Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

One of the largest newspapers in the country, USA Today, relaunched its website this week, and is now offering many Web 2.0 tools which give readers more options than ever in terms of reading, sharing and interacting with the website’s content. New features include:

• User Comments: Every article now has user comments.
• Most Popular: Read articles based on popularity rather than in the order assigned by USATODAY editors. Articles are ranked by Most Read, Most Commented, Most Recommended (see below) and Most Emailed.
• Digg-Like Article Voting: Click “recommend” on an article and the vote tally increases by 1. Highly recommended articles appear under the “Most Popular” tab.
• Profile Pages: Registered users have their own page that aggregates their comments, recommended articles and other content.

The site is already getting good reviews, including this one from TechCrunch: “The website is no longer a simple hose spouting news at readers. It has become a full on social network, integrating user generated content in intelligent and interesting ways.”

In a letter to its readers, the editors framed the redesign as being part of “a mission recast for an era in which readers are inundated with information, have little allegiance to a single news source, struggle to assess the credibility of what they read and have the capacity to share their own insights with a wide audience.” This is a sober and brave realization, and I think it’s great that USA Today has come to this conclusion.

In terms of the “print is dead” debate, I think what’s important about all of this is that the editors are realizing that there are plenty of things the Web can do that a physical object can’t, and rather than resist the Internet, or else have their online brand merely mimic their offline product (the way so many print publications are currently doing), USA Today has instead decided to exploit the online medium. Imagine what would happen if other newspapers, magazines and book publishers had a similar revelation?

TechCrunch: Bravo to USA Today

USA Today: To Our Readers