Electronic publishing

When not worrying about my family's health or commenting on various political issues, I do have a day job in professional publishing (by this I mean we create research materials for a certain professional field, in our case, attorneys). Over the years I have seen many changes. When I started at my company, the big excitement was about the creation of electronic versions of our books on DOS based CD-ROMs. Today an entire library can be downloaded to an iPad in seconds. To outsiders, the offline print versions of our books look the same, but the production of them has changed tremendously from tapes being converted into metal camera ready copy sheets for the printers when a book was ready to be published, a process that could take several days, to sending the files via ftp in seconds. So it is with interest that I saw yet another article about the demise of print, particularly, the weekly news magazine.

Really this should be no surprise. Like the CD-ROM of 20 years ago, the print magazine has been surpassed by something newer. However, while physical books can compete with the newer technologies for quite sometime, magazines can't due to one fatal flaw: timeliness. By time print magazines and newspapers reach readers' hands the news contained in them is out of date. Not a big deal for magazines like Rolling Stone with feature articles or even those with in depth news analysis that doesn't have to be particularly timely, but death for print newspapers. I'm thinking of switching our weekend NY Times subscription to digital only because by time Sunday rolls around, I've already read most of the paper on my iPad. And, working in publishing for nearly two decades, I am still amazed that "books" that once told up a full bookcase in my office can now fit in my pocket on my phone as ebook files (down side is I can't access them if the phone loses power).

Still, there is something to be said for print copies. I enjoy re-discovering hard copy books on my bookshelf, paperback or hard copy, to read again. Physical books are easy to lend and always accessible, with or without an account with a private vendor or electricity. I also enjoy walking the stacks at the library to see what strikes my fancy. Still, while I gave up print a while back for news, I find myself moving to electronic books for two main reasons. One, I find it easier to read a 1,000 page book on an e-reader that weighs just a few ounces, as opposed to a book that weighs a few pounds. Second, and more importantly as my eyes reach their mid 40s and find it increasingly hard to read small fonts without glasses, I can make the fonts on my e-reader larger to make the letters legible. Vanity no longer has to go before the fall.