The end of print media is coming

“We have the luxury — the opportunity — of making a leap that most newspapers will have to make in the next five years.”

-- John Yemma, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, on their discontinuation of their print publication (from the New York Times, 10/29/08)

If one belongs to a smaller (especially non-profit) journals, one has seen this coming. Most newsletters and smaller print publications have already (or are in the process) of discontinuing their paper editions and moving to an online-only format. Many magazines have either folded or have limited the number of issues they print in a year.

This represents a huge change: in less than 5 years, I predict most average-budgeted periodicals will move to an online-only system. Any publisher that's a non-profit or that works with a low budget will similarly feel impelled to give up on print since it is too expensive.

Harvard gets it right

I'm sure many people saw the article "At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on The Web" from the New York Times. What I found particularly interesting was the idea that the division responsible for managing and granting access to all these faculty (and maybe student) publications was the library.

I've been thinking this for years now, thanks to Library 2.0 and Stephen Abram. Libraries across the board should be proactive and solicit information such as reports and papers from their communities. By assembling websites where such information is assembled, scholars and interested people would know where to go - they would look to the library to be the source of the latest publications. In that way, libraries would be the equivalent of a scholarly Craigslist.

I wonder if any of the librarians at Harvard thought of this. :)