The Heavyweight Championship of Publishing

Jan26 | by Galactic Ink

Ding, ding, seconds out, round one, fight! The heavy weight battle for your reading future has begun. Having recently come across this amusing article http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/20/2720158/sorry-ibooks-paper-books-still-win-on-specs we once again reconsider our view as to where the world of publishing is heading. As Leading Brands produces both print and digital publications we have an invested foot in both camps and so can see the positive and negatives for both arguments. Yes, digital publications can do so much more than print books or magazines can with the world of mass media hypothetically available at the touch of screen but is there as much gravitas reading Dostoyevsky’s War & Peace on a kindle rather than in a fine leather bound tome, you certainly wouldn’t get as many admiring looks on the metro!

 

The author of the article raises a fine point that the transference to e-publications makes reading materials much more transient. Whilst a well bound and cared for book can last for centuries what happens when your latest gadget gets over two years old and becomes a technological dinosaur? You replace it with the latest iCraze and what happens to your library of downloaded books and magazines, they float away into the technological ether, forgotten and never seen again.

 

I think the march into e-publishing is unstoppable as the benefits it can offer are invaluable to todays plugged in society but also I feel traditional print has got a long way to go yet. This promises to be a very long fight. Ding, ding, round two.