A few years ago I speculated on what it might mean that politico.com was getting a good share of its revenue from its local print edition in DC -- evidently it was the print revenue that was keeping the magazine afloat. Politico is still around, including the print edition. I don't know whether the print edition is still critical to the operation, but it says something that it's still around years later.
There's an even more blatant example, though, one that I don't recall noticing earlier even though it's been around since 2005: WebMD has a print edition. I've seen it in a couple of doctor's offices in the past few months. I'm sure I've seen it many times before and just not registered it.
It makes perfect sense, of course. Patients waiting in doctor's offices are the classic captive audience. Even today, when people are likely to have smartphones and/or tablets to read from -- or could just bring a book like in the olden days -- it's clearly still worth it to have a pile of paper around to browse through. A medical magazine aimed at the general reader makes perfect sense. If you're into sports or celebrity gossip you've probably already read the stories in those months-old magazines, but chances are you haven't browsed through WebMD, no matter how old it is. Being in a doctor's office, you might well be in the mood to.
As with Politico, it's particularly interesting that a primarily web-based outlet -- you can't get much webbier than WebMD -- is choosing to publish a print edition, and sticking with that decision for years at a time.
Showing posts with label print. Show all posts
Showing posts with label print. Show all posts
Sunday, January 3, 2016
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Print ... still not dead
Way back in the late sixties and early seventies, a bunch of people in Northern California put out The Whole Earth Catalog. Several of them, actually. There were one or two lying around the house when I was growing up, and I would often browse through them. I can't say I remember any particular content, but I do remember the vibrantly busy layout and, of course, the iconic photos of the Earth on the cover, including William Anders' famous shot of the Earth from the surface of the moon on this edition.
Print catalogs have a long and influential history. The Sears Catalog, for example, had a huge influence on the rural United States in the early 20th century, offering as it did everything from pins and nails to tools to toys and games, clothing, fishing and hunting equipment, bicycles, automobiles and even a house to put it all in. As I understand it, the arrival of the latest Sears Catalog in the mail was a noteworthy event in many communities.
In these days of the web, of course, there's little need for a mail order catalog. A good commercial web site is more up to date, a good deal easier to search and not so bad to idly browse. Some will not only show you detailed pictures of the goods, but let you customize and see the results. Why kill trees to send something static that will be obsolete by the time it arrives?
And yet ...
Kevin Kelly, one of the original editors of The Whole Earth Catalog, has been running or co-editing the site Cool Tools since its origins as a mailing list in 2000. It's now settled into a blogish form, but last year Kelly decided to collect the best bits from the site and publish them, as a book. In print. In 472 pages of print, to be exact.
There's at least one webby twist, though: Each item has a QR code which you can scan with your smartphone to get a link to the seller's site. That makes perfect sense, really. While the contents of the sites may change, the sites themselves will be much more stable (particularly if the book does a good job of driving business to them).
It's an interesting hybrid. A physical book that you can leaf through will provide a nice overview -- nicer than scrolling through screen after screen, unless your screen is pretty big -- and you still have the links. Granted, the links are a bit more cumbersome to chase, but if you're mostly browsing and only occasionally visiting the linked sites, that's probably not too bad.
Even if it just ends up being an interesting conversation piece, Cool Tools is only the latest in a line of blogs and other web sites spinning off books. Randall Munroe of xkcd fame, for example, is publishing his What If series in book form. Just to emphasize how not-real-time an enterprise book publishing is, even with today's technology, the book won't actually be available until September.
It's one thing if publishers are still putting out genre fiction paperbacks or coffee table photo books. The paperback as a tradition will probably be around for a while yet, and you don't have to buy a fancy reader to enjoy it. The coffee table book is the canonical example of something that print can still deliver better.
But a catalog and a web comic would seem to be two of the least print-friendly formats that could feasibly be printed. And yet they are. I have no idea why this should be, but I don't mind.
Print catalogs have a long and influential history. The Sears Catalog, for example, had a huge influence on the rural United States in the early 20th century, offering as it did everything from pins and nails to tools to toys and games, clothing, fishing and hunting equipment, bicycles, automobiles and even a house to put it all in. As I understand it, the arrival of the latest Sears Catalog in the mail was a noteworthy event in many communities.
