Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

David Carr had an interesting essay in the NY Times a week or so entitled “The Lonely Newspaper Reader” where he talks about how people don’t really read newspapers anymore, with newer generations getting all their info, and spending most of their time, online. For these “digital natives” print is indeed dead; they spend little of their time reading newspapers or even novels. Instead, they interact with the Internet.

From the essay: “Last Wednesday morning at my house, one of my daughters back from college was staying at a friend’s house in the city, no doubt getting alerts on her cellphone for new postings to her Facebook page. Her sister got up, skipped breakfast and checked the mail for her NetFlix movies. My wife left early before the papers even arrived to commute to her job in the city while listening to the iPod she got for Christmas. True enough, my 10-year-old gave me five minutes over a bowl of Cheerios, but then she went into the dining room and opened the laptop to surf the Disney Channel on broadband, leaving me standing in the kitchen with my four newspapers. A few of those included news about the sale of The Star Tribune, a newspaper that found itself in reduced circumstances and sold at a reduced price to a private equity group. I looked around me and realized I didn’t really need to read the papers to know why.”

NY Times: The Lonely Newspaper Reader