I’ve been hearing this print-is-dead meme ever since the term “blog” was mentioned on TV.
To set the record straight: No print isn’t dead. It won’t die anytime soon. Go do your homework.
One cannot unite a community without a newspaper or journal of some kind.
— Mahatma Ghandi
Print’s been the tool to reach the masses, judging by the sheer number of newspapers and journals of every kind. Mostly because advances in technology have minimalized production costs; the internet, then, nullified them.
Print is going through a phase now, a shift in focus, if you will, just like it did when TVs started to become mainstream, causing unnecessary worries to newspaper publishers. With more people reading news online, and real damage happening the newspaper and magazine businesses, the worries aren’t completely unjustified. It doesn’t mean print is going to die yet, only that certain businesses are replaced overtime, but that’s how the business world works.
Print has certain advantages of any other medium. It’s unobtrusive, it’s non-hyper, and it can be taken offline. So I can read without IM and email distractions, without slashing through a jungle of links, even when I’m waiting for the bus. Also, the nature of the medium itself forces authors to think differently, to rephrase their sentences, to be unambiguous, to make sure that you can read without resorting to Wikipedia.
Veerle wrote a great follow-up on this topic with emphasis on design. Tim O’reilly discusses how their book sales surged after Barnes & Nobles set all computer books on sale. It seems that newspaper publishing is the only area in print being affected. After all, people rarely keeps newspapers.
So buck-up little print designer, I seriously doubt your medium will go Dodo in my lifetime or yours. Get back to Quark and keep on keepin’ on, my wallet is at that ready.
— Greg Storey, Pulp
This e-age has provided alternatives to the print medium. eBooks tried to replace regular books. Blogs tried to replace news, while news tried to replace itself. Youtube tried to replace TV. But at the end of the day, these are different sides of the same Rubik’s cube.
Comments (3)
This would seem to disagree with you on this one.
As for me, most all of the print sources I read these days are far more easily accessed online. News is fresher by far than anything in the newspaper or in a magazine, certainly.
“It seems that newspaper publishing is the only area in print being affected.”
I wanted to add “magazines”, but they still have a few winds.
Dying magazines and daily newspapers only suffer because their content has to be fresh. Most books, for example, are timeless, a work of art so to speak.
Judging by the Grim Reaper’s site, I can see that dead or dying magazines are those about celebrity gossip, lifestyle and entertainment, and Internet business.
I think that the rise of the free daily in most major western cities, the increased revenues realized by newspapers that have actively engaged readers through the web in addition to their papers and the human conditioning to textural stimuli are all good examples of why print will always exist in some form or another.