In praise of print

Sometimes I wonder why, in the digital age, I bothered to write a book. Printed academic journals seem like they are quickly going the way of the dinosaur, and most of the feedback I get about my research comes from things people have read online rather than in printed copies of journals that take years to appear.

This isn’t to take anything away from the importance of having other researchers review work. I’m all for that, and think it is an important part of vetting results of research. But the print itself seems to get in the way rather than facilitate to conversation of ideas on which any kind of research depends.

So why write a book?

In the most recent Technology Review, the editor offers an excellent explanation. He’s talking about the virtue of magazines (rather than print in general), but the argument extends nicely. He writes of one of the articles in the issue:

I would never have commissioned such a piece for technologyreview.com. For a start, the essay is very long, and almost no one reads long stories on a computer, or even prints them from a Web page. Secondly, it is only slyly topical, and the Internet is mostly unforgiving of stories that are not bluntly of the moment. Finally, it is not obviously useful, and search engines and hyperlinks promote stories that answer people’s questions and gratify their preoccupations.

In short, the Internet is a very good medium for economically expressed, timely stories. More, the Web is unapologetically responsive to the market. Online, the posture of editors before readers is slavish: we listen to your demands, or else we (more tangibly, our “audience traffic”) are punished.

Yet editors can do more than give readers what they say they want; they can also offer up stories that surprise and delight. In print, editors can be purveyors of serendipity. Such a function may not be wanted in the yawping, demotic marketplace of the Internet. It can seem unacceptably elitist to those who are skeptical about the intelligence, expertise, impartiality, and good sense of what the blogosphere calls the “mainstream media.” But there are still many readers who will pay for that old-fashioned virtue, nicety of editorial selection.

I don’t think it is editorial selectivity that makes a book worth writing. Rather it is the chance to lay out an idea–or a collection of ideas–in a format that suits them. The internet is a wonderful resource–and, in my opinion, a much better place to put research articles than in print.

But each medium has its own affordances, and even in the digital age, there is something to be said for having a chance to lay out an argument completely and (one hopes) eloquently.