The iPad has been hailed as another nail of coffin of print.
Indeed, in his book Print is Dead Jeff Gomez says the internet is killing print little-by-little by removing it as a necessity for most people. Information is spread by websites and most people communicate by email. Sports scores and classified ads are found in newspapers but most people get this information online. Print is gradually being erased. Gomez argues that publishers should see this as an opportunity, not a threat. "Just as videos and DVDs proved to the movie business that their trade had little or anything to do with film itself, so too will digital reading prove to publishers that cardboard and pulp are merely the passing adjuncts to its most important processes," Gomez writes.
But to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports about the death of print are premature. Print won't die, it will just change.
Printing on demand is now a growth industry. As detailed in The Economist, about 285,000 titles were printed on demand or in short runs in 2008, the last year these figures were available and that's 132% more than in 2007 and for the first time more than in the conventional way. The world's biggest wholesale book distributor Lightning Source printed 20m books in 2009 and the average print run per title was less than two.
At the same time in Germany, entrepreneurs have set up a new paper, called Niiu, which lets readers choose the types of articles they want to read, taken from a range of newspapers. Readers will register on the website, www.niiu.de, before 2pm and then access other papers, pages and sections of interest online to build their own paper. But instead of reading it online, their selections will be printed overnight and delivered to their doorstep, at a price. The venture already has international partners including The New York Times and The Washington Times. It's so tailored that you get the newspaper with your name on top. The customised paper might be a sign of what's ahead.
There is a similar approach in Switzerland with a Swiss German innovation called Personal News, as detailed here, a nifty collaboration between SwissPost and Syntops GmbH. What happens with Personal News is that you register online and select up to seven newspaper sections that interest you, including the Washington Post, and the newspapers you select send their PDFs to Syntops, which assimilates the PDF into personalised publications and passes them on to Swiss Post, which then has them on your doorstep by 11am. You can even change your newspaper selection up to 7pm the previous night.
Books on demand and personalised newspapers are tailored for each customer and the beauty of the model is that each customer actually wants to read it. Whether the economics stack up is another thing altogether. The per unit costs are the same so conventional printing offers stronger economies of scale. And when you have spectacularly successful writers like JK Rowling and Dan Brown selling millions of books, print on demand won't replace conventional printing.
Still, it tells us that publishing will change. If print on demand for newspapers and books takes off, the big losers will be book sellers, news agents, logistics firms and offset printers.
no comment untill now