Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Saw two stories today which are interrelated; the first is an article in Business Week entitled “Time to Rename the Cell Phone?” The story talks about how today’s smart phones are increasingly being used for pretty much everything except making phone calls.

Excerpt: “Amid the rise of so-called smart phones that do everything from browsing the Web to downloading and storing pictures and music, there’s a growing concern that what today we refer to as a cell phone, isn’t quite the right description for these new do-all gadgets.”

The second story is an article which proves the point of the first article; it’s from the New York Times, and is entitled “YouTube Coming Soon to Cellphones.” This story talks about a few cellphone carriers which will soon be allowing users to download YouTube videos onto their cellphones (which makes perfect sense since some of those clips were shot using cellphone video cameras in the first place).

Excerpt: “‘Everybody carries a phone with them, but they may not have a computer,’ said Steve Chen, chief technology officer and a co-founder of YouTube. People can ‘take the phone out of their pocket while waiting for the bus’ and watch a video, he added.”

So, whatever it is we call “cellphones,” it’s obvious that they have become much more than just communication devices. Or rather, the borders of what we call communication have become — in our flattened, vertical world — much more broad; it used to be that the only way you could directly communicate with someone was by picking up the phone (before that you’d have to send a telegram, but that meant getting a third party involved; the invention of the phone was the invention of true personal connection across a distance). But now you can call someone, text them, IM them, send them a video, or even post to a blog using a cellphone, and thus communicate with a whole lot of people at once. Instead of reaching out and touching someone, you can now touch the entire world. So who really cares what that’s called?

Time to Rename the Cell Phone?

YouTube Coming Soon to Cellphones

Newsweek this week has an interesting story which touches upon the idea of the “attention economy,” with more and more people getting used to enjoying their entertainment when they want it, instead of watching it when the networks put it on the air. (Of course, the next step after “when” is “how” they want it, something publishers have not yet really had to grapple with).

Excerpt: “Broadcast television’s prime time as we know it is fading. Since the industry’s formative years in the 1950s, the powerful medium has revolved around initially four but now three nocturnal hours, from 8 to 11 o’clock. Mass audiences would settle in for appointment entertainment.”

Newsweek: Why Prime Time’s Now Your Time

CNET has an article entitled “iPod at 5: The little gadget that could,” which talks about the rise of the iPod and how it almost single-handedly saved Apple. In view of the “Print is Dead” debate, I think the iPod was critical because it showed how much people could—and were willing to—change their entertainment purchasing, delivery and consumption habits (in this case, towards music, although the iPod now is changing the way people are watching TV shows and movies), and that the change could be spurred because of either a device or a business model that made sense. If you would have told someone in the recording industry, twenty years ago, that this would have happened, they would have scoffed at the notion. Kind of like how people in the publishing industry are now scoffing at the idea of digital reading ever being successful…

Excerpt: “It’s hard to overstate the impact of the iPod on the computer, consumer electronics and music industries since it was introduced in 2001. The iPod, arguably, is the first “crossover” product from a computer company that genuinely caught on with music and video buffs.”

iPod at 5: The little gadget that could

While I’ve recently seen a number teen magazine closing down their print versions (mostly due to competition from the Internet), choosing instead to concentrate on their online presence, the newest casualty in the declining magazine market seems to be a bunch of how-to magazines about the home (they’re called “shelter mags”).

From a Media Post article: “As magazines struggle with the rise of the Internet and shifting consumer preferences, traditional mainstays are under siege. One notable example is “shelter” mags, including some of America’s most venerable purveyors of homemaking advice. Like lad mags on the other side of the gender divide, shelter and craft mags are caught between a rock and hard place: on one side they face competition from the Internet, and on the other, a market that may be over-saturated.”

Run for Shelter, Home Mags Take a Beating

There’s an article from today’s USA Today entitled “Totally Wireless on Campus,” which talks about a new generation of “digital natives” for whom a digital life is the only life they know. In the “Print is Dead” book I’m so far referring to them as Generation Download or Generation Upload, but I think I’ll now throw Digital Natives into the mix as well (because Generation Next is lame).

Excerpt: “Technology is so second-nature, ‘I can’t even think of when I use it and when I don’t. It’s such a part of life,’ [Hunter, a college student] says.

Hunter isn’t a techno-geek. He’s just a ‘digital native’ — a term that has been used to describe millennials, the first generation who grew up in a world filled with computers, cellphones and cable TV.”
USA Today: Totally Wireless on Campus

There was a Reuters article today on Yahoo with the headline “Online newspaper readership grows,” which talked about how readership of print editions are in decline while traffic on newspaper websites is rising. The article, citing a recent study, also showed that more young kids (who are of course digitally savvy) are reading news online. From the article: “The Washington Post’s Web site increased its audience reach among readers aged 25 to 34 by more than 60 percent…”

Online newspaper readership grows