Social marketing expert Shel Holz begins a Death Watch series on "various media whose death has been widely predicted." He kicks off the series today with a look at the coming decline in tangible media — books, magazines and newspapers — as media continue to flow into digital containers.
Let’s take these one at a time.
Books: While my friend Steve Rubel predicts that all these media will be extinct or in sharp decline by 2013, I’m with Shel on this one. In my view, books will continue, much as they have before, for the next decade. (Research books and encyclopedias excepted, of course.) They’re cheap, lightweight, portable, annotatable, can be loaned to friends and never need recharging. Sales of print books will stagnate, as more of us become transfixed by other media forms, but sales of electronic book readers will continue to disappoint. The only area where e-book readers will show substantial growth may be on college campuses where students no longer need to lug around 50 pounds of textbooks, but even there adoption will be slow as book publishers are in no rush to transition to digital.
I also agree with Shel that Blurb is a brilliant online service. In the coming weeks I plan to print some photo books on Blurb.
Magazines: Here, too, I think Steve overestimates the speed of the transition to digits. Readership of the print versions of Newsweek and Time (admittedly market leaders) just crush the number of reads the articles get on their websites. Most of us aren’t ready to abandon our print copies to spend more time in front of our computers and iPhones. There’s this, too: These news sites’ income brings in about 1 percent of the print version, and no one has figured out how to make the online versions profitable, for a simple reason: Most of them won’t be. If you can’t pay the journalists, you won’t get the journalism.
Newspapers: I’m on record predicting that half of the 1,700 or so daily newspapers in the United States will be gone, or gone to all-online versions, by 2014, so I’m largely in agreement with Steve here. (The New York Times and Washington Post, with already downsized staffs and budgets, won’t be gone, but they too will feel the pressure to shift more of their resources to the online editions.)
The big takeaway from the dotcom meltdown of 2001-2002 is this: The public’s habits change slooooooowly. We haven’t abandoned Target and Macy’s and Toys R Us to do all our shopping online. But we are buying more of our stuff there. The same will hold true for tangible media. We’re at the start of a transition to the digital world, but it will be slow and, for many companies, painful.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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