Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

On the Good Magazine website, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter has an introductory essay to Good Magazine’s list of the “51 Best Magazines Ever.” Carter gets, I think, just about everything wrong in his essay, stating that “the essential strength of a magazine is its ability to amplify. An idea, or an image, or a story, set within the pages of a magazine and assembled by the right hands, can become the grist of breakfast chatter, dinner-party conversation, or elective body debate around the world.” That may have been the case before the Internet, but the explosion of the Web has shown that there is now a dozen other ways — besides magazines — to amplify ideas and spread information. Whether it’s through blogs or websites like MySpace and YouTube, our current breakfast chatter revolves most often around something we see online, not something we read offline. And in terms of delivery, when Carter writes “you can buy a magazine almost anywhere. Publishers will even deliver it to your door,” this is almost laughable. In our on-demand everything world, magazines are physical copies sitting in dark mailboxes, whereas blogs and websites are digital bits instantly flying through cyberspace. When Carter finally acknowledges the “print is dead” argument, writing that “magazines — or, rather, certain magazines — aren’t going away anytime soon,” he has a point. Not all magazines will become extinct in a future where people increasingly get their information online, but when Carter also says that magazines “have, so far, not perished at the altar of the internet,” he’s factually correct but intellectually wrong since magazines have recently taken several direct hits, and the upcoming generation of Digital Natives — for whom interacting with a computer in order to get information is now second nature — they will turn less and less to the newsstand, rejecting it for the already amplified ideas they find online.

Good Magazine: The 51 Best Magazines Ever