Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Jeremy Leslie, writing on Business Week.com, reviews the new book The Last Magazine by David Renard. As Leslie writes, “Renard’s central theme is established with the opening sentence of the book. ‘Magazines, as we know them, are dying.’” Leslie then draws a picture of the how the future of magazine publishing could play out: “over the next 20 years, mainstream magazines will cease to be distributed as printed items, as a combination of pressures pushes publishers to move to digital distribution.” This sounds very much like the “print is dead” debate, with major consumption of printed material happening digitally online (rather than physically offline). However, most of the The Last Magazine seems to be about not the mainstream magazines which will disappear (in fact, just this week Premiere magazine folded), but rather the book highlights the smaller, more idiosyncratic magazines that have a chance to flourish in a digital future by flying under the radar. These “microzines” will be issued in limited editions, and will focus on specific niches, rather than today’s magazines and newspapers (not to mention books) that try to appeal to as many people as possible (which is why they are failing: because most people are now online, so that’s where the brands and authors must also exist). Sounds like an interesting read…

From the review: “While the process of designing and printing magazines has been revolutionised in a single generation of digitalisation, the financial model behind the making of magazines has barely changed. The model has been successful because of continued growth. But recently this growth has stopped.”

BusinessWeek.com: “It’s Not The End of Print”