About Print is Dead

An independent guide to books, publishing and reading in the digital age, started in 2026.

What this site is

Print is Dead publishes explanatory articles about how books are written, published, sold, borrowed and read now that so much of that happens on screens. It covers e-books and audiobooks, the publishing business and self-publishing, bookselling and libraries, copyright, and the new questions raised by artificial intelligence. The aim is to explain how things work, with sources, for readers, writers, librarians, booksellers and anyone curious about what has happened to the book.

The name is a question rather than a verdict. Our answer, set out in print versus digital, is that print is very much alive, but no longer the only way a book exists.

What was here before

This web address has a history that has nothing to do with the current site, and we want to be clear about it. In the late 2000s it was used by a blog about books, media and the digital future, written by a different author and connected to a book of the same name. That blog ended many years ago. Since then the address has changed hands several times and, for some periods, carried content that had nothing to do with books.

The current site is a new publication. It is not a continuation or relaunch of the earlier blog, it is not affiliated with that blog's author or with the book, and none of the earlier blog's writing is reproduced here. Everything on this site was written new in 2026. Where an old address from the earlier blog still receives visitors, it is redirected to the page here that covers the same subject, so that an old link about, say, e-readers lands on a page about e-readers.

Independence

Print is Dead has no commercial relationship with any publisher, bookseller, retailer, device maker, self-publishing service, library platform or AI company. We do not sell advertising placements, sponsored articles or links, and we do not accept payment or free products in return for coverage. Where an article mentions a company or a service, it is because it illustrates how something works, not because anyone asked us to.

If that ever changes, for example if the site carries advertising in future, we will say so on this page and label it clearly where it appears.

How articles are researched

We write about a subject that is full of confident claims and unreliable numbers, so we follow a few rules:

• Anything a reader can check, such as a date, a court ruling, a law or a technical standard, is attributed to its source, and the source is linked at the foot of the article.
• We prefer primary sources: court decisions, official guidance, standards bodies and the organisations that collect the data, rather than reports of reports.
• Publishing statistics are often estimates based on surveys or panels. Where we use them we say who produced them, and where reliable figures are not public we say that rather than guessing.
• We are careful with claims like "the first", "the largest" or "the only", which are easy to write and often wrong.
• Articles on fast-moving subjects, such as AI and copyright, carry the date they were last reviewed.
• We do not invent quotations, case studies or people.

Corrections

If you find a mistake, please tell us through the contact page. We correct factual errors promptly, and where a correction changes the substance of an article we note it on the page.

Who writes it

Print is Dead is run by a small independent team. Articles are unsigned and published under the site's name, and the site takes responsibility for them as a publication. We do not use invented author names or personas.

More

See the privacy page for what this website records when you visit, and the home page for an overview of everything we cover.