Book Technology and Music Technology
Apple announced the launch of its latest endeavor, the iPad, this past Wednesday— Apple’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Nobles’ Nook. Without much fanfare held at the San Francisco unveiling, the public’s reaction to the iPad was subdued. Unable to share in marketers’ enthusiasm over the product, the iPad is deemed a disappointment before its critics. Coincidentally, coinciding Apple’s announcement of the iPad was news of J. D. Salinger’s death. Once hailed as one of the great living artists of our literary history, his passing away is like the passing on of the torch into the hands of book technology.
One of the books that have vastly changed my views on how the music industry is being shaped is something I’ve picked up to review for one of the publications I’ve been contributing to. The book, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, by Greg Kot, is a fast-paced diatribe into how the music industry over-reacted and basically tried to over-ride the music downloading and the I-pod movement. Rather than accept these latest trends in music development, the big corporations that had launched artists from Metallica to Brittany Spears into stardom, were left more than aghast. They were at their wits-end trying to sue every illegal downloader out there, including one of the sites that carried the torch to music downloading, Napster. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. The more the conglomerates fought this monster of a whirl-wind from happening, the bigger the exposure this monster got.
Kot conjectures in this time and age when whatever the customer says is right—the I-pod and music file-sharing business were only bringing music back into the hands of the consumer where it belongs. Music was still being distributed but this time instead of in stores where the cost of CDs began at $17.99, music-lovers around the world now had their hands on the largest database of music ever—the internet. Artists who knew how to utilize off this greatly benefited from this system where artists can interact with their fans in ways their predecessors could never imagine. Ardent fans, now, could easily connect with their favorite artists and with this easy access paved the way for music to be spread “virally”. With old fashioned word-of-mouth and “grind it out artist-development”, bands like Death Cab for Cutie rose to stardom with lots of help from their fans. “It’s really interesting—with all this technology, we’ve come back to the oldest form of musical communication there is—a person, the troubadour, going from town to town playing songs for people. I don’t think that’s ever going to go away, you know?” says front man to Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst in Ripped.
What some people might not wait to consider is the fact that music technology and book technology have a vastly similar track-record. With critics and large conglomerates scrambling to bear down at the latest in development regarding book or music technology, no wonder the public has, to say nonetheless, such a low opinion in how the industry will survive in the midst of these products.
Regarding the iPad or the Kindle replacing books, or the internet killing off our newspapers, Michael Moore made a good point at a press conference for his film Capitalism: A Love Story. He poises the question: If the internet were truly the reason why people are no longer reading newspapers then why are newspapers in Europe not having the same problem? Is either France or England deprived from no internet?
What shouldn’t shock viewers is that Moore’s message relays that capitalism is among one of the problems. Newspaper publications and magazines are putting more emphasis in their ad campaigns rather than content. When newspapers put their readership second to the business community, America has definitely lost.
The second reason that Moore poises is that illiteracy rates has sky-rocketed in America. To paraphrase what Moore says: We live in a nation of over 40-million illiterates. And if over 40-million of America is illiterate then they probably will not be reading the newspapers. Blame the public education school system for this. Again, when a nation’s priorities are wrong, of course this will leave its citizens affected.
But this is beside the point. My point is that rather than seeing the Kindle or the new addition to this ensemble, the iPad, as the devil’s incarnate for the publishing world; just think of it this way: the iPod or music downloading didn’t necessarily destroy music. People are still listening to music wherever and however they get their hands on it. Rather than seeing the iPad (or Kindle/Nook or whatever) as something for evil, think of it as a promotional tool for literacy. We are seeing these items in the eyes of a capitalist economy—how much we will gain or lose from this. But think of it at a literacy stand-point: the latest in book technology can’t be a miss if it is supposed to promote something like literacy. Like the carefully crafted scenes in Ripped when the music industry was freaking out over the I-pod and music downloading, music technology only put the holding-torch back into the hands of the consumer, and (ironically enough, since we’re talking about a capitalist economy here) everything the customer says is right.