The Wabe → Personal Notebook → Follow The Money
In his column and book, Jakob Nielsen has placed the end of traditional print media sometime around the year 2008 (Nielsen, The End of Legacy Media). He bases this estimate on current technological trends and estimations on the point where digital media surpasses print media in readability and quality. In other words, this death is based solely on the concept that technological improvements in presentation will overcome all usability concerns of the consumer.
The problem with this estimate is that it assumes that the media provider will gladly adapt and provide high-quality content to the consumers. It’s a grand experiment being conducted now; newspapers and magazines, cowed by technology pundits’ cries of doom, have begun presenting their content for free on the web. Dave Barry, the Pulitzer-prize-winning commentator, often mocks the panic felt by editors as they try to adapt to “the new media.”
They needn’t bother. Print media is not going away anytime soon; the only thing that will force a change in content distribution will be a radical rise in the expense of paper. The freewheeling nature of the Internet, which has avoided the bridle of big media time and time again, will insure that print is the only viable medium for profit-oriented content providers.
The first evidence of this is the collapse of advertising revenue on the Web. To facilitate dynamic advertising, content providers set specific guidelines for the size and format of online advertising. Unfortunately for the content providers, the uniform nature of these advertisements allowed users to learn quickly how to ignore them. Additionally, many products arose that allowed users to ignore graphics of a given size, format, or origin.
Micropayments were supposed to solve the problem of revenue. A micropayment is the transfer of pennies from an end-user’s account to the content provider in exchange for access to the provider’s content. Nielsen still places a lot of faith in their eventual success; unfortunately, it is a difficult argument in the face of their complete lack of presence on the modern Web. The problem is that the philosophy behind micropayments is flawed (Shirky, The Case Against Micropayments). People hate them.
It’s all very well and good to wax on about the power of technology, but as any good Marxist will tell you, money is what drives sociological change. Nielsen skirts around the chicken-and-egg problem of demand-versus-cost by putting emphasis on early adapters, but there are other economic factors that may quash any hopes of seeing an all-digital, all-virtual media future.
Foremost is the ever-present problem of copyright on the Web. The average consumer has no respect for authors’ rights; he freely distributes copyrighted materials with careless alacrity not seen since the speakeasy days of the 1920s. The problem, of course, is the difficulty of achieving simultaneous control and distribution of content. If the consumer can read it, the consumer can redistribute it. Even worse, if the content is available to the everyday user, it is vulnerable to automated extraction tools wielded by unscrupulous rival content providers.
Another problem is accessibility. While “Internet anywhere” is a guaranteed eventuality (the death of Ricochet being just a minor stumbling block), the idea of having to carry a content reader wherever you go is bound to leave the majority of end-users cold. Ubiquitous computing is still but a pipe dream.
Paper is an attractive medium for these exact reasons. Copy-protection is built-in: while the provider has the means to produce instances of the content (e.g., a newspaper) for fractions of a penny, the expense of duplication for an end-user is much greater in both money and effort. The content instance has its own built-in display and navigation—while traditionally linear—is direct and immediate. It is lightweight, wireless, and requires no secondary access fees. Conversion to digital form can be done through scanning and OCR, and sections can be “clipped” for archiving.
Print media protects the content of the content providers, and thus prevents loss of economic value for the information contained within. Newspaper and book publishers have a vested interest in controlling the number of instances of their content. Advertisements only provide a meager income since consumers have learned how to ignore them; micropayments are difficult to implement and are unwelcome. Neither provide revenue with unauthorized instances of content, which cannot be prevented with freely distributed digital media. Print media provides almost all of the economic advantages of digital media but only a few of its limitations. Print will not die.
Last Modified: 2005/03/27 04:38:54 GMT
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