How do you read?
It’s no secret that the world’s view of print is changing – daily even. Major newspapers and magazines across the globe are seeing major decline in the number of subscriptions sold, largely due to the increase of readers going digital. By “going digital”, I mean many who once had a paid subscription to a newspaper or magazine which was physically delivered to their home, office, or work, now get that same content from any number of web based sources – FOR FREE. Big names like Playboy, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Dallas Morning News have all seen big declines in the number of subscriptions sold compared to years passed. Check these articles for more facts along these lines – article, article, article, article, article. Get the picture?
A DIFFERENT APPROACH
Many who read for pleasure now read differently as well, thanks to devices like Amazon’s Kindle Reader and other similar competitors (Barnes and Noble Nook, Sony eReader, Irex iLiad). Book publishers are also seeing declines in the number of books printed and sold.
Now keep in mind the over-arching problem is not that the salesmen and women for these print publications are all bad. The biggest problem is that readers don’t see the value in a physical, printed book, newspaper, or magazine as they once did (article). Even as it is, I’m sure there are some holdouts that will go down with a newspaper in one hand and a rotary telephone in the other.
HOW DO YOU READ?
So this begs the question – how do you read? Have you already adopted a fully digital reader’s mentality or are you on the other end of the spectrum – a holdout who will cling to print publications like Ted Nugent to his gun collection?
Here’s how it breaks down for me…
Number of magazine subscriptions – 4 (none personal, all for church related stuff)
Number of newspaper subscriptions – 0
Number of books purchased in the past year – 20-30
As you can see, I haven’t totally abandoned print for digital, but newspapers have little value to me (as does telephone books & advertising in things like these) and you’ll see shortly that my digital news intake is significantly greater than my print intake.
MY NEW NEWSPAPER
I’m not an avid reader, but I do like to keep up with news and culturally relevant happenings. Nor will I be canceling my Amazon.com account or will I stop ordering books soon. But, my best friend since June 2008 has been Google Reader. Google Reader is a web-based RSS reader that serves to pipe all of the content feeds from my favorite blogs, news sites, and other places on the web into one, easily readable web browser format. Here’s how my Google Reader feeds looks…
Friends/family blog sites – 8
Ministry news/blog sites – 18
Technology news/blog sites – 14
General news – 4
That’s 44 subscriptions that a read weekly, none of which costs me anything. I don’t see myself paying for a print subscription anytime soon either. Two of my 4 “general news” subscriptions are sports related too – I find news media outlets like NBC, ABC, and CBS to be quite redundant and negative.
What about you? How do you read? Let me know…I’m genuinely interested.
*SHAMELESS PLUG WARNING*
You can plug AndyBarlowBlog.com into Google Reader (or any RSS reader) to have new posts streamed directly to you. Click this link – Feedburner – then copy and paste into your reader. Yes, it is that easy!
No Mom, I didn’t just fire you. But just for your box of information for future purposes, you can very easily take a machine needing an internet connection everywhere you want to go, with the exception of some sparsely inhabited places.
My new iPhone is a perfect example of this. I have AT&T’s high speed 3G network at my fingertips wherever I go & my email (and other info) is sent to the phone where I read it in my hand.
And your point about the printed page being around “as long as it is taken care of” is no different than me (or anyone else) maintaining their computer equipment. The whole premise for this blog post is built around the idea that many people already do own and maintain digital equipment, so there’s no cost for purchasing new equipment.
Thanks for reading.
Hey son, did you just fire me? You cannot take a machine needing an internet connection everywhere you want to go, but you can carry a newspaper. Doctors offices would not allow you access to their high speed internet. You don’t need it in a park either, if reading a newspaper or magazine. You don’t need to worry about maintaining a newspaper, but you do a computer. Where will the history be when a computer crash wipes out all that info. On the printed page, it is there as long as it is taken care of. Surfing through computer archives for any publication is tedious and time consuming. Give me the printed page anyday, for a simpler, less challenged and technically advantageous enjoyable time.