Aug 14 2008
Report of the death of print wildly exaggerated
I came across Jeff Gomez’ book Print is Dead: Books in our Digital Age while browsing through Hodges Figgis the other day. I couldn’t help but savour the irony that Gomez’ work came as a rather large chunk of dead tree. Reports of the death of print are frequent and often wildly exaggerated.
Print is Dead? Not yet, apparently.
To be fair to Gomez, his book is also available in electronic format. But, I find ebooks insultingly overpriced, I don’t have an ebook reader, I wouldn’t buy one just to read a single book, and I don’t want another device to hump around, recharge and synchronise. That’s the problem for eBooks in a nutshell.
Having said that, a quick flick through this book in the bookshop and a brief wander around Gomez’ blog makes me think that he might have something intelligent to say on this topic. And there are undoubted shifts in the print industry – most apparent in the newspaper and periodical business at the moment. Perhaps ebooks are an example of the sort of change that Larry Keeley famously characterised: We always overestimate the amount of change in the short term and we underestimate the amount of change in the long term
. I may give this book a go when my current book pile shrinks a bit.