In these days of the web, of course, there's little need for a mail order catalog. A good commercial web site is more up to date, a good deal easier to search and not so bad to idly browse. Some will not only show you detailed pictures of the goods, but let you customize and see the results. Why kill trees to send something static that will be obsolete by the time it arrives?
And yet ...
Kevin Kelly, one of the original editors of The Whole Earth Catalog, has been running or co-editing the site Cool Tools since its origins as a mailing list in 2000. It's now settled into a blogish form, but last year Kelly decided to collect the best bits from the site and publish them, as a book. In print. In 472 pages of print, to be exact.
There's at least one webby twist, though: Each item has a QR code which you can scan with your smartphone to get a link to the seller's site. That makes perfect sense, really. While the contents of the sites may change, the sites themselves will be much more stable (particularly if the book does a good job of driving business to them).
It's an interesting hybrid. A physical book that you can leaf through will provide a nice overview -- nicer than scrolling through screen after screen, unless your screen is pretty big -- and you still have the links. Granted, the links are a bit more cumbersome to chase, but if you're mostly browsing and only occasionally visiting the linked sites, that's probably not too bad.
Even if it just ends up being an interesting conversation piece, Cool Tools is only the latest in a line of blogs and other web sites spinning off books. Randall Munroe of xkcd fame, for example, is publishing his What If series in book form. Just to emphasize how not-real-time an enterprise book publishing is, even with today's technology, the book won't actually be available until September.
It's one thing if publishers are still putting out genre fiction paperbacks or coffee table photo books. The paperback as a tradition will probably be around for a while yet, and you don't have to buy a fancy reader to enjoy it. The coffee table book is the canonical example of something that print can still deliver better.
But a catalog and a web comic would seem to be two of the least print-friendly formats that could feasibly be printed. And yet they are. I have no idea why this should be, but I don't mind.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Web and print journalism: Curiouser and curiouser
By now everyone knows that print journalism is in serious trouble. By "everyone knows" I mean "the story has been aired widely enough that it's time to file it away under a shorthand version and move on to something else." Might or might not mean it's actually the case.
Enter Politico.com, which looks like a typical case of new media uprooting the old. Founded by ex-print journalists, it is now a go-to place for anyone who wants to find out lots and lots and lots of the minutiae of Washington politics. It came to public notice during the 2008 election but has since carved out a niche, with more White House reporters (8) than any other single organization.
As a business, it is more or less at break-even, not bad for such a young startup in an inherently cut-throat field. The punchline? About half its revenue comes from its print edition. Without it, Politico would be losing fairly serious money.
Folks, I'll admit I really don't know what to make of all this. On the one hand, pushing bits over the internet has got to be much, much cheaper than putting ink on paper and distributing the paper, even over a geographically small area. So I would tend to expect a natural evolution from print toward bits with -- and this is where I beat my not-so-disruptive technology drum yet again -- largely the same structures forming online as off, and largely the same players.
On the other hand, are the facts. The facts (in my reading, at least) bear out the not-so-disruptive part nicely. The print-to-bits part, however, seems to be going remarkably slowly, even backsliding in some instances (Politico and books published from blogs, for example). Kindle does not seem to have taken the world by storm, yet.
The obvious next step is to try to quantify all this. How much money is going to bits and print, respectively as the years go on? The analyses are out there, doubtless. Perhaps Alpha can turn them up?
Enter Politico.com, which looks like a typical case of new media uprooting the old. Founded by ex-print journalists, it is now a go-to place for anyone who wants to find out lots and lots and lots of the minutiae of Washington politics. It came to public notice during the 2008 election but has since carved out a niche, with more White House reporters (8) than any other single organization.
As a business, it is more or less at break-even, not bad for such a young startup in an inherently cut-throat field. The punchline? About half its revenue comes from its print edition. Without it, Politico would be losing fairly serious money.
Folks, I'll admit I really don't know what to make of all this. On the one hand, pushing bits over the internet has got to be much, much cheaper than putting ink on paper and distributing the paper, even over a geographically small area. So I would tend to expect a natural evolution from print toward bits with -- and this is where I beat my not-so-disruptive technology drum yet again -- largely the same structures forming online as off, and largely the same players.
