Once upon a time, a select group of monks and scholars were responsible for the creation of all written media. They toiled away for years, patiently handcrafting beautiful, ornate, handwritten scrolls and books (predominantly editions of the Bible) which were eventually distributed to a very select audience. The process was extremely lengthy, expensive (in terms of both man hours and materials) and elitist. But the end result was an item that had been carefully checked by scholars for accuracy and had a level of care taken over the design and implementation that appropriately matched the gravitas of the content. Surely it was worth it, wasn’t it?
As it turns out, it wasn’t. A revolutionary new technology, the printing press, came along and blew this old method of making books and other written items out of the water. Printed books proliferated rapidly – despite cries of outrage over the lack of authoritative control over the quality of content – with the cheaper, more efficient process essentially democratising the distribution of the printed word.
There was immediate opposition to the printing press, and a whole lot of grumpy monks around. Early printing was quickly associated with devilry, and amongst the elite it was widely seen as something that would undermine the existing political and religious order. (As it turns out, they weren’t far off the mark.) But none of these fears did anything to change the success of the printing press, and the wide dissemination of information it enabled changed the face of the world forever.
Back to the future
So, enough with the history lesson – let’s fast forward to today. We have an extremely mature industry based around the production of printed media. Books, magazines, newspapers, brochures, annual reports, business cards and on and on. Compared to individually handcrafting these items, designing and printing them means that runs of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of items are both practical and can be done at an incomparably lower cost.
But that is comparing it to handcrafting the individual items. The thing is, handcrafting an item or printing it aren’t the only two options on the table anymore. The new revolutionary technology on the block, the Internet, has provided another way to distribute the written word: Digitally. And guess what? It’s cheaper, more democratic, more efficient and more flexible than printing and distributing physical items. Sounds a bit like the advantages that the original printing press brought over hand producing books all those years ago, doesn’t it?
The unavoidable truth is that digital distribution is cheap. Full stop. No matter how efficient your printing process gets, no matter what your economies of scale, paper, ink and distribution cost money. This is true whether you are printing a hundred business cards or a million newspapers. What’s the cost to make a PDF of your brochure once it’s designed? Effectively nothing. The cost to host that brochure on the Internet, where hundreds of millions of people can access it? You could probably spend a few hundred quid a month on that if you tried really hard, but more likely you’re taking about £10-£50. Printing a thousand copies of a brochure might cost you £2000, and the maximum amount of people that it can reach is… well, about a thousand. The costs of publishing your newspapers content on the Internet compared to the costs of printing it out daily on dead trees and sending it out around the country? Not even in the same ballpark.
The rise of digital distribution channels makes for some pretty hard-to-ignore economics. Combine the financial advantages with the other benefits afforded by the medium, and it is not hard to see why the Internet is increasingly rewriting the rules on how companies choose to distribute their information. Actually, physically printing out books, newspapers, brochures and other collateral is going the way of the Dodo, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it.
But I hate reading on screens!
There are plenty of people who are in major denial about this. Most people who disagree generally fall into three camps: those who don’t understand the economics of the matter; those who think that people’s love of beautiful, physically printed items will mean that they will be produced forever; and those who don’t understand that the technological situation as it stands today isn’t the end of the revolution, it’s just the start.
If you think that newspapers won’t stop printing on paper because there are still lots of people who will pay for their Sunday paper, (on paper, rather than read it from a screen) you’re in the first camp. Time to wake up – your £1.40 doesn’t cover the cost of that newspaper, advertising does. And the advertising is going where the eyeballs are: The Internet. Your printed Sunday papers wont be in your lap in 5 years time, sorry.
If you think that people will always want printed items because you can touch them, hold them, physically own them, then you fall into the second camp. A beautifully printed item is indeed lovely to have and to hold. But the monks probably thought that about their lovingly handwritten Bibles. Sadly, like it or not, economics and efficiency will always win out over sentimentality and nostalgia. And the kids today just don’t have that same attachment to physical items – they are too static to be useful in their Internet-centric world where the pace of change is so rapid, and where all their communication and networking is done online.
If you think that books, brochures, magazines and other printed materials won’t be exclusively digitally distributed in the future because people don’t like reading from screens, then you fall into the third camp. Screen technology is advancing in leaps and bounds; flexible, bendable screens are already being successfully prototyped, and in combination with technologies such a E-Ink, the displays of the no-to-distant future will provide a reading experience just as comfortable and pleasant to the eyes as reading your favorite paperback novel.
As Clay Shirky said recently in his excellent essay on the death of the newspaper industry, “[This] is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place”.
Looking to the future
People who work in any aspect of the print industry, from designers to writers to publishers, get very defensive about all this. They see it as an attack on their profession, or as someone telling them that their skills are rapidly becoming irrelevant. Rubbish. The vast majority of people who are currently involved in the wide group of print based industries have skills that are not only relevant, but are going to be essential in the new Internet era. We’re not going backwards here, we are going forwards – skills such as design and journalism will have an incredibly important role to play in the crafting of our digital future. But only those who manage to break free of the mental paradigm linking what they do to the production of physical, printed media will keep up. The rest will be left behind, still handwriting their manuscripts with quill pens.
Further reading (both for and against!)
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0002/okrent.htm
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/the-death-throes-of-print/
http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/
http://abriefmessage.com/2007/09/04/heller/
http://havemacwillblog.com/2009/04/08/the-death-of-print-media-hold-the-home-page/
http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2009/01/28/theres-the-death-of-print-and-then-theres-the-death-of-print/
http://gawker.com/341807/the-simpsons-announces-the-death-of-print