Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday had a story by Ethan Smith entitled “Sales of Music, Long in Decline, Plunge Sharply,” which talks about how — as the headline suggests — even though music sales have been in a slump for years, they’re now close to bottoming out. And what’s most scary to industry analysts is that one of the things that killed the CD — digital downloads — is far from making up in its sales the loss of revenues which CDs used to provide. True, the iPod has certainly made a huge dent in the music market, not to mention it’s changed the way a generation listens to music, but Smith also points out that online access has given the consumer a myriad of choices. “But because of the Internet, those [music] consumers have more ways to obtain music now than they did a decade ago, when walking into a store and buying it was the only option.” These days there are dozens of options for potential consumers, not to mention there’s more competition than ever in terms of online entertainment. This is not just the home stereo versus Apple; it’s also about YouTube, Second Life and Myspace.

And even though the music industry has been the first to feel the pinch from an increasingly digital world, it will certainly not be the last big media business to take a hit. “The film, TV and publishing industries are also finding it hard to adapt to the digital age,” writes Smith. “Though consumers are exposed to more media in more ways than ever before, the challenge for media companies is finding a way to make money from all that exposure. Newspaper publishers, for example, are finding that their Internet advertising isn’t growing fast enough to replace the loss of traditional print ads.” For trade publishing these changes are only — so far — being minutely felt, but that will of course change over time. Today’s music buyer (or rather, the teenager today who doesn’t buy music) could be tomorrow’s twenty-something who chooses to read blogs and websites rather than novels. Because of these (mostly all-around downward) trends in traditional media, newspaper, magazine and book publishers need to embrace the Web, find ways to interact and engage with the consumer, and change its business model to meet the emerging digital reality. Because, really, if music goes away, couldn’t words be next?

Sales of Music, Long in Decline, Plunge Sharply