On the other hand, are the facts. The facts (in my reading, at least) bear out the not-so-disruptive part nicely. The print-to-bits part, however, seems to be going remarkably slowly, even backsliding in some instances (Politico and books published from blogs, for example). Kindle does not seem to have taken the world by storm, yet.
The obvious next step is to try to quantify all this. How much money is going to bits and print, respectively as the years go on? The analyses are out there, doubtless. Perhaps Alpha can turn them up?
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Why are there blogs in print?
A while ago I asked "Why is there still print?". Asked, but didn't really answer. If books area test case for going digital (again leaving aside that text is fundamentally digital), then a blog, which is already available online for free, has got to be the acid test. Why on earth would one put a blog in print?
In Conversational Reading, a blog in form if not name, Levi Stahl examines the role of self-publishing (that is, print self-publishing) in putting blogs in print and tells why he has bought not one, but two self-published books adapted from blogs. Essentially, there's something about a book.
It's nice to have an index in the print edition, though.
In Conversational Reading, a blog in form if not name, Levi Stahl examines the role of self-publishing (that is, print self-publishing) in putting blogs in print and tells why he has bought not one, but two self-published books adapted from blogs. Essentially, there's something about a book.
It's nice to have an index in the print edition, though.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Dr. Dobb's: Dead or alive?
While chasing links for the previous post, I learned that Dr. Dobb's is no more. Sort of.
Last I'd looked, on the news stands a few months back, Dr. Dobb's was still in print and, from a quick browse, pretty much the same publication I remembered. I wasn't surprised, but given the nature of the business and the fairly large number of cool magazines (geekly and otherwise) that aren't around any more, I wouldn't have been surprised to find it had gone wherever cool magazines go when they aren't published any more.
Turns out I must have caught one of the last published issues. Dr. Dobb's is no longer in print, at least not as itself. It is now a monthly section in Information Week and an online portal. [This portal is still up, but, sadly, Dr. Dobb's finally shut its virtual doors on 16 December 2014. Fittingly, one of the last pieces published concluded a 10-part series on abstractions for binary search. The site has been "sunset", not shut down, meaning that the existing content will be available indefinitely. There just won't be anything new. --D.H. May 2015]
Is it a death in the family, or the same soul being transferred to a different vessel? To me, that has much more to do with the quality of the content than the particular means of publishing. If Dr. Dobb's remains a useful resource for the computing professional, the change matters little. If it morphs into something less ... I'd tend to think the change in format is more a symptom, whether of declining resources, declining standards or declining whatever else, than a cause.
For whatever it's worth, I note that ddj.com seems to suck up a prodigious amount of CPU, at least under Firefox. Not exactly "running light".
Last I'd looked, on the news stands a few months back, Dr. Dobb's was still in print and, from a quick browse, pretty much the same publication I remembered. I wasn't surprised, but given the nature of the business and the fairly large number of cool magazines (geekly and otherwise) that aren't around any more, I wouldn't have been surprised to find it had gone wherever cool magazines go when they aren't published any more.
Turns out I must have caught one of the last published issues. Dr. Dobb's is no longer in print, at least not as itself. It is now a monthly section in Information Week and an online portal. [This portal is still up, but, sadly, Dr. Dobb's finally shut its virtual doors on 16 December 2014. Fittingly, one of the last pieces published concluded a 10-part series on abstractions for binary search. The site has been "sunset", not shut down, meaning that the existing content will be available indefinitely. There just won't be anything new. --D.H. May 2015]
Is it a death in the family, or the same soul being transferred to a different vessel? To me, that has much more to do with the quality of the content than the particular means of publishing. If Dr. Dobb's remains a useful resource for the computing professional, the change matters little. If it morphs into something less ... I'd tend to think the change in format is more a symptom, whether of declining resources, declining standards or declining whatever else, than a cause.
For whatever it's worth, I note that ddj.com seems to suck up a prodigious amount of CPU, at least under Firefox. Not exactly "running light".
Monday, January 5, 2009
Web publishing goes to the Dickens
Charles Dickens is known for many things; well, at least for A Christmas Carol and possibly Oliver Twist. He is perhaps somewhat less well-known for his use of unusual names (Ebenezer Scrooge, Martin Chuzzlewit, etc.) and for having published many of his works in serial form.
