The rapidly dwindling printed page
August 8, 2011 Books 2 CommentsThe nationwide chain of Borders bookstores officially went down in flames last month. Which sucks; I know a lot of folks were cheerleading their demise, due to the fact that Borders and others muscled out many independent bookstores in the 1980s and 1990s, but the loss of the chain is not a good thing. Our local Borders closed months ago, and now all we have in my area is one massive bookseller, Barnes & Noble. (And if you live in a town that doesn’t have a Barnes & Noble, you’re shit out of luck.)
Without any competition, Barnes & Noble has no incentive to offer the kinds of deals that Borders had, or even to stock varying products. There’s been countless times where I’ve searched for something that was normally stocked at Borders, but come up empty at Barnes & Noble.
This whole debacle got me growing more depressed about the impending death of print as a medium.
Since so much material is online nowadays, quality periodicals are becoming harder to come by. Aside from publications going out of business, many that are still in print are outdated by the time they hit shelves. The only magazine I read is Decibel, and the material in there isn’t duplicated, such as interviews and album reviews. I understand that you can find album reviews all over the ‘net, but Decibel‘s writers are some of the very few that I trust. But how much longer does the mag have in this day and age? To the best of my knowledge, it’s stable, but even niche publications like Decibel aren’t safe.
Then there’s books. Sales of e-books are starting to outpace their printed counterparts, and it’s a lot cheaper for a publisher to send out a file than print and ship a stack of books. Dedicated e-readers are cheap, and more advanced tablet computers like the iPad are perfect for reading digital books, magazines, comics…you name it.
Print’s slow death saddens me, as I vastly prefer physical media over a random collection of zeroes and ones. It’s a shame that we’re throwing away a longstanding tradition in favor of simple convenience.















