The inevitable end of printed media

I'm terrible when it comes to newspapers. I don't buy them every week, but honestly, I love them. I even like clipping the little coupons, while I agree if I did have an iPhone or some other hand-held device that I can download coupons onto and show to cashiers for my discount that I would-- I still have this huge thing for ink on paper.

Mind you, I just recently graduated with a degree in printing.

I was expecting this for some time when Los Angeles Times laid off more than half their employees 5 years ago, but it is becoming more and more prevalent that the value of print is declining. My only hope is that the next generation can still enjoy and appreciate books like we do.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Midna

The statement that ebooks will be cheaper is ignorant. Already the big publishers have banded together to set prices for ebooks. It makes no sense that in some cases the mass market paperback is out for $6-$7, yet the ebook version is over $10. You can shop multiple sites and find discounted offers here and there, but it's much more limited than it used to be.

Midna, the bigger argument in this case is that it is a much bigger profit in general, for the publishing companies to go totally digital. The paperback mass markets are offering their prices at $6~$9 often times cheaper than their digital counterparts, but that often times is with a grave cost.

To put a point to this, the Los Angeles Times no longer does delivery M-F for free because their subscription sales revenues do not cover them. They still do the weekend deliveries for $1.50 subscription per week. So people are paying LA Times roughly $5~7 a month to get their papers delivered to their doors on the weekdays. THIS IS STILL DIRT CHEAP, though maybe not as cheap as the amount of electricity you use to charge batteries on your iPad or Kindle to go through the same amount of news/information you can searching on the internet/news website. This subscription fee nearly does not cover the amount of cost it takes to run journalist staff (who they had to lay off hundreds in the last decade), have press offices and news rooms running 24/7, pay the electricity bill on the building that houses at 4-story building tall press, not to mention the labor and facility costs on warehousing and distribution. I have not even grazed the printing process/costs yet.

The printing industry made a few good moves to move forward to eco/environment-friendly newspapers such as the water-based ink printed newspapers like USA Today and San Francisco Cronicle. They use water-based inks instead of traditional oil based inks so the overall chemical impact and pollution on the environment can be reduced (oil-based inks are managed by solvents which have harsh chemicals, and need to run on water constantly--therefore, potentially causing more pollutants to be released in BOTH water and air--plus, when the paper gets thrown away and decomposes(hopefully), the inks don't leave harsh chemicals in the soil). The big guns, fortunately, can still run on traditional lithograph print, but like Sprout mentioned in the opening post, a lot of newspaper companies have already shut their doors. In California, close to 150+ local newspaper publishers have already closed their doors, some big ones such as the Fresno Bee.

You cannot simply pick up a newspaper and think it's only the articles that matter. What part of an economic structure it plays, argumentatively, IS an archaic infrastructure that's been in place for the last couple centuries. What I'd like to argue, is that I hope that there will be some connection between the new digital technologies to keep print alive. Because no matter how useful a Kindle/Knook/whatever e-Reader there is, there is no comparable resource of all of these in one small package that arrives at my door on Sunday morning:

• Global News
• Economic Data
• Critical Political Issues
• Weather Forecast
• Places to Eat / check out
• Movie times
• Local News
• Local Events
• Entertainment in the area (that I may not be aware of)
• Obscure and random things to do
• Apartment listings
• Obituaries
• Coupons
• Sales for local Electronic/Grocery stores
• etc., etc., etc...

I can get through a lot of this information in about an hour. No matter how spoon-feeding the eReaders and facebook/twitter updates are, there's no way I can search for all of these in less than an hour and obtain information that I would find useful. The news-updates maybe, but all the extra stuff along the way I find like "where to get the best deals on chicken this week" and "ooh, an Estate Sale this Saturday in up-scale Palos Verdes, maybe I'll find a nice piece of furniture there for cheap"? No, I don't think I can search or Google all those in the same time frame that I can going through the Sunday paper.

There's nowhere I can't reach.