Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this, touches a man,
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
First MediaShift tells us print is not dead, and a few days later Audioholics tells us it is (or dying pretty rapidly, at least). Confused? Sceptical? Yeah, me too.
Having been in the publishing industry for a while now, I’d like to chip in my two cents; not as a veteran of the industry, nor as an evangelist of the “print is dead” school (since I’m not certain I quality for either role), but simply as the everyman reader.
What makes this even more interesting is that even as I write, Amazon is currently hosting an event at Pace University in New York City, where it is heavily rumored that they will unveil the Kindle DX, a bigger version of the current Kindle 2
that will deliver newspaper content and textbooks as well. Of course, the Kindle 2 can already handle newspaper content, but the purported 9.7-inch screen of the new Kindle means the device is not designed to be ultra-portable (certainly not when compared to the Kindle 2 and other e-book readers) but more as a replacement for your physical newspaper or textbook.
I’m not trying to sit on the fence when I say I understand where people are coming from when they say things like “Print will never die” or “E-books are the future”; honest, I do, I understand and I agree with both parties to a certain extent. But so far, what we’re seeing on both sides of the fence are people playing the numbers game, pulling up the latest statistics to prove their point (while other equally statistically adept people debunk their point; consider me statistically challenged) or making general statements about how print/digital media is more amenable to the nature of reading and interactivity, whereas most of us would agree that humans have shown that reading and interaction are subject to various individual styles.
Also, I find that the types of content were not considered. Personally, I would like to see newspapers, textbooks, and books containing little or no illustrative material go fully digital. I own a lot of books, and I would certainly love to be able to store and manage them digitally. On the other hand, I don’t see myself considering illustrated content (comics, magazines and books on the visual arts) in the digital medium, at least not with the current technology. So yes, with the current available display and content delivery technology, I would like to go selectively digital, so to speak.
It’s all too easy to get all sentimental about the print media when you consider ideas like those from Whitman at the start of this post. But whether in digital or in print, whenever we read Leaves of Grass, we touch the man.
Image taken from here
