners of the digital age is boxes and cardboard for packaging, both white and brown. With online shopping, packaging has become a booming industry and is one of the reasons why, for the first time in history, less than half the paper made in the world is “communication” paper. Actually, now is the second time in history that this has happened. In ancient China before Cai Lun, paper was used mostly for wrapping.
ONE FINAL PREDICTION from Harry Gould: “Paper will probably never disappear.”
Certainly for the time being, paper has a solid, even if slightly diminished, place in our culture. Mitchell Kapor said, “At the moment, paper still has some advantages over screens. Flexibility. It has more longevity because it has attributes for which there are no substitutes. I think we will have paper for a long time, which does not mean forever.”
There is another advantage of paper. To use electronic terminology, it is very “secure.” Electronic messages can be hacked, accessed, reconstructed. Paper cannot. When National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden started revealing to journalist Glenn Greenwald the extent of the surveillance on the public by the NSA, they feared government interception of their communication, and with good reason. They could talk, but the room might be bugged. They could send highly sophisticated encrypted electronic messages, but even that might not be safe. In the end, they sat together and passed notes handwritten on pieces of paper that could be torn up and burned. Another advantage of paper is that it is easy to destroy—much easier than electronic information.
Ironically, many books on paper are being published about the ruinous effect that digital communication is having on human beings and civilization. We are told that we will lose our memory, our ability to sustain a thought, our ability to think and truly find our way through an idea. Those same warnings were made when communication changed from oral to written. There was some truth to it when Plato and Socrates were debating the notion and there is some truth to it today. It is very easy, when in a conversation with an annoying interlocutor with a cell phone in hand, who repeatedly Googles every subject for factoids, to understand what Socrates was saying in Plato’s Phaedrus: “It will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves. . . . And it is no true wisdom.”
It is no true wisdom. How often do we think this thought about people who spew facts from the Internet? Don’t Plato’s words about people who rely on writing resonate when observing people who rely so much on search engines? “They seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing.” And yet, even with the establishment of written language, human discourse and intellectual pursuits continued. The written word proved useful. In the words of the first-century BCE poet Horace, “Littera scripta manet.” The written word remains.
Before predicting all the things that will disappear in the digital age, it is worth remembering that orality still survives. The first step in promoting a new book is having the author read it in public, because when people hear it, it tends to make them want to read it. Recordings of books have also become tremendously popular.
There are still many oral traditions—African storytellers, calypso musicians in Trinidad engaged in improvisational contests with a very specific rhythm and rhyme, ancient Jewish prayers such as the Kaddish recited for the dead in an unmistakable and easy-to-remember cadence. In oral traditions, rhythm and rhyme are essential memory aids.
The Basques have a tradition called bertsolari, which is a contest between oral poetry improvisers. The poems are highly rhythmic and rhymed. In Basque country, 1,400 people will attend a bertsolari and it will be broadcast on television. And for that matter, poetry itself, from any culture, is an example of oral literature that has continued in written form. Anyone who doubts the oral nature of written poetry should listen to old recordings of Irish Poet William Butler Yeats chanting his poems.
It is apparent that human beings have an innate desire for connection. There is a part of the brain that makes human beings, the most social of animals, want to connect with one another. Our brains have evolved this way; it is in our genetic coding and it is likely to grow stronger as humans further evolve because it is a trait that benefits survival. It is why humans invented a spoken language, then a written language, then paper, then printing, then electronics. This is evolution, not revolution.
And written language itself has been returning to its early development, to pictographs and hieroglyphics. There are the signs by the side of the road, the signs denoting women’s and men’s bathrooms, and the growth of the use of emoticons—which stands for “emotion icon”—in digital communication. Why are we revisiting early writing forms? Why are these pictographs conveying feelings, such as 
, meaning “happy,” increasingly becoming part of the digital vocabulary of the twenty-first century? It is because change and the resistance to change always work hand in hand.