Hope for print?

Going back to visit my folks next week and I always enjoy wallowing in their newspaper deliveries. Two weeklies. Three dailies. (including yours, Kato). Each morning, by the time I'm done with all of them, my fingers are covered in ink.

Sort of a sidebar on democratization, but with books, it seems readers are also regaining an appreciation for the role gatekeepers play in the industry. The self-publishing craze has subsided a bit, one reason being there was just so much out there -- some of it good, a lot of it horrific -- that readers do understand that agents and editors at traditional publishers play a role in the quality of books (yes, a lot of crap books are still published traditionally).

As the spouse of an agent, I'm hoping print books continue their comeback. #advances

 

The second part, and the idea that you might not know you'd care to read something are the reasons I still believe in the newspaper. And I think its demise will be bad for society in the long run. I read stories every day in the paper that I otherwise wouldn't have if it wasn't packaged the way it is. I do the same on the Interent, but it's not as easy. I think we'll definitely be less informed. Hell, it's been happening already.

 

My family has never not had at least one daily paper delivered to the house. In the good old days, we had as many as five. Completely agree with the notion that we need gatekeepers to push information that we would otherwise miss out on. One of the great pleasures in my life is stopping in small towns to buy a paper and see what strangeness is going on locally.