Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

In C.P. Snow’s controversial 1959 speech “The Two Cultures,” the British scientist-turned-writer described how the sciences and the arts and humanities were at that moment being increasingly segregated into separate camps by a growing and profound split in thinking and values. Each group distrusted the other, with the artists looking at the scientists as if they were boorish philistines, while the scientists regarded the artists as clueless Luddites. According to a new report from IBM entitled Navigating the Digital Divide — as reported last week on The Australian’s website — there is now emerging a new but different schism, this time between old media and new media. The report “warns that the conflict between traditional and new media is seeing the emergence of a media divide that could erase hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from the bottom line of the world’s leading media companies.”

(Of course, the significance of this coming from IBM cannot be lost; the computer giant, who looked untouchable in the 1950s and 1960s — their name was synonymous with computing — found themselves increasingly out of touch with the lucrative personal computer market of the 1970s and 1980s, playing catch-up to more nimble rivals like Apple. So if anyone should know something about ignoring important emerging technology, it’s IBM.)

The IBM report talks about how the music industry lost well over $100 billion in its transition to digital, noting that “television and film companies will be next if companies don’t systematically navigate the media divide. Now is the time to determine changes in business models, innovate and re-evaluate partnerships. Media companies must take action before it is too late.”

The publishing industry is not mentioned in the article, but of course it too will need to make this tricky transition, and if it doesn’t learn from the mistakes of these previous industries — music, television and film — then the cost to publishing’s bottomline may be so large it never recovers.

The Australian: Old v new may cost billions