Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

InfoWorld, a magazine about information and technology that has existed for nearly thirty years, today published its last ever physical copy. As Editor in Chief Steve Fox put it last week, “No more printing on dead trees, no more glossy covers, no more supporting the US Post Office in its rush to get thousands of inky copies on subscribers’ desks by Monday morning (or thereabouts).” But InfoWorld is not going out of business; instead, it’s just going online. “We’re not going anywhere,” says Fox. “We are merely embracing a more efficient delivery mechanism — the Web — at InfoWorld.com. You can still get all the news coverage, reviews, analysis, opinion, and commentary that InfoWorld is known for. You’ll just have to access it in a browser (or RSS reader) — something more than a million of you already do every month.”

I think this move makes a lot of sense, and not just for InfoWorld’s audience, but in general. The Web has created expectations in users concerning delivery, interaction and utility, and all of this — in a Web 2.0 world — makes the need for print magazines increasingly obsolete (or, if nothing else, a souvenir-like afterthought). As Fox notes, he and his staff have been producing for years more material than a magazine can handle: “In addition to the articles we had prepared for print, our staff and contributors create and post the equivalent of a full magazine online every day, featuring 25 blogs, bundles of daily online-only news stories, columns, articles, regular videos, slideshows, and podcasts. The limited confines of a print magazine, with 32 pages of editorial content each week, simply couldn’t begin to address the needs of an information-hungry IT audience.” Freed from the confines of ink and paper, InfoWorld can now exist as purely itself, stretching or contracting to fill any virtual space it wants.

InfoWorld folds print mag to focus on online and events