Doing its bit in the ongoing quest to Make Money Writing on this "Web" Thing, Underland Press has picked up the baton with the Wovel -- rhymes with "novel", looks like an inside-out vowel and is not to be confused with the Wovel, a completely different beast which would appear to rhyme with "shovel".
There are two gimmicks here: First, the Wovel appears in serial form. The author writes from Thursday to Sunday and posts the next installment in time for everyone to read it at work on Monday. During lunch or other company-approved hours, I might hasten to add. Then comes the other gimmick. Readers are invited to vote on what happens next. Votes are taken from Monday through Thursday, at which point our intrepid author starts it all over again.
Two cliffhangers for the price of one: What will your fellow readers vote for (see the results in real time), and where will the author take you from there? Always leave 'em wanting more ...
So, how do they make money off of this? As far as I can tell, they sell books.
[As far as I can tell, the Wovel wrapped up in January of 2010, about a year after this post was published. Wunderland looks like it's still in business, though. -- D. H.]
Doing its bit in the ongoing quest to Make Money Writing on this "Web" Thing, Underland Press has picked up the baton with the Wovel -- rhymes with "novel", looks like an inside-out vowel and is not to be confused with the Wovel, a completely different beast which would appear to rhyme with "shovel".
There are two gimmicks here: First, the Wovel appears in serial form. The author writes from Thursday to Sunday and posts the next installment in time for everyone to read it at work on Monday. During lunch or other company-approved hours, I might hasten to add. Then comes the other gimmick. Readers are invited to vote on what happens next. Votes are taken from Monday through Thursday, at which point our intrepid author starts it all over again.
Two cliffhangers for the price of one: What will your fellow readers vote for (see the results in real time), and where will the author take you from there? Always leave 'em wanting more ...
So, how do they make money off of this? As far as I can tell, they sell books.
[As far as I can tell, the Wovel wrapped up in January of 2010, about a year after this post was published. Wunderland looks like it's still in business, though. -- D. H.]
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
You saw the website. Now read the book!
Someone sent me a link the other day to a definition on Urban Dictionary. While enjoying that, I noticed a link for their latest book. It's not surprising that a major site should have an associated book or two. What's surprising is that it's not surprising.
I've argued before that text as a medium is not going to die out any time soon and that the web is a major factor in that. But it's a bit more puzzling why print doesn't die out. Books from web sites are a particular curiosity, and one for an online reference even more so. Think about it: The online version is searchable, hyperlinked and up to date. The print version is none of the three.
A dictionary is meant to be searched, is generally more fun and useful to browse by chasing cross-references, and had best be up to date (it'll often be new words you'll want to know the meaning of, at least when it comes to slang). Why bother with print? I can see why a publisher would bother: they know how to get paid for print. But why bother to buy a book?
Copy protection isn't an issue for a free online dictionary. It's got to be the form factor. It's still hard to take the online version with you wherever you go. Sure, you can carry a laptop with you, and there are hot spots and cell modems, but a book is generally smaller and more reliable. And it's not that hard to search, particularly if the entries are alphabetized.
Kindle was supposed to change all that, but as far as I can tell the infrastructure and selection aren't quite there yet to make Kindle take off.
I've argued before that text as a medium is not going to die out any time soon and that the web is a major factor in that. But it's a bit more puzzling why print doesn't die out. Books from web sites are a particular curiosity, and one for an online reference even more so. Think about it: The online version is searchable, hyperlinked and up to date. The print version is none of the three.
A dictionary is meant to be searched, is generally more fun and useful to browse by chasing cross-references, and had best be up to date (it'll often be new words you'll want to know the meaning of, at least when it comes to slang). Why bother with print? I can see why a publisher would bother: they know how to get paid for print. But why bother to buy a book?
Copy protection isn't an issue for a free online dictionary. It's got to be the form factor. It's still hard to take the online version with you wherever you go. Sure, you can carry a laptop with you, and there are hot spots and cell modems, but a book is generally smaller and more reliable. And it's not that hard to search, particularly if the entries are alphabetized.
Kindle was supposed to change all that, but as far as I can tell the infrastructure and selection aren't quite there yet to make Kindle take off.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Undead technology
I did a double-take just now when I followed a link to a PDF file and noticed the Kinkos/FedEx logo in my PDF viewer. When did that happen? [Imagine a quick Google search here] Looks like the deal was announced back in June.
