Physical Books Have Only 5 Years to Live

No more than two years ago, editors from some of the world's most renowned magazines said that printing will not disappear entirely for at least another decades – their estimates have now halved.

Even the editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, told the New York Observer that the magazine, in its current format, still had a long way to go before it was replaced.

His argument was that people move on slowly in picking up new technologies, and that at least 10 years were needed for people to get accustomed to the new media.

“Technology adoption happens slowly. This is the editor of Wired telling you no. Obviously, newspapers are going to be changing dramatically over the next few years, but magazines are not newspapers,” he said.

“ And I think magazines 10 years from now are going to look something like they do now,” Anderson said in 2008.

Now, only 24 months later, he and the editors for the Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, among others, are already working on applications that will see their magazine brought to portable devices. Most of them are already on the iPads.

The most recent estimates show that the change is happening faster than anyone believed. Statistics show that sales of books for the Kindle device have just exceeded those for hardcover books.

“People will say 'no, no, no' – of course you like your libraries,” says Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The expert is also the the father of the One Laptop Per Child project. “It's happening. It not happening in 10 years. It's happening in 5 years,” he says.

“I still think that ten years from now we'll still have lots of print magazines, along with lots of print books, and they will be more-or-less like they are now,” the expert says, quoted by Technology Review.

“What I've changed my mind about is what fraction of the market they will be. E-readers, from tablets to smart phones, have matured faster than I thought they would back in 2008,” Negroponte adds.

According to analysts, we are currently approaching a point where the adoption rates for devices such as e-readers will explode out of control.

When this happens, the feedback and network effects will begin to take hold, and the products will inevitably penetrate the entire market.