Print vs. Digital with a twist!

[InkAddict]

You should check this out!

I've known the "Non Sequitur" cartoons for a long time, and Wiley always hit the nail at the right angle, but he REALLY gets the point across here (even if he is probably unaware of the discussion we're having at the moment) when he's talking about "print media vs. digital media"

I believe what he's sketching out to be the future: Print Media becoming just a "special" luxury version of the more widespread digital media.

This shouldn't offend nor scare the print enthusiasts (of whom I am part), they should instead embrace it!

As to the difference in price, there could be a market for small-size printers!

Imagine the possibilities of YOU choosing WHAT paper you want your comcs printed upon!

Say, the cheap one for the PVP comics you like to leave lying around in your bathroom, while the heavy-stock luxury paper fits your "finder" collection you like to leave on your bookshelf and have grown fond of as if it were a child to cherish!

Also, all of the distributors could well lose their job as a distributor, but find a new job as "printer" and thus make a fine buck catering for those who WANT to spend money on printed media, while the less-endowed readers' audience may be happy downloading images (or viewing them online), and may only want SOME of them printed out!

I don't know if this should go into the "commerce" section, but as the FOCAL point of "print media having an online version" changing to "online media having a print version", is more of an artistic consideration to me, I don't know how your comments will evolve.

Just thought I wanted to share one of the most talented webcartoonists' views with y'all!

[thrdgll]

I think the message behind that cartoon is the pointlessness of having to filter the information through a computer in the first place. It hardly seems a celebration of the computer age to me.

We've beaten this horse to death, but I still get the sense that those heavily involved in internet usage aren't aware of how isolated the online community really is. Until the computer is as cheap as a television set, then the internet, not books, will remain the specialty item.

The last thing in the world a consumer wants is a more complex set of decisions. Given the choice between a book lying on a shelf and someone (or something) prompting them to decide what kind of paper they want that book printed on, most people are going to pick up the book that's already assembled. I'm not saying it's the right choice, I'm just trying to be realistic.

Gearheads dazzled by electronic gizmos aside, there's a reason consumers don't leap at the chance to use the "self-checkout" at the supermarket. They recognize this as an attempt to make them responsible for what used to be someone's else's job. Consumers (and I'm using the term as derisively as possible here) like the idea that it's all being done for them by other people. They will choose the book that's already printed becuase someone else has made all the decisions for them.

We cannot assume that the general public is as excited about digital technology as the online community. People will enjoy having to print their books themselves about as much as they enjoy automated phone mazes. Any vision of the internet's future must acknowledge the simple truth that most people despise computers.

Ashley

[InkAddict]

...point taken

You're probably one of the best advocates of the dead tree comic community on the board, Ashley, and THAT's the reason I like your comments most!

...but what if digital comics become "easier" than printed (choose the kind of paper and leave your seat to get 'em) comics?

Won't eventually the "easier" technology win over the less easy one?

It reminds me a little of the old Vinyl/CD discussion.

Eventually, most people weren't won by the superior quality of CD's, but by the fact you can easily skip songs and jump to the ones you want!

Also I didn't want to take Wiley's cartoon as a manifesto... just a (very) possible way of how printed media will be viewed soon!

(already kids are being overwhelmed with computer high-tech at school, even in domains I would have preferred theold printed books to rule: one kid I know ended his papers with a bibliography and source notes; most were web-sites....hardly recommendable sources )

[thrdgll]

What "won people over" to CD's was the sudden and complete absence of vinyl records, players and needles in the market. Watch carefully what happens with the DVD Revolution, it will be as quick and merciless as the CD transistion. Store owners will be penalized finacially for continuing to stock VHS by the larger corporations and their distributors (as they were for continuing to handle vinyl) until there's nothing but DVD stock. The message to the consumer will be clear: buy a DVD player or watch nothing.

Mind you, I LIKE CD's and DVD's just fine. But do you really think, given a true democratic choice, that most people are going to willingly buy yet another expensive electronic device if they're not forced to do without the old alternative?

