Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Interesting post from Alan Rusbridger on the Guardian blog Comment is Free; he’s writing about the Davos 07 conference taking place right now in London, at which many newspaper and media types are trying to deal with an increasing online audience and their shrinking offline audience. Rusbridger uses climate change as a really apt metaphor for the new digital reality, saying basically that — the same way that everyone denied global warming for so long, for as long as they could until it got so hot they had to acknowledge it was real — media is now having a similar epiphany, finally coming around to the idea that more and more people are looking to their computers for content, and that less and less people are interacting with or buying traditional formats such as newspapers, magazines, and books. It’s an inconvenient truth for publishers to be sure, but doesn’t have to be a cataclysmic one if they take advantage of our electronic future by embracing digital reading.

From the blog: “There have been many such discussions over the years - but few with such a concentration of high-level engagement from the people running so-called old media organisations. The discussion was unfocussed and (as always) inconclusive. But it’s a bit like climate change. Five years ago a lot of time was wasted listening to the deniers. Now there are very few: The nature of the problem has dawned on everyone - and an industry which is notoriously uncollaborative is actually getting together to find some solutions.”

Davos 07: ADD vs OCD