Independent work theme: the future of print media

INDEPENDENT WORK
THEME: THE FUTURE OF PRINT MEDIA

Student: Sheraliyev Azamat
The Future of Print Media

Introduction

Since the advent of the internet and the surge of social media, print is said to be ‘dead’. Today everything is mobile and news is always a second too late to update their readers. How can a static, physical and slow media adjust itself to survive in a wireless and digital world, updating every second? When Steve Jobs revealed the iPad in 2010 as a device that fulfilled the gap between smartphones and laptops, he knew that it would change all is known about electronic and print media. It was said that the iPad would be the salvation of newspapers and magazines but also, with Kindle, could make print books obsolete. But what is the real truth? This essay will try to answer this question, comparing how three traditional print media are behaving and adapting in the digital world.

Book 2.0

A book is a collection of things written, draw, printed, illustrated or with blank sheets, joined together in one place. They are the way of humans perpetuate their thoughts and knowledge to future generations since Antiquity: tablets, scrolls and codex are primitive forms in trying to condense many information in a singular object. Electronic readers such as Kindle, iPad and Kobo could replace print books. They are adaptive to readers preferences, giving them the choice to change font type and size; with a Wi-fi connection and a built-in dictionary is easy to find the meaning of a unknown word; and they are light and compact: with lower weight than a paperback it is possible to carry 1,400 books approximately (Amazon.co.uk, 2014). Just like the invention of movable type machine in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg shaped the form of modern books, it is natural to imagine that electronic books are the next stage in book’s evolution.
Amazon’s Kindle was the first to succeed in introducing a device that was specialized in being a platform for readers. The concept of e-books existed since the first computers were born, but was only with Kindle, launched in 2007, that e-books could compete with the print books. It was not just the design and the e-ink technology that made Kindle a success, but ‘a complete solution for the user’ (Slywotzky, 2011) provided by Amazon. Sony maybe was the first in introducing a e-reader, but was Amazon that made them mainstream. In 2010 it was estimated that had over a 3 million Kindle devices in use (Auletta, 2010). E-book readers reached 12.8 million in 2010, been Amazon’s Kindle the principal choice when it comes to e-readers using e-ink. But printed books still lives, even been surpassed in rate sales in 2012 at amazon.com (Malik, 2012).
In a recent survey, 62% of 16 to 24-years-old prefer print books over e-books (Bury, 2013). The price and the emotional connection are the two main reason why young adults prefer print books. But why a generation so connected with the new technology prefer a old-fashioned device such as print books? Matthew Brady (2013) had some good points about this survey. As a person from this generation (16 to 24-years-old) he prefers books, but do not have a good answer to why he likes more print books than the digital ones.
“The ebook, to me, is just a phase in the evolution of reading technologies — they’re no less “natural” than printed books, which just feel that way because they have been around so long (when did you last see a wild printing press roaming the moors?)”
(Brady, 2013)
So we can consider the e-readers and tablets as a new scale in the evolution of printing. Perhaps the question that should be made is not if the digital will substitute the print, but what this devices are doing in changing the common knowledge of what the print media is. The answer could be in other place.