The 8-track (and I'm showing my age here) sold because of its ability to "loop" from the end of the tape back to the beginning - no getting up to flip the disc over or move the needle. I'm sure if the quality hadn't been such total shit, we'd all have 8-track players instead of cassettes. So yes, the quality does hold persuasion, but you have to completely muscle out an old technology by underhanded means (such as cell phone companies buying up pay phones and pricing them out of existence) to really "convince" the consumer.

Ashley

[Jack Masters]

This reminds me of something from K. A. Applegate's Animorphs, where the high-tech aliens were all amazed that humans had created books before the internet.

Yes, in the current scheme of things books have many advantages over reading things online. This does not mean books are inherently "better".

I grew up in a household in which both computers and books were in great supply. My father worked as the head computer-guy for the university, and he had over 2000 books. But the computer was in constant use, whereas the vast majority of the books just sat on the shelf forever after being read a single time.

Perhaps this is because people use computers for different reasons then they buy books. They use computers to ACCESS information, and they buy books to POSSES it.

It may well be that this need to posses is a basic human desire that books fill and computers do not, but is it really healthy? What separates the need to own books from the need to own cars and TVs and blenders and yes, sophisticated electronic gizmos?

[InkAddict]

What "won people over" to CD's was the sudden and complete absence of vinyl records, players and needles in the market.

concerning the CD market, you're right, at one point next to no vinyl was available anymore.

In the meantime, however, most people had already switched to CD, and it was to really overhaul the standard, that vinyl was being "demonised" as being oldfashioned and primitive. I remember being honestly amazed at how good was the sound quality of a paper tube and steel needle on an old pick-up I owned. Primitive yes, but not so low a quality as they wanted to make us believe.

On the other hand, while today vinyl has regained a respectable position both as collector's item and as "special" listening experience,... cd has almost completely crushed vinyl out of existence.

collector vinyls aren't cheap.

With books, however, I hope NEVER such a change will be forced upon us: it could well be tried, but publishing is TOO easy: you might buy and cmlose all vinyl factories, but you cannot control all printers/presses/photocopiers...

Also, BOOKS will be a viable alternative for those who like to render something "real".

All books are mainly just INFO, and the ink and paper adds no value to the written work, but most people like to consider the boob AS a book, not as "intellectual produce".

That's why the idea of a PRINT and DIGITAL market coexisting peacefully alongside each other is a SERIOUS view of how the future COULD be!

However I have never considered books "objects"; merely things CONTAINING info. That is why I treat them poorly (even if I could never abandon them)

Strangely, I act the same way with comics, even if most of my friends find this repulsive behaviour, and seem to consider comic albums as highly-valued objects to be cherished and protected, while they feel okay tossing a paperback book around or carrying it (the book) around at the bottom of a bag...

[Jack Masters]

Well, books ARE objects, regardless of how you consider them.

[Greg Stephens]

With books, however, I hope NEVER such a change will be forced upon us...

It won't happen right away, but it could. One of the reasons (for there are many) that CDs replaced older formats of music so quickly and efficiently, is that the same companies that had been producing the vinyl LP, then the magnetic tape cassette, were those that were producing the CDs. They're not really in the music business, they're in the technology business. They develop formats and players that make audio information portable, and they're very good at that. They're not so good at determining what music the public wants and giving it to them. The very fact that they fail to realize this is exhibited by their sudden attack on Napster rather than an embracing of it and working out how to make money off of it (they will eventually). The same hold true for VHS tapes and DVDs. 8-track tapes and laserdisks suffered from being introduced before their respective technologies were refined to a small enough unit that can play the same length of time as the older format. I could go on about this, but I'm going to bring this back to the thoughts of books and computers and point out that the reason that computers won't eliminate books- at least in the immediate future- is that the people invested in print technology are not the same people that are currently (important word, that) bringing us all the new and nifty digital technology (with rare exceptions). See, the music business as a whole accepted CDs and started producing those, which is that how they got to be everywhere. For books to become obsolete in the same fashion, it would take the entire publishing industry as a whole to agree on an alternative format and start producing whatever that is rather than old-fashined paper books. And I don't see that happening anytime soon. (Now I expect that someday I'll have to look back on that statement and laugh.)

