As I descend into my post-Christmas blues and I settle into my new department at work - I reflect on some of my thoughts that I had over the holidays.One of my thoughts were;
Imagine a world without books? This gives a sense of emptiness and an impression of a much less interesting place to live, with all our imaginations and thoughts tied up in our heads and not shared. However if I rephrase the question to; Imagine a world without physical books? Does this conjure up the same feelings? I mean, the books still exist but not in the traditional format that we are used to - instead we are going digital. This sparks the discussion of how important is the physical nature of the book and do we need it to enjoy the story?
I watched an interesting documentary on BBC called 'Imagine', where the new realm of digitalisation is decreasing the number of physical books that we buy in shops. Instead it is the era of Kindles, iPads and e-books, where you can download thousands of books onto one device without the need of lugging big bulky books around with you. Some people think this kills the romanticism of reading books and takes away from the whole experience, other people think that the book is just a method of transmitting ideas - therefore it does not matter how these are communicated. It is interesting to think that people believe that the actual holding of the book and the smell of the book adds to the experience - surely we are just reading it for the escapism? However, as it may seem that we are running into this era where everyone owns an iPad (which it may seem like that to a Londoner) but the reality is that only 13% in the UK actually own an e-book reader, which tells me we are quite far off a world of no books!Translating this digital ethos to the press world, news and newspapers can be downloaded easily by way of 'apps', but are they a threat? My uncle is a perfect example of this, a man who just turned 60 was quite happy to chuck away the use of the newspaper and read the news on his new iPad. This has sparked certain theories within the industry that 'press' is a dying medium and that there are no future for the press traders - its all going digital! I wonder though, how much of this is true? Sure, the press team are getting trained in digital aspects, but I think that is more for purposes of harmonisation in the industry to encourage working together.
Press has been on the decline, but looking at recent statistics; 10+ million newspapers are still bought everyday in the UK with 75,763,015 sold every week! Speaking in terms of advertising, 1 insertion reaches about 57% of all adults. If you were to read just those statistics alone, you would not think press is on the decline - it is still prevalent within our society and I don't see it going anywhere soon. If you want to reach adults on a mass scale, then press is definitely a strong contender in the channel mix.
The digitalisation is certainly a lot faster in London than anywhere else in the UK, in fact, London is a little world of its own where people forget that the rest of the UK exists (London accounts for 12% of the entire UK population). Life is a lot slower in many parts of the UK, where the carrying of books is not an issue and they have time to go pick up the daily newspaper - however, when London sneezes, the rest of the UK catches a cold..... therefore London maybe a good futuristic illustration of the world to come, where everybody throws away traditional methods of reading and embraces the digital world of e-books.
It begs the question, what could ever be next?
