The Print Revolution

I've been actively researching about forth coming iPad and what it could mean to the print industry for work. It occurs to me we are approaching the start of the print revolution.

We've been in the digital revolution for a while and it can be broken down into several small revolutionary movements, such as the digital music revolution.  this however could be the most pertinent as the the oldest medium of print starts its move to digital form.

You could say that it started a while ago with the launch of kindle and if you want you can say even further back with the launch of the internet. These are both good points but i think its the start of the end of print as a physical format that is the point.

I'm an Apple fan and make no excuses for that but what I think Apple are good at, are finding a digital market and pushing it to a common international standard. In terms of the forthcoming iPad they are taking the book and providing a form to read it on. The iPad isn't perfect as it doesn't yet help bring magazines, newspapers and comics to the device natively as it does with books. Thanks to the App Store this won't be much of a problem but i can't help feel an app called Newspaper stand that allows subscriptions to newspapers and Magazines in a way iBooks does is missing.

So the great thing is the future will see digital editions of our favorite print publications coming to us for a reasonable price. The down side is the past. What about old books, editions not currently in print or even ones that never will be again. Of course we could scour e-bay and old book shops but we are used to things at our fingertips. This is the problem being addressed by the Gutenberg Project and to an extent Google Books. Now both projects have their faults and their advantages. Google Books is probably the most publicized due to the copy-write back lash by authors and publishers.

Here is my proposal, all publishers agree to bring all editions of their back catalog to digital format. In response to that these digitizing projects will only digitize out of print books that, a) don't have a publisher who still exists, b) who's copy-write is out of date and c) won't be available in a digital format without these projects such as university and public libraries.

These companies can work together to bring archived material into the public domain at a lower cost to themselves and bring the print to an larger audience. Local newspaper archives would most benefit from these. I personally would like to research local newspapers without having to spend days at the library, looking through thousands of papers, when the internet takes seconds.

As I said we are on the cusp of the Print revolution but its only by bringing as much of the old print to the new format that we will truly benefit. True it will eventually kill off the print medium but its better to preserve the knowledge than loose it due to arguments over money.  Also true it will eventually kill off the library (which I'm a fan of), but this will only happen if the library doesn't evolve but the benefit is a library run at cheaper costs with more books than any one building can currently hold.

So I say embrace the change, push for digitization even if it is only to preserve the past for the future.