[chrisSturhann]

For books to become obsolete in the same fashion, it would take the entire publishing industry as a whole to agree on an alternative format and start producing whatever that is rather than old-fashined paper books. And I don't see that happening anytime soon. (Now I expect that someday I'll have to look back on that statement and laugh.)

Greg,

I don't see any radical changes coming in the book industry, at least not in the short term. I don't think you'll be eating your words anytime soon, but I think there's more than just format to think about.

I work for a publisher of science books and journals. We happen to be one of the rare exceptions you mention. Each year we see our online revenue grow and our print revenue decline and that's what we plan for. Then again, we're kind of a special case. Our readers are not consumers. They're scientists doing research. They care more about timeliness and convenience than they do about format. They want to be able to download an article in their office/lab and they don't want to have to wait until a printed journal is out to read an article. One of the real advantages of online publishing in our field is that papers can be published article-by-article. Say you have a journal that publishes an issue every three months. In a print world, an article could sit for months waiting for enough other articles to be able to print an issue. Online that article could be published as soon as it was ready.

Traditional book publishing is a different. People aren't going to want read a novel, or even a nonfiction book, chapter by chapter as they become available. Also I think that people who read books are always going to view an unbound printout or web page that you have to sit at a computer to read as an inferior product. Plus, publish on demand technology has made commercial book quite a bit more viable. Publishers can now publish a single copy of a single work that's virtually indistinguishable from a regularly printed book. Before publish on demand, publishers would have to guess at how many copies a book would sell and hope that it would sell enough to make a profit, have enough extra copies to keep the book in print for a reasonable period, have to pay to store those extra copies, etc. If a book sells out, they'd have do the same guess work again and hope for the best. If a book doesn't sell, you have to remainder (sell at a loss) or even destroy the remaining copies, because it costs more to store them than you're liable to recoup by selling them. Publish on demand has removed a lot of that guess work. It also allows publishers to print only the number of copies they know will sell and print them as needed as long as it is viable to do so. They can keep work in print longer, and it's more viable to publish books that have lower demand.

I see two ways there would be a shift toward online publishing. First, if publishers could produce an online version as a byproduct of what they're already doing and sell that online. Say they could do a pdf version of the book for download. The problem with this is you would have to price it enough lower to make up for supposed lack of quality. Who is going to pay seven or eight dollars for a pdf of a novel that they would have to print on their own paper with their own printer when they could get the same information bound with a color cover for the same price. To make it worthwhile, the price would have to be a buck or two, and you'd need micropayments to make that feasible. Second, publishers would have to develop multimedia content that adds value to the print. The thing is that they've been doing that for years with CDs packaged with books. The only real advantage of going online is that you could embed the multimedia into the text, but that could be done just as easily on the CD as well.

I don't think any of these issues are going to be resolved very fast.

Chris

[thrdgll]

Chris,

Very enlightening perspective you have there. Thanks for being the sane intermediary between my anti-corporate ravings and the McCloudian optimism for all things digital seemingly held by most posters.

For the record, my vendetta is not against computers or those who champion the future of technology, but against those who would hinder our choices in the marketplace. Reminding us that booksellers and computer-makers are different people is reassuring. Once Time Warner owns everything, the future of media, print or digital, won't look quite so rosy.

Ashley

[Greg Stephens]

Good points, but I feel obliged to point out a couple of contrary cases to this statement:

People aren't going to want read a novel, or even a nonfiction book, chapter by chapter as they become available.

The first contrary example isn't very current, but in the 19th century it was fairly common for longer works to be published serially. Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and other big names did this. Just because it's not in vogue these days (thanks mostly to the fact that the greater ease of typesetting and publishing novels these days compared to then makes publishing a brand new, untried novel much less problematic) doesn't mean that people won't do it or don't want to do it.

The second contrary example is comic books, which are long stories that are told serially and, more recently, are subsequently collected in one volume.

Though I realize that these two examples aren't particularly germane to mainstream book publishing in the year 2002, I had to bring them up.

[InkAddict]

...as an additional note, to set things in a historical perspective, ...

....When books were first printed (and no longer written), the LOW cost of print vs. the HIGH cost of handwritten (manuscript) books, made it a logical choice to print: more books could get sold!

...seems as if micropayment is going to have the same effect on the digital industry