Tag: DEATHOFPRINT

Americans are increasingly doing their reading on screens, according to the Association of American Publishers. From January 2010 to January 2011, e-book sales more than doubled, increasing by 116-percent to $69.9 million. By contrast, hardbacks and paperbacks fell by 11.3- and 19.7-percent, to $49.1 million and $83.6 million respectively. By our calculations, ten years from now, "turn the page" ...

Amazon's empire is continuing to grow, with the company reporting an increase in profits of eight-percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. That growth was a little slower than expected, but the really big news from Amazon's quarterly financial report is the fact that sales of Kindle e-books have surpassed that of paperbacks. It was only in July sales of e-books passed that of hardcovers -- making it ...

With newspapers shedding film critics left and right, and amateur movie blogs gaining steam, many old-school academics and film journalists are blaming the Internet for what they call the 'Death of Film Criticism.' On the Web, literally everybody is a critic -- and that, some argue, threatens the very art of film criticism, itself. Roger Ebert, however, begs to differ. In a recent essay for ...

Ah, what unsurprising news a year can bring! Just as everyone predicted, e-books continued to nibble at the ankles of their printed forebears this holiday season, with between three and five million e-readers activated in the week after Christmas. Barnes and Noble claimed that it sold a million e-books on December 25th alone, while Amazon's been outselling print bestsellers with digital ones since ...

We've already heard about how students are clinging to printed textbooks despite many of the advantages provided by e-books. Sales of electronic textbooks are expected to increase in the coming years, but growth may be relatively slow, with optimistic estimates projecting a 15-percent adoption rate by the end of 2012. But a new report from the Chronicle of Higher Education claims that some ...

The White Pages' chronic illness might have been diagnosed in New York, but the phone book crawled to New Jersey to die. Regulators in the Garden State have given Verizon the okay to stop printing the residential listings. The company will still deliver print copies of the Yellow Pages, as well as government and information listings, but residents who still want the old-school, ink and paper White ...

Perhaps like the executioner with axe in hand, we bloggers have, for some time, been grimly certain of print's inevitable demise. Still, our heads hung yet lower today following New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.'s concessive words: "we will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future." While Sulzberger wouldn't speculate as to when that day will come, the axe is most ...

As a child, your writer got his geek on by traipsing down to the local library, where a massive microprint edition of the Compact Oxford English Dictionary was on display. The antique tome required a magnifying glass to read, and exuded some kind of occult authority with its Bible-like, tissue paper pages. But that experience will not be shared by the younger generation, as the Internet is ...

As print journalism continues to die a slow death, consumers are flocking to the Internet to get their news. According to a recent study, though, people are still having a hard time trusting what they read online. A report from the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California finds that more than 75-percent of users rank the Internet as the most important source of ...

The Kindle may be facing stiff e-reader competition from Apple's iPad, but, when it comes to printed books, at least, Amazon's reader seems to be dominating the market pretty handily. The company says it sold approximately 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books sold over the past three months, and that gap is continuing to widen. Last month alone, for example, Amazon sold 180 Kindle books ...

In an effort to retain a dwindling readership, some newspapers are equipping vending machines with credit and debit card readers. According to Advertising Age, The Wall Street Journal installed card readers on 190 newspaper boxes located in the greater New York area. It's a matter of convenience for customers, since many more people carry a Visa or Mastercard in their pockets than do quarters. The ...

We enjoy Nick Bilton as much as the next nerd, but why does the New York Times' tech columnist think that the main failure of digital magazines is their lack of social networking capabilities? Call us old fogeys, but back around the turn of the 19th century, when we were in our ramshackle grammar school barns on the outskirts of the Dust Bowl, the magazines we read didn't come with any sharing ...

Here's something you may not know about us editorial types. Remember those MLA books that your teachers made you purchase, and that inevitably wound up buried in the bottom of your locker? Well, such books, or style guides, are our building codes, if you will. Our unique problem, though, is that there is no single set of stylistic rules. Every publication has to decide for itself what is "correct" ...

Ruth Reichl, nonpareil food writer and the last editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine, summed up our feelings when she wrote on her Twitter account this morning, "[They are] reviving the brand, not the magazine. Pity." "They" are Condé Nast, the publishing powerhouse that shuttered Gourmet last year after a drop in revenue, and the big boss that just announced the reincarnation of the ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... Just yesterday, the Twitter Blog trumpeted the site's new Places location-tagging feature, but the service almost immediately forced the increasingly frequent Fail Whale to surface. The "failed enhancement" reportedly blocked users' access to feeds, and some individual tweets appeared numerous times. According to a Twitter Status blog ...