Will an Ipod for publishing kill printed media?
28 April 2010
Frank Romano, RIT professor emeritus and Great Print Debate Chair
Time magazine once named the Personal Computer the "man" (machine) of the year. Publishing industry pundits are ready to canonize the iPad. It is the personification of the e-world of publishing and it and its ilk will change the way we learn, work, read, and communicate.
At stake are the future of reading, cognitive development, libraries, human communication, print, and the publishing industry as we know it.
There is a movement that has as its core premise the philosophy that electronic is more environmentally friendly than paper. Picture an iPad in a landfill, disintegrating into toxic chemicals that will harm the environment for a million years. Paper, however, will have been recycled and ultimately become one with the earth.
From the earth is the tree and back to the earth is the paper. In-between we record life as we know it and that recording can be accessible for millennia. At my university, we have had some of the Dead Sea scrolls and they are readable after thousands of years -- if they were the Dead CD-ROMs, forget it.
I fear that we are degenerating into a society that watches and listens more than it reads and reflects. Reading requires the use of the imagination. New media is more literal. The iPad is not a reading device; it is a multi-media player that will change the nature of books by integrating audio and video. It will lead to the death of text and the rise of a generation of people with short attention spans. Brevity is the soul of twit(ter).
Anti-paper people only see their own PC -- they fail to see the server farms consuming giga-volts of energy generated by burning fossil fuels and mega-tons of old screens, computers, and electronic paraphernalia discarded every year.
"E" is not free. An e-mail blast may appear cheaper than a paper mailing, but our planet pays the price. We save pennies and our environment pays pounds.
Paper is not the enemy. It has its place in a multi-channel, multi-media world. It will never be the only medium again, but it will be a medium that is well done when integrated into cross media campaigns.
The Apple iPad has fallen on the heads of a new generation of information and content consumers. Publishing will change. Print will change. Change will change.
This topic - Will an Ipod for publishing kill printed media? - will be debated at IPEX as part of the Great Print Debates.
The Smithers Pira/Ipex Great Print Debates take expert commentary, lively debate and audience interactivity to a completely new level.
Each panel of experts - thought leaders and high-profile industry representatives - will debate the most pressing questions facing the printing industry today.
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Audience participation and interaction using simple polling technology will allow real-time feedback and drive the questioning of the panel moderator and push the experts out of their comfort zone.
- Be at the forefront of the drivers and trends changing your industry
- Hear the biggest names in print and media debating the most controversial issues in 2010
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- Takeaway an exclusive study with scenarios and forecasts to 2020
Where?
The Printers Profit Zone in Hall 9 (9F 333)
When?
13.00-14.00 every day of IPEX.
Register online at www.ipex.org/greatprintdebates