OK, so if I'm reading something perfectly well online, I have the option of sending it off to my local copy shop, having it printed out and then venturing out to go pick it up. Or, I suppose, I could have it FedExed to my doorstep.
Something tells me I'm not in the right market niche for this.
I could, however, imagine FooCorp emailing a bunch of, say, nice glossy marketing collateral from the Oceania headquarters to the Eurasia headquarters, where it would then be printed at the local shop, collated and bound and delivered to the appropriate desks. Clearly Adobe and Kinkos/FedEx think that people will want this, and who am I to say them nay?
At the risk of sounding like an, um, broken record, it seems that certain technologies have not yet figured out that they're supposed to be dead. Text isn't dead. It's now a verb. Print appears to be doing just fine, as well.
OK, so if I'm reading something perfectly well online, I have the option of sending it off to my local copy shop, having it printed out and then venturing out to go pick it up. Or, I suppose, I could have it FedExed to my doorstep.
Something tells me I'm not in the right market niche for this.
I could, however, imagine FooCorp emailing a bunch of, say, nice glossy marketing collateral from the Oceania headquarters to the Eurasia headquarters, where it would then be printed at the local shop, collated and bound and delivered to the appropriate desks. Clearly Adobe and Kinkos/FedEx think that people will want this, and who am I to say them nay?
At the risk of sounding like an, um, broken record, it seems that certain technologies have not yet figured out that they're supposed to be dead. Text isn't dead. It's now a verb. Print appears to be doing just fine, as well.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Why is there still print?
The Newsweek article on Kindle quotes Jeff Bezos as saying "Books are the last bastion of analog." I take his point, but it seems an odd statement. Text, after all, is arguably the first real digital medium. What he means by "digital", of course, is "available to computers". Unlike music and video, which are now routinely released in computer-readable form, books are still released in a form you can't just download. Bezos aims to change this with the Kindle.
The interesting question is, why does print resist digitization so well? I've suggested that publishers like it because it provides copy protection, but why does it? The answer has to be economic, not technical. Technically, it's trivial to digitize a book. Just scan it in. Don't bother to try to convert the image back to text. If all that people want to do with the result is read it, the image should work fine.
There's an interesting subplot here. Optical character recognition (OCR) seems to do fairly well these days on well-printed books, judging by Google books and Amazon's own "Search inside the book" feature. On the other hand, the fully general problem of reading anything a person can make out still appears to be hard, which is why sites use distorted text CAPTCHAs to try to stop bots. This seems like the equivalent of anX-prize for freelance OCR hackers, and indeed the inevitable arms race appears to be well under way. Finally, bringing us full circle, one source of these CAPTCHAs is printed text that failed to scan correctly.
In any case, the difficulty doesn't seem to be digitizing text in a readable form. The problem is, what do you do with it once you've got it? It's technically trivial to scan a book, but it still takes some time and effort to flip through all the pages, at least without expensive specialized equipment. So if I've done this, I'd like to see some compensation -- assuming I don't mind violating copyright laws.
Can I put it on the web and sell it? Well, um, I've just brought it into digital form, thereby making it hugely easier to copy. In other words, I've just put myself in the position of the publisher whose print-based copy protection I've just broken. If copy-protection is out, there's always advertising. Except that's maybe not such a good idea given that I've just broken the law.
This same argument would seem to act as a counterbalance to all sorts of unauthorized copying, but obviously it doesn't apply as effectively to audio and video. This is probably because copying CDs and DVDs is much, much easier than scanning books, and also because books are simply a different medium. I'd expect that PhDs have already been earned on just such matters.
The interesting question is, why does print resist digitization so well? I've suggested that publishers like it because it provides copy protection, but why does it? The answer has to be economic, not technical. Technically, it's trivial to digitize a book. Just scan it in. Don't bother to try to convert the image back to text. If all that people want to do with the result is read it, the image should work fine.
