Fading Ink

The 21st century has witnessed great advancement within technological spheres. Almost every field today is in some way or the other relied upon the internet for its smooth working. We develop goose bumps today if we are reminded of how terrible used to be the days when things were technically challenged. Today everything is greatly possible to happen within a few seconds due to internet and technical advancements of all kinds. Imagine referring to age old books from libraries and not being able to locate certain aspects about the topics that concern us. So when we are confronted by information available at top speed via the internet and e-books as compared to traditional paper books, many of us in such cases confer much importance to the online versions of the same books.

The closing down of Britannica Encyclopaedia and the sudden emergence along with the overwhelming response and popularity of the Wikipedia is a much importantly debated case in this context. We have this on one side and the other side where it is believed that internet cannot do any harm to the future of print media. The advent of electronic media would not affect the survival and development of print media, said short story writer Vasudhendra. Speaking at a session on ‘Kannada on Internet’, he said e-book, e-news and internet will never be a challenge to the printed material or books. He said writers should adapt to the changing technology and use Internet to their advantage.

The suspension of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s print edition and their concentration upon its online edition, with paid access should give us some cause for pause. The various editions of the Britannica encyclopaedia have had huge volumes which becomes challenging to the respective readers to cover, wherein the upcoming online version offered ease of access and faster accessibility regarding any content. The Britannica was the standard encyclopaedia for a long time. It was a great place for summarized knowledge. It had the pride of place in most libraries, too – gold-lettered and leather-bound. The coming of the World Wide Web with its free access to information brought the Britannica down a few notches.The growing popularity of Wikipedia could be understood through a number of factors. Not only was it free, it also covered any topic you could think of under the sun and did not have to go through the rigorous (and snooty?) process of a bunch of experts deciding whether it was important enough to be featured in the pages of the Britannica.

Despite what you may have heard, reports of the “death of print” have been greatly exaggerated. A survey by Deloitte found that 88% of magazine readers in the UK still prefer to consume articles via print. While half of respondents to its state-of-the-media survey (2,276 UK consumers, aged 14 to 75) owned a smart phone, 35% subscribed to at least one printed magazine in 2011. Of course, with the adoption of tablet devices on the rise, this figure could well be out of date already – particularly given the rapid improvement in the quality of digital publications, and the demand for them to do more than merely replicate the content of print titles online. But, regardless of some high-profile print closures in recent years, the stories of doom and gloom in the publishing industry have been tempered by a mini renaissance in independent titles. And old-fashioned paper and ink has an unlikely savior.

Ironically, one could attribute it to the internet. A lot of people have discovered their opinions and voices writing blogs and sharing in social networks. A natural next step is to create something permanent.The mainstream publishers have let down the industry and individuals are trying to create better publications. But it’s not just amateurs who are responsible. Some of the internet’s big players – fashion sites such as style.com, asos.com and netaporter.com, online kids’ game Moshi Monsters and yes, even Google itself – are now publishing print magazines, using traditional media to refresh the parts of their business model that other solutions can’t reach. For online brands, print is a neat way of gaining extra marketing attention and boosting their community, even if there’s no money in it.

One of the best examples of a truly integrated multimedia success story has a very different target audience. Moshi Magazine, the spin-off print title for the online kids’ game Moshi Monsters, posted an ABC figure of 162,838, putting it ahead of men’s magazines such as Nuts (114,116) and FHM (140,716). And it’s clear that these kids are still in love with paper.”You might be able to look at a digital game or magazine on an iPad, but you can’t cut things out, colour-in, take pen to paper or stick it on your wall,” says Emma Munro Smith, editor of Moshi magazine. Despite hugely popular online elements to the Moshi world, for Munro Smith’s readers, “having their work, letters or username immortalized in print will always be incredibly exciting”. This idea of the permanence of print, particularly among younger generations supposedly reared in the digital age, is something dear to the heart of Gerald Richards, CEO of 826 National, the literacy project set up by novelist and publisher Dave Eggers. When we watch students with books, there’s a very different experience – there’s that power of having something physical that they own, particularly when they write and see their name in print, it’s always there. With computers, it’s gone at the touch of a button.

The two worlds of print and internet can co-exist and support one another. It’s not an either/or situation. One is a resource for the other: you read something in a book, and then you look it up on a computer. Students are often writing blogs anyway. The beauty of online is that it allows them to instantaneously share with a larger audience. But the relationship with books is different. Kids take books home and they can keep them.It’s often counterproductive to create divisions and make comparisons between the worlds of online and print. It’s our admittedly unorthodox opinion that the two can co-exist, and in fact should co-exist. But they need to do different things. To survive, the newspaper, and the physical book, needs to set itself apart from the web. Physical forms of the written word need to offer a clear and different experience. And if they do, we believe, they will survive.”It’s simply a matter of defining the different role and purpose of print and online,” says Sara Cremer, MD at customer communications agency Redwood. “Print does certain things very well. There’s a sense of reward – almost luxury – of devoting time to the printed page that you can’t put a price on. But at the same time, there’s an immediacy and ‘share ability’ to the online world that’s just as valuable in its own unique way.”Creating boundaries between the two can prove unhelpful. “It is only helpful to make the distinction if you can then emphasize and radicalize the inherent qualities and advantages of both media. We just don’t get why people always see it in either/or dichotomies; it’s more about the ‘AND’.”

This brings us neatly to Google. The very same organization that was once accused of looking to kill off print with its digitized Google Books Library Project now has its own print journal, Think Quarterly, created by The Church of London creative agency. Like Cremer, Danny Miller, the company’s founder/MD, points out that, “magazines are simply very effective ways of engaging with people. To the greatest extent, it just seems like common sense to us that any company would want to communicate with people through print.” Similarly, we would like to thus conclude that there is no battle as such between the print world and the internet and one does not face competition with the other as there is equal demand for both.