Print is dead. Long live print!

November 2, 2008

A brief inventory.

Things I never read in print anymore:

  • Bank statements
  • Newspapers
  • Opinions

Things I always read in print:

  • Books
  • Alt-weeklies
  • Magazines

Things I often read in print, but not always:

  • Recipes

4 Comments and Tweets

  1. I would generally agree with that list. I’ve read newspapers in print when I’ve worked for them and because of the comics section when I was younger.

  2. This is about where I am, too. But I’ve been giving some thought lately to the Kindle. I don’t see it eliminating paper books completely, but maybe more and more so over time. (I have yet to investigate whether my library has a way of loaning e-books… perhaps by download?)

    As you know the alt-weekly scene here in Miami leaves something to be desired, but in any case I see that moving online over time, too. Same for magazines to a lesser extent (the best magazines combine design photography and text in ways that just doesn’t translate to the internet).

    What’s particularly interesting is the prospect of having a portable, easy-on-the-eyes screen for browsing the text-based internet (eg in particular newspaper sites), because I understand the Kindle comes with some sort of limited internet-browsing ability built in.

    BTW, I recently did a 13-week subscription of the paper Herald, and what a disaster that was… I hardly ever even opened it, and then they extended my subscription and repeatedly called me trying to get me to pay for it.

  3. Ryan:

    Incidentally, college newspapers didn’t cross my mind here, but they fit into a time-sensitive category that goes something like this:

    Things I read in print every day when I was on campus, but read online-only now.

    The local newspaper where you grew up might fit into this category as well, depending on your age.

  4. For my list, delete recipes. I’m a big cooking enthusiast and I get all of my recipes online now. When I think of it, I share them on delicious, which kind of fits, I think.

2 Trackbacks

  1. [...] as Ryan Sholin demonstrates, the newspaper buyers of the future don’t buy them. A weekly publication, maybe. A [...]

  2. [...] not tomorrow, or next month, or even next year – but it’s coming”.  Why? Well as Ryan Sholin demonstrates, the newspaper buyers of the future don’t buy them. A weekly publication, maybe. [...]