Earlier this week, over at
Dead Tree Edition, Mr. Tree (if that is his name, although I am always reminded of Monty Python’s “
It’s A Tree” talk show) poses the question, “Which are better, printed magazines or digital magazines?” and I could not agree more with his answer: “It’s a stupid question.” Tree-based vs. electronic media? Is the bark worse than the byte? (Sorry.) Moving right along:
publishers are not in the business of creating printed products. We’re in the business of informing, entertaining, and advertising; the medium is just the means to an end.
Fellow print lovers, it’s time to stop pretending that electronic publications aren’t real magazines or that print is always superior to digital.
Fortunately, I think we are finally (I hope) moving away from the false dichotomy of “p” vs. “e” and recognizing that each medium has its strengths and weaknesses, and each reader/viewer/subscriber/whatever has his, her, or its preference (as for the “its,” there is now a
cable channel designed for dogs, so who knows what publishers will decide to do in the future...). It behooves publishers to offer their content in as medium-agnostic a form as possible so it can be accessed however one wants it. This is not a new conversation, but it’s one we seem to need to keep having.
Going back to the issue of strengths and weaknesses of any given medium, I wrote about this over on
my personal blog last week in the context of talking about how the venerable
Encyclopedia Britannica will
no longer be offered in print. As I wrote, I used the print edition of
Britannica when I was a research assistant many many moons ago (i.e., just as the Internet was starting to emerge), and it was not easy to find what you were looking for. If anything killed the printed encyclopedia, it was not Wikipedia (or even the Internet) but rather the search engine, be it online or offline, as in a CD-ROM-based encyclopedia like
Encarta—or, indeed, in the CD-ROM version of
Britannica the company first put out in 1989.
As someone who prefers printed books (and even printed magazines, a lot of the time) to e-books, I find print an unsuitable medium for reference materials. There. I said it, and I’d say it again.
As I wrote (on a train on an iPad, which accounts for the typos and weird wording):
It’s tempting to think that it’s th[e] fact that Wikipedia is free that accounts for its popularity and for the demise of Britannica, and no doubt that is part of it (but actually Britannica went bankrupt in 1996, before there even was a Wikipedia—or even a Google). But even if Wikipedia existed as a free print edition (which would be impossible; someone actually did calculate—back in 2007—how many pages that would take and it would be the size of an entire library), it still would likely not be even as remotely useful as the electronic version, especially in this day of mobile Internet. I personally can vouch for how many bar bets or other inquiries are settled in moments thanks to an iPhone and Wikipedia. (Or IMDb, as the case may be...) In fact, as I write this, I am on Amtrak using my iPad (and WiFi on Amtrak, which is free, but all data is 10-15 minutes late). I have been using said iPad during this journey to look up the history of MIT on Wikipedia. Just think if I had to haul around a set of encyclopedias...
And why am I looking up the history of MIT? Because I just started reading The Technologists by Matthew Pearl—in print. See? There are some books I still prefer to have in printed form.
