Image Hosted by ImageShack.us
www.flickr.com

06 June 2006

Print is where words go to die

Yes it's true. Print is dying, in fact by 2040 it will be dead as many of you are aware. And books are probably the most limiting of communication media.

The problems with books are many: They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources. They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader. They try to teach readers but don’t teach authors. They tend to be too damned long because they have to be long enough to be books. As David Weinberger taught me, they limit how knowledge can be found because they have to sit on a shelf under one address; there’s only way way to get to it. They are expensive to produce. They depend on scarce shelf space. They depend on blockbuster economics. They can’t afford to serve the real mass of niches. They are subject to gatekeepers’ whims. They aren’t searchable. They aren’t linkable. They have no metadata. They carry no conversation. They are thrown out when there’s no space for them anymore. Print is where words go to die.
- Jeff Jarvis


Print is dead. Long live digital media! Let's go paperless, save our last trees and share, remix and talk about content and knowledge.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home