Moving away from print
10/07/12 05:40
I love books. I have walls of bookshelves in my office and at home. I am always reading and often have two or three books going at the same time. I don’t have a tablet computer, but I do read books on my phone. I like the convenience of having a book with me when there is a small time of waiting, but the phone doesn’t offer the satisfaction of holding a real book in my hands. I think in terms of printing and publication. That is part of the reason why my blogs are not at all like most other blogs. I write an essay each morning.
I think that books will long be a part of the world, though I suspect that future generations won’t have libraries that look much like the ones I have grown to love. There are less expensive ways to provide access to the information in books. The computer is an excellent tool for research and even I am finding that I don’t use traditional encyclopedias much any more. And, more and more, I am doing my biblical research by using online tools rather than traditional commentaries and other sources. I know that there are books in my office that I haven’t taken off of the shelves for five or more years.
Yesterday we received a catalogue of print resources that are available for Christian education. The catalogue is well done and has informative promotions for the various resources. I immediately sat down and paged through the catalogue. I am familiar with most of the resources that the catalogue is promoting and so there wasn’t much that was new. My reaction after paging through it surprised me, however. The catalogue advertises the products of a traditional press. This press has been in business for hundreds of years and its people think in terms of traditional printing. They have a central distribution warehouse, keep an inventory on hand, and are prepared to ship books to churches and individuals. They know printing and the distribution of printed resources. My reaction was not to the printed resources, but rather that the beautiful catalogue is probably the last of its kind. As I said, they know printed resources, but they don’t seem to know the Internet. The catalogue presents an advertisement for an online resource. The resource is high quality and looks appealing in the catalogue. The web site, however, is a disaster. The product isn’t selling well because the press doesn’t know how to make the web site work. The product is difficult to find on the web. The promotional web site has no samples. The actual distribution web site has broken links and really is just distributing print resources in downloadable .pdf format.
The press is going broke.
Like me, they are thinking in terms of books and print in a world where there are lots of flashy Internet resources.
The Internet doesn’t work like a book. With a book, the press has a product, sets a price and sells the product. Money is exchanged in direct relationship to the goods received. The Internet is powered by advertising. The product is often delivered without charge, except that it links to advertisements for other products to purchase. Amazon.com is a site that sells traditional books, but you can’t visit it without seeing a page full of recommendations for other books, merchandise, and other products. The process of purchasing is so easy that additional purchases are just a click away. The company gets the Internet and knows how to use the Internet to produce revenue. It looks easy, but it isn’t.
And so we see bookstores and printers and newspapers and other traditional media facing decline, decreasing budgets and producing fewer and fewer products.
I don’t have to go farther than my morning newspaper to be reminded that there is decline in print media. The newspaper is produced by a staff that is less than half the size of the team that produced the paper a decade ago. The product itself is of lower quality. Headlines and articles don’t match up. There are multiple errors on each page. The art of editing has been reduced to page layout – adjusting the number of words to fit the available space. Proofreading has been assigned to a computer. And the content is predictable and boring. I frequently wonder how much longer I am going to continue to spend money each month to have a newspaper delivered to my home.
I don’t read the newspaper for news any more. I have already read the news online. I still read the comics in the newspaper, though I know I can also read those online. In fact, I do read some comics online because I like a few that aren’t printed in our paper.
I just like the feel of a newspaper at the breakfast table. I don’t take my computer to the table, yet. I know plenty of people who do. And the best tablet computer available costs less than three years’ newspaper subscription. And there is the problem of the huge amount of waste that a traditional newspaper generates. Essentially, we throw the entire paper away every day. Of course, we carefully save our old newspapers for recycling and I take them to a collection box because I am uncertain of the consistency of our curbside recycling. But even so, they are simply composted in our community. The cost of shipping makes paper recycling too expensive for our area. It is wasteful for me to consume so much paper every day.
