Josh Blaylock Dot Com

How Print Will Fall

How long until print is dead?

That question has come up in conversation about a hundred times in the past few weeks, so I thought it'd be worth taking another hack at technological fortune-telling (hey, gotta have a hobby).  From the business stand-point, it's worth talking about this to stay on the pulse; personally, it's just a geeky thing I like to do.  Hey, about 15 or 16 years ago my Dad and I called it when we said "I bet in the future you'll just keep all your music on some kind of 'computer box' that you can carry around, so let's see if the crystal ball works this time.

We've all seen press about e-books, pdf readers, the new Amazon.com "Kindle" being the latest invention, but will any of them take off?  I think that it's undeniable that eventually, people will read the majority of their content digitally.  But it will be a while before those of us who've grown up used to print are phased out.  The catalyst, I believe, is going to start with schools.

While one might still hold a fondness for the experience of turning pages and feeling a book in his or her hands, what if your $1000 + college book expenses were just cut in half by purchasing a high-quality e-book reader?  Even better, the following year, you can just download all of your new required reading.  That's sure as hell a lot more appealing than carrying around a hundred pounds of textbooks. 

Now skip a couple of years forward, when everyone in the college system has these, and millions of others who jump on the bandwagon due to the falling prices and rising quality of the readers.  By now you will have mastered illegally downloading all the textbooks you need, and since you have these, you MIGHT AS WELL download something more fun to read. 

Similarly, reading material like newspapers will be so much easier to read on the e-book readers (although I think they'll last in paper form a lot longer than many of us think).  With aiming to clean up the environment, how can anyone really argue with this, though? 

Being a comic book publisher, I have to bring up funny-books.  I think they'll go digital too, but this will happen after the e-books become mainstream, and of course, offer really nice color displays.  The entire concept of comics being collectible is something that separates them from magazines, newspapers and books.  However, I think magazines, newspapers and books will suddenly BECOME collectibles. 

A traditional "book" will become something you buy for the same reason many people buy comics right now - you want to keep it on your bookshelf, you like knowing that it is produced in a finite quantity, and you can admire how many you have.  The more digital books grow, the more the passion for collecting print products will as well.  I guess it's comparable to collecting music on vinyl.

Eventually it will become harder to buy things in print than it is to download them.  What does this mean for publishers?  I think it's going to be a very good thing.  There's a danger, though, of being held hostage by those who control the mass distribution such as iTunes, Amazon.com, and whoever else comes on the scene.  In contrast, you'll always be able to get your information out to people via your own online presence. 

Those large brick and mortar outlets, though - the huge bookstore monsters - are already feeling competition, and I don't see any way that they could possibly last another ten years without radically changing their merchandise catalog and morphing into another form of big-box retailer.

So who knows?  The effects of this are going to take a while, but when it happens, I think it's going to happen faster than anyone expects.  And all of this is just over the next ten years... who know WHAT the hell will happen after that?  Eventually we're going to be able to coat our walls (and anything else for that matter) with paint that acts as an LCD screen, and probably transfer files from one platform to another by simply touching it.  How awesome will it be to be able to save the movie you downloaded the night before on your T-SHIRT and then play it on your bulletin board at work?  I'll tell you how awesome.  TERRIFYINGLY awesome. 

Or... we'll all be using sticks to make fire come 2012. 

Silly Little Dreams

A long time ago, I think somewhere around 1996, I had just started self-publishing black and white comics and making the rounds at conventions from Chicago to Pittsburgh. I was still living in Cincinnati, going to the Cincinnati Acedemy of Design for commercial art. We had recently gone to Chicago on a trip to visit random agencies in town, where a lot of alumni were working.

I had no intentions of doing the agency thing, and just considered school a means to a temporary day job while I pursued comics. There were only a couple of schools in the entire country that even taught comics at the time, and I couldn't afford those, so self-pubbin' was my "education." So meanwhile, I really liked Chi-Town... all my life, everywhere I'd lived, was either been bored or felt that something was slightly off, and the Windy City was the first place to ever feel like home.

Some friends were having a home-from-college gathering on the good ol' West Side of Cincinnati (an "interesting" place all its own), and I ended up bullshitting with two guys about what our plans were. I'd never really clicked with these guys, but they were always kinda there as mutual acquaintances and we got along okay. They were aspiring computer programmers or some such. I was about to say that after I got out of school I may go to Chicago to work at an agency, or be an art director, until I can get the comics going full time. Also, that a bigger city would no doubt help get better connections no matter which way I went.

But I didn't get past "Move to Chicago to work for an ad agency..." God DAMN you woulda thought I'd just said I was going to try out for NASA, or wanted to run for President (two things that I STILL think someone should shoot for if that's what they wanna do). Man, they went on lecturing me for a good five minutes about how crazy that was, and how unrealistic it was. I've never been influenced by anyone like that, and wasn't by these guys either, but it was like a scripted After School Special. I mean, the dialogue REALLY seemed like it was that scripted; they were just missing a drunk, grumpy old Dad in the background shouting "You'll never amount to anything!" Were they fucking with me? That's actually the only reason I even stayed around to listen to them for as long as I did - they HAD to be fucking with me and I wanted to call them out. But no, they were dead serious. They were acting as wise benefactors attempting to bestow knowledge on me and bring my head down from the clouds.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall. What they said was really powerful. Not because they actually dissuaded me or made me doubt anything - no, because I had never before seen anyone so blatantly, consciously set such a low ceiling for themselves. They wanted to stay local, get their degrees, and get a job at P&G (which they called Proctor and God). They wanted so badly to sit in a cubicle working for a big company close to home and if you thought about doing ANYTHING else you were a fucking nutjob. If you did NOT want to set the bar so low for yourself, you were just crazy, because they felt the level they'd set the bar at was already astronomically high.

NOW, if that IS your job, if you DO work in your home town, that's FINE. If it's what you ENJOY doing then knock yourself out! That's not what I'm saying here.

I had to break it to them that I didn't even consider the agency job (a route I never took anyway) the challenge, only part 1. Part 2 was breaking into comics full time, maybe starting my own publishing company or comic studio, and start to build something similar to what those crazy Image Comics guys were doing. Fast forward to 2007, and while I still haven't hit many of the goals on my list, I've had Devil's Due for seven years now, and even my own ad agency - companies for which I have relocated OTHER people to the Chicago area.

I should also note that at least one of these guys was always first in line to buy any goofy little shirts or stuff I printed up in High School.

They were telling me that simply moving and getting my FALL BACK ON job was unattainable. That always stuck with me, and I vowed never to forget it. When thinking of various blog topics lately that one just kinda popped into my head. So, it may seem petty, but eleven years later, I think it's finally time to say, in my best Nelson impression, "Haaa haaaaa." I'll think about you guys the next time I'm doing a round of meetings in L.A. at my SECOND office.