There's an interesting subplot here. Optical character recognition (OCR) seems to do fairly well these days on well-printed books, judging by Google books and Amazon's own "Search inside the book" feature. On the other hand, the fully general problem of reading anything a person can make out still appears to be hard, which is why sites use distorted text CAPTCHAs to try to stop bots. This seems like the equivalent of anX-prize for freelance OCR hackers, and indeed the inevitable arms race appears to be well under way. Finally, bringing us full circle, one source of these CAPTCHAs is printed text that failed to scan correctly.
In any case, the difficulty doesn't seem to be digitizing text in a readable form. The problem is, what do you do with it once you've got it? It's technically trivial to scan a book, but it still takes some time and effort to flip through all the pages, at least without expensive specialized equipment. So if I've done this, I'd like to see some compensation -- assuming I don't mind violating copyright laws.
Can I put it on the web and sell it? Well, um, I've just brought it into digital form, thereby making it hugely easier to copy. In other words, I've just put myself in the position of the publisher whose print-based copy protection I've just broken. If copy-protection is out, there's always advertising. Except that's maybe not such a good idea given that I've just broken the law.
This same argument would seem to act as a counterbalance to all sorts of unauthorized copying, but obviously it doesn't apply as effectively to audio and video. This is probably because copying CDs and DVDs is much, much easier than scanning books, and also because books are simply a different medium. I'd expect that PhDs have already been earned on just such matters.
Kindle and print
While looking for something else, I ran across the November 26 issue of Newsweek. The cover story was on Amazon's new Kindle e-book. Conveniently enough, the article is available online.
Overall I found the article pretty evenhanded, balancing the "print is inherently inefficient" side with the "books are inherently special" side. As usual, I think both sides have valid points. A few thoughts:
Overall I found the article pretty evenhanded, balancing the "print is inherently inefficient" side with the "books are inherently special" side. As usual, I think both sides have valid points. A few thoughts:
- Yes, print is inherently inefficient. That doesn't mean it will die anytime soon. People still sent hand-delivered messages long after the telephone became widespread. Steam trains ran long after the diesel came along. Western Union only recently shut down its telegraph service.
- On the other hand, it's hard to imagine print not giving way to bits over time and eventually reaching niche status. My completely unfounded guess is that it will end up more like blacksmithing than buggy whips.
- Amazon is right to recognize that it's not enough just to have an electronic device that more or less looks like a book. The Kindle is not just a device but a service. Along with searchability and the potential for hyperlinks, Amazon hopes the killer app will be the "buy and read it right now" feature. Push a button (and pay Amazon a fee generally less than you'd pay for print) and the Kindle will download whatever book you like. Whether this is enough to pull people in remains to be seen, but it at least seems plausible.
- The Kindle relies on copy protection, presumably using some Trusted Computing-like facility. I've argued that it's not unreasonable to expect a special-purpose device to give up programmability in an attempt to lock down copy protection. Again, it will be interesting to see how well this works.
- Conversely, print has a nice, well-understood copy protection model. Copying a book means physically copying pages. In theory this is quite breakable. In practice it works well (so far). Publishers naturally like this. It would be interesting to try to quantify how much this convenience to publishers is extending the lifetime of the book, as opposed to the "nice to curl up with and read" aspect.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
How do writers get paid without copy protection?
Hal comments (thanks!) that music and video can't be protected, and as a result only interactive content, particularly games, will be commercially viable. Music and video will be produced mainly as an adjunct to games and given away free. I was going to get into this anyway, so that seems like a great jumping-off point.
First, I completely agree that music and video can't be protected by purely technical means, and that interactive media have a much better shot. Copy protection fundamentally requires a tight connection to an object or event in the physical world, and interactivity provides such a connection. Frankly, though, I'm reluctant to claim categorically that anything can be effectively copy-protected, even when it looks like there's an airtight case. Where there's a will there's very often a way.
Nonetheless, the model of paying a fee to be able to participate in an interactive experience with others looks viable. It certainly seems to be working so far. I can also see single-user cases working, particularly if the game play has a random element to it. This also seems to be working so far.
On the other hand, I'm not convinced that it's necessary to protect content strongly in order for content creators to make a living. Text, for example, is impossible to protect. No one really tries, that I'm aware of. The exception would be environments where secrecy is at a premium, in which case protection is generally a combination of encryption to prevent casual access and stiff penalties for giving away the keys or unencrypted content.
And yet writers can still make (a little) money. How?
