Print Is Dead. (Just Don’t Tell Jeff Bezos.)

Illustration by formerfactory

How long have we been hearing that trope? Since early in this century at least. Its lore goes further back than that of course. And certainly the iPhone and its progeny continue to constrict reading space to real estate no larger than your infinitely scrollable handprint. Nonetheless, the widespread belief that we are abandoning print has more followers than Katy Perry, if such a thing is possible.

Still, humans remain a tactile mammal, what with all the thumb-pecked texts and chats we are pushing upon each other. Surely part of a smart phone’s appeal is that you can hold it, cradle it, fondle it, and use it to get in touch, stay in touch, and touch upon a world heretofore unimaginable just 20 years ago — an eon in digital time (does anyone know what heretofore means anymore?).

Yet it seems even the great standard bearers of the digital age, Millennials, have a soft spot for print. They are, I discovered, still suckers for print, and for a variety of reasons. Even Amazon, the digital colossus readying to escort us to our instant gratification future, is opening brick and mortar stores. It seems that people like the way books smell(this being the most ironic link to a product I can imagine).

Your local grocery store has a bank of magazines and racks of tabloids at the end of every checkout. They don’t appear to be going away for some reason. When something persists, it does so because enough people continue to want it, regardless of how passé we’ve been told it is.

​And of course, it’s summer. And we’re sitting in the sun on a beach or a boat deck or poolside, and the brilliance of the light makes reading that damn iPhone or iPad impossible. So we sit back with a paperback, folding a corner of the page to mark our spot when the kids or some hottie or the day’s end beckons us to put aside our latest Stephen King thriller or NYT best seller so we can return to it later, lovingly — if unconsciously — delighted with our lingering analog habits that let us touch a world that can’t be reduced to an algorithm intent upon selling us something we might need or want or pestering us to post or share or like or whatever it is they’ve come up with to keep us from abandoning the internet’s pulse if only for an afternoon.
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 ©2016 John Hofmeister • Illustration by formerfactory