If you work for a print publication, you’re pretty tired of hearing people say that “print is dead”. Many people even take this one step further and declare that journalism is dead. It seems the age of printing our best ideas on flattened bits of dead tree has had its day.
Case in point: the iPad. Apple announced yesterday that it has sold three million of them in the first 80 days. A truly amazing stat, tainted only slightly by Apple’s insistence on referring to the device as “a revolutionary and magical product”. For a company so in touch with cool, it has some truly corny marketers.
Preening aside, Apple tends to redefine an entire market with its very first product. They did so with digital music players (the iPod), then touch screen smartphones (the iPhone), and now tablet computers. Dozens of other manufacturers, from Nokia to HP, are hustling out touch screen tablets to compete in this new gold rush.
And publishers around the world are eagerly joining the fray. Magazines, in particular, see the iPad (and its brethren) as a saviour. Here, for the first time, is a device that can approximate the beauty of a magazine layout without any of the printing or shipping costs (which account for over a third of the costs for most magazines).
Unfortunately a lot of their first efforts have been underwhelming — at least from the perspective of tech commentators. Wired magazine’s app, for instance, is not only enormous to download (over 500 megabytes) but also quite obviously a print product jazzed up for a new platform. One particularly unkind reviewer compared it to a multimedia CD-ROM from the 1990?s. Ouch.
But that didn’t stop them selling 24 000 copies in the first 24 hours after launch. Not bad for a first attempt, and one that was heavily delayed by Apple’s spat with Adobe (which also explains the app’s enormous size). This may just be froth created by the launch, but it looks like a significant number of people are genuinely keen to read an entire publication on a screen.
But does this really mean that print is dead? After a near death experience during the recession, many newspapers are now profitable again, and magazines look to be following. Besides, the 70% of the world’s population who don’t have internet access are unlikely to want to buy a $500 wireless browsing device.
Even when they do become affordable, tablets and e-readers are unlikely to kill print in the medium term. For proof look no further than Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, who holds 440 patents — many of them for lifesaving medical advances like the world’s first wearable insulin pump. As he points out in a fascinating interview with the Economist, technology is only one part of the equation.
“Technology is easy to develop,” he says. “Developing a new attitude, moving the culture from one mental model to another, that’s the difficult part. You give people a solution to a problem and the great irony to me is that even though they’re unhappy, they have high inertia. People don’t like change. The reason it takes technology 15 or 20 years to come in is because 15 years is the time it takes a kid who saw it when he was young to become a functioning adult.”
So it seems print’s execution has been delayed for another decade or two. But will that mean the end of journalism as we know it, circa 2030? Unlikely. A publication isn’t the dead trees it’s printed on, nor will it be the screen it’s displayed on. A good publication is an institution, a filter on the universe and a calm voice amidst the storm. No amount of technology is ever going to replace that.