First, the traditional print model is still alive. I've heard newspaper publishers express concerns, given that classified ads have serious alternatives online (often including the newspaper's own online ads), but daily papers are still around, as are independent weeklies, supermarket tabloids and mass-market magazines, coffee-table books, specialized trade rags, pulp fiction and pretty much everything else.
Not only has print not disappeared, I'm not sure I can even think of a particular commercial genre or format that's disappeared. You'd think by now something would have. Small-circulation newsletters tend to be emailed or on web pages these days, and office memos have (thankfully) more or less bitten the dust, but those are non-commercial.
Print has (at least) three ways of making money. At least one of them carries over quite well to the online world:
Of the three approaches above, physical print is all about literal copy protection, while subscription depends at least to some degree on protection through interactivity (even a print magazine has to stay fresh by responding to its readers). Advertising stands out in that it not only doesn't require copy protection, but actively encourages free copying (as long as the ads stay attached). The more copying, the more people see the ads.
First, I completely agree that music and video can't be protected by purely technical means, and that interactive media have a much better shot. Copy protection fundamentally requires a tight connection to an object or event in the physical world, and interactivity provides such a connection. Frankly, though, I'm reluctant to claim categorically that anything can be effectively copy-protected, even when it looks like there's an airtight case. Where there's a will there's very often a way.
Nonetheless, the model of paying a fee to be able to participate in an interactive experience with others looks viable. It certainly seems to be working so far. I can also see single-user cases working, particularly if the game play has a random element to it. This also seems to be working so far.
On the other hand, I'm not convinced that it's necessary to protect content strongly in order for content creators to make a living. Text, for example, is impossible to protect. No one really tries, that I'm aware of. The exception would be environments where secrecy is at a premium, in which case protection is generally a combination of encryption to prevent casual access and stiff penalties for giving away the keys or unencrypted content.
And yet writers can still make (a little) money. How?
First, the traditional print model is still alive. I've heard newspaper publishers express concerns, given that classified ads have serious alternatives online (often including the newspaper's own online ads), but daily papers are still around, as are independent weeklies, supermarket tabloids and mass-market magazines, coffee-table books, specialized trade rags, pulp fiction and pretty much everything else.
Not only has print not disappeared, I'm not sure I can even think of a particular commercial genre or format that's disappeared. You'd think by now something would have. Small-circulation newsletters tend to be emailed or on web pages these days, and office memos have (thankfully) more or less bitten the dust, but those are non-commercial.
Print has (at least) three ways of making money. At least one of them carries over quite well to the online world:
- The book as a physical artifact. Coffee-table books look great. You just can't get that on your screen. If nothing else, the resolution and contrast are way higher than for anything you can get on a screen. Other books use special paper and fancy bindings to look gorgeous. Children's books are particularly inventive in using pop-ups, textured materials and so forth. These are niche markets, though. What's interesting is that nothing electronic yet seems to have killed off even the humble paperback.
- Subscriptions. You pay me a regular supply of money, I give you a regular supply of content. This seems to work well for cable TV and satellite radio. In the case of music radio, you can get all the content elsewhere, but what you don't get is the particular selections and, of course, the charming DJ's. Talk radio is more of a live performance and in many cases interactive. As such, it's one prototype for (probably) copy-protectable interactive content. Not all radio or TV is paid for by subscription, though, and pure subscription models are fairly rare in print (investment newsletters come to mind). The alternative, of course is
- Advertising. Not even Mad magazine survives purely on subscriptions any more. Plenty of "free" publications survive on advertising alone. Online, without the cost of printing presses, paper and delivery, no one needs to charge a subscription fee. Why bother, given that it's trivial to copy the content? So instead, you get a variety of ads in exchange for the convenience of being able to get a document hot off your search engine. There are various technical ways of stripping out ads, but the dirty secret is this: ads are actually useful, at least sometimes. The symbiosis between "real" content and ads has been around for a long time and very much alive and kicking now. Just ask Larry and Sergey.
Of the three approaches above, physical print is all about literal copy protection, while subscription depends at least to some degree on protection through interactivity (even a print magazine has to stay fresh by responding to its readers). Advertising stands out in that it not only doesn't require copy protection, but actively encourages free copying (as long as the ads stay attached). The more copying, the more people see the ads.
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