I know the world is changing. I know that new generations will have fewer and fewer printed resources. But I have no fear of running out of books in my lifetime. I have my rooms full of books that are my old friends. I will not live long enough to re-read all of the books I currently own. And I still have “one click” purchasing at Amazon.com. New books arrive from time to time. In fact, there is one that will be delivered today.
There is excitement in being at the cutting edge of technology. But there is great comfort in being an old coot with his room full of books. These days I’m threading the balance between excitement and comfort differently that I did when I was younger.
And there is a bit of me that enjoys the reactions of young people who ask, “What do you do with all of these books?”
Yesterday we received a catalogue of print resources that are available for Christian education. The catalogue is well done and has informative promotions for the various resources. I immediately sat down and paged through the catalogue. I am familiar with most of the resources that the catalogue is promoting and so there wasn’t much that was new. My reaction after paging through it surprised me, however. The catalogue advertises the products of a traditional press. This press has been in business for hundreds of years and its people think in terms of traditional printing. They have a central distribution warehouse, keep an inventory on hand, and are prepared to ship books to churches and individuals. They know printing and the distribution of printed resources. My reaction was not to the printed resources, but rather that the beautiful catalogue is probably the last of its kind. As I said, they know printed resources, but they don’t seem to know the Internet. The catalogue presents an advertisement for an online resource. The resource is high quality and looks appealing in the catalogue. The web site, however, is a disaster. The product isn’t selling well because the press doesn’t know how to make the web site work. The product is difficult to find on the web. The promotional web site has no samples. The actual distribution web site has broken links and really is just distributing print resources in downloadable .pdf format.
The press is going broke.
Like me, they are thinking in terms of books and print in a world where there are lots of flashy Internet resources.
The Internet doesn’t work like a book. With a book, the press has a product, sets a price and sells the product. Money is exchanged in direct relationship to the goods received. The Internet is powered by advertising. The product is often delivered without charge, except that it links to advertisements for other products to purchase. Amazon.com is a site that sells traditional books, but you can’t visit it without seeing a page full of recommendations for other books, merchandise, and other products. The process of purchasing is so easy that additional purchases are just a click away. The company gets the Internet and knows how to use the Internet to produce revenue. It looks easy, but it isn’t.
I don’t have to go farther than my morning newspaper to be reminded that there is decline in print media. The newspaper is produced by a staff that is less than half the size of the team that produced the paper a decade ago. The product itself is of lower quality. Headlines and articles don’t match up. There are multiple errors on each page. The art of editing has been reduced to page layout – adjusting the number of words to fit the available space. Proofreading has been assigned to a computer. And the content is predictable and boring. I frequently wonder how much longer I am going to continue to spend money each month to have a newspaper delivered to my home.
I don’t read the newspaper for news any more. I have already read the news online. I still read the comics in the newspaper, though I know I can also read those online. In fact, I do read some comics online because I like a few that aren’t printed in our paper.
I just like the feel of a newspaper at the breakfast table. I don’t take my computer to the table, yet. I know plenty of people who do. And the best tablet computer available costs less than three years’ newspaper subscription. And there is the problem of the huge amount of waste that a traditional newspaper generates. Essentially, we throw the entire paper away every day. Of course, we carefully save our old newspapers for recycling and I take them to a collection box because I am uncertain of the consistency of our curbside recycling. But even so, they are simply composted in our community. The cost of shipping makes paper recycling too expensive for our area. It is wasteful for me to consume so much paper every day.
I know the world is changing. I know that new generations will have fewer and fewer printed resources. But I have no fear of running out of books in my lifetime. I have my rooms full of books that are my old friends. I will not live long enough to re-read all of the books I currently own. And I still have “one click” purchasing at Amazon.com. New books arrive from time to time. In fact, there is one that will be delivered today.
There is excitement in being at the cutting edge of technology. But there is great comfort in being an old coot with his room full of books. These days I’m threading the balance between excitement and comfort differently that I did when I was younger.
And there is a bit of me that enjoys the reactions of young people who ask, “What do you do with all of these books?”