The Four Clothes-Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Mr. Magazine (AKA Samir Husni), in a recent blog entry written while preparing to debate his friend Bob Sacks at the upcoming Florida Magazine Association’s annual convention, declared that print is in fact not dead because of the fact that four recent fashion magazines recently had their biggest issues ever. For Husni, somehow, this is good news. As he posted to his blog upon seeing these four tomes sitting proudly on the newsstand, “I rubbed my eyes and took a second look. I asked myself how can this be true? I thought someone told me (actually a lot of someones) that print is dead. Well folks, guess what, print is not dead. Soon the prophets of doom and gloom will wake up from their nightmare.” No, I would say the fact that Vogue is growing in physical size while The New York Times is shrinking makes the nightmare not only true but that much more worse. Also, when the defenders of literacy and print start holding up copies of Harper’s Bazaar as a sign that printed matter is surviving, I can tell they’re really getting desperate.
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I couldn’t agree more, and I said so at the debate. What game these titles and those publishers play is their business. But anyone can make the biggest issue ever. THe question is did it make a profit? And does this in any way reflect the industries current trends and patterns? No and No. Print is not dead, but it is filled with many red herrings about it’s current conditions and real future.
I couldn’t agree more as well. Survival of print can only be attributed to any exclusive attributes of print in the context of screen presentation. Unfortunately such exclusive attributes boil down to only three; legibility (not resolution but immediacy of meaning), haptic efficiency (conveying concepts with physical objects) and persistance (default preservation and reaccess).
Will such attributes assure print survival? No, because the screen based reader is no longer independently self interfacing or even assuredly bionic.