A beautiful artifact

Lo siento: no logro borrar el anuncio del Cadillac en Nurburgring. Enjoy it.

And you said that Wired, the magazine, is now at an all-time high for subscriptions, which is remarkable given what's happened to a lot of print media. Is there going to be a magazine in ten years? I mean that print copy that arrives that was very thick ten years ago and got very thin and is now very thick again. Pregunta Henry Blodget a Chris Anderson en el medio de la entrevista del post anterior:

I'm going to say yes, because you know I'm contractually required to say yes, I'm going to give you a logic to defend it. I think the book analogy is a good one. This has been the year of the e-book and right now I'm pretty much exclusively reading on the Kindle app on my iPad and I love e-books; but what we've seen is as e-books rose, there is still a market for physical books but it's a different market because you're now giving people a choice, you know, the physical one or the digital one. The question is why would you pick the physical one? It's got to add value in some way. With physical books, the answer is, the benefit of corporeality. You can give it as a gift, you can put it on your shelf, maybe the tactile, maybe the covers, beautiful and die-cut and embossed. And so the notion of the book as an artifact becomes more important than the book as an information package. The information package can be anywhere in any form, but the book is an artifact. It has a kind of atomic essence. That becomes the unique quality of print.

So I think what you're going to see going forward, is that print is going to be a minority share of the book market, but not zero. And the people who want print want it for the right reasons, which is they want what print can uniquely do. So to extend that analogy, I can imagine a day where print magazines are a minority share of the overall magazine industry. But maybe the price goes up, maybe the quality goes up, that as print gets smaller, print gets better. And the print becomes a kind of a beautiful artifact for those who value just that. In the print magazine now, usually the magazine is basically given away, because it's stuffed full of ads, let's call it 80-20. Sold at a deep discount to its cost.

Chris Anderson debe haber leído a McLuhan, aunque no lo diga en los 40 minutos de la entrevista. Y si no lo leyó debería hacerlo, ahora que es editor de Wired.