IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2019 - 11

Book Reviews
A. David Wunsch

Real Things and Why They Matter
The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter.
By David Sax. New York, NY: Perseus. 2016, 282 pages.

rom today, pa inting is dead!" is
said to have been
proclaimed by the
French painter Paul
Delaroche in 1839 after seeing his
first daguerreotype. His was an early
name on the list of people who have
made fools of themselves when
prognosticating a future resulting
from a new medium or invention.
Motivated by either techno-euphoria
or pessimism they have become
famously wrong. In July of 1913
Thomas Edison told a reporter that
books will soon be obsolete in the
schools, having been replaced by
movies. Of course, photography has
affected the practice of painting,
and to some degree film has found
a place in schools. Who hasn't suffered through an "educational film"?
These gaffes are not limited to the
19th and 20th centuries.
Fairly recently (2013) Marc
Andreesen, a major venture capitalist, predicted that, "retail guys
are going out of business and
e-commerce will become the place
that everyone buys. You are not
going to have a choice." In other
words - goodbye brick and mortar
store. Try telling that to the dudes
at the "Genius Bar" next time you're
in an Apple store. Evidently Steve
Jobs didn't see the handwriting on
the wall either, nor Amazon, which

is opening actual bookshops. In
2012 Sebastian Thrun, the creator
of Google's self-driving car, who had
just launched a MOOC ("massive
on-line open course") asserted that
such classes would be so disruptive
that 50 years hence only ten institutions in the world would provide
higher education. Five years after
his prognostication we might think
that half the Ivy league would be
gone. Nope.
David Sax's book is a welcome
antidote to these seers. It's much
better than its misleading title
might have you believe. There is
no "revenge" here. But it is a direct
assault on some widely-held beliefs
about the "digital revolution." His
chapters take us on a tour of companies, businesses, and a summer
camp that refuse to accept the clichés of the digital age. Starting at
a vinyl record store in his home city
of Toronto he announces, to my
skepticism, that a "new record store
opens every two months" in his city.
This is surely hyperbole, but my web
search brought an article about the
best vinyl stores in Toronto with
photos of a dozen of them, each
filled with bins stacked full with
lively sleeves containing new and
used LP records. Some clue to the
success is seen here in the jackets:
the records come with a tactile and
visual excitement not found in an
MP3 file or digital stream. According
to Sax, the shipment of LP albums
in the U.S. grew from 990 000 in

F

"

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2019.2915176
Date of publication: 30 May 2019

JUNE 2019

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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

2007 to more than 12 million in
2015 - annual growth rates of
more than 20 percent. Anecdotal
evidence shows the buyers to be
principally in the age group 18-24
who regard the iPod as "uncool" -
a gadget their parents use. Many
recording artists prefer recording
for an analog device - digital capture and processing of sound offers
too many choices to the recording
engineer and musician; for vinyl,
you play and record a tape of the
song, and if you like it, it gets transferred to vinyl. If you don't, you just
start over.
Sax visits Nashville Tennessee
and goes to URP records. Every day
they are pressing 40 000 records,
and their staff has tripled since
2010. A European company executive tells him that 30 million new
record discs were pressed worldwide in 2015. And, of course, if
people are buying records they are
getting turntables to play them on.
Crosley, an American maker, churns
out 1 million per year.
There is an honesty to much of
Sax's writing. He is not so naïve as
to tell us that vinyl LP records will
overtake CD's nor for that matter the
even stronger downloading of MP3
files and the use of streaming services. Vinyl represents just 10 percent
of all music sales - CD purchases
are three times bigger. It's clear that
vinyl sales will level off at some fraction of music consumption and will
constitute a niche market for certain

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