Steve Rubel Says Print Media is Dead | Big Think

Steve Rubel Says Print Media is Dead

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We will see the decline of print media in five years, according to the digital expert.

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Question: What is the future of print media?

Steve Rubel: You’ve got to look at the statistics and the trend lines. You know, when you look at the statistics from Amazon. When there’s a Kindle, when the book is available in both Kindle format, Amazon Kindle format and print format, 35 percent of the time Amazon sells the Kindle format.

That’s a big number. I mean that’s the biggest, one of the biggest book retailers in the world and 35 percent of the books that they sell in Kindle format which is a huge number, I mean, it’s like you know, hundreds of thousands of titles is in Kindle format and they’re just getting going.

So, I mean, that’s a that’s a 2.0 device. Imagine when it’s a 5.0 device or imagine when the iPhone is you know, which now is a 2.0 device, imagine when that’s you know, a 5.0 device, you know, also uses the kindle format so, it’s coming.

Also, demographically you have to look at the younger audience too, they grew up reading on screens and so I think that for books, we’re going to, you know, I think that will be either eroded or really sharp decline by five years. I think newspapers, I mean, they’re already on their way out a lot of them in recent print, regionally faster than nationally, we’ll see about the national ones.

DVDs I think, you know, as great as blue-ray is a format I think we’re going to see over the air, over the internet downloading be the preferable way to go and get the content as the speeds pickup, devices improve, you know, and even video games as great as video games are as CDs, I think that we’re seeing you know, this whole notion of downloadable games wether it be on your iPhone or, you know, downloadable through the X-Box live system which I actually have in my house and even those titles are big, and it’s hard to push those down a pipe right now, it’s coming and so I just don’t see...

I think the one area where I could probably be wrong is magazines, because people seem to like the tangible feeling to them but I just see, you know, I commute in the Long Island Railroad to New York everyday and I look and, you know, I started commuting in 1999. You had to have a newspaper to get on the train and you do not get on the train unless you have a newspaper. Now, you know, it’s probably two-to-one you know, devices versus newspapers. So, and it’s shrinking, I think it shrinks everyday so that’s you know, I'm putting a five-year timeline on it like I said, I can be wrong but I think a lot of these are going to be accelerated by that.

Question: Which print media companies are making a smooth transition to digital?

Steve Rubel: The New York Times I think has done a remarkable job. I mean, you know, these sites have done a remarkable job as it relates to the delivery of content and the presentation and the format and the approach versus the monetization. So those two things are sometimes very different.

So, the Times has done an incredible job, I think, creating a website that’s just been nothing short of amazing. Everything from what the average users use when they go there, to the features that if you really, you know, surf and you found them are incredible, I don’t know if you know Snap but the Times it’s actually tagging every single story in your website with topics and I think if you go to topics.nytimes.com, you can pick any topic you’re interested in. If you’re interested in Alex Rodriguez or you’re interested in, you know, Apple or you’re interested in Barack Obama, you can pick any topic you want and you can navigate all the stories that are tagged with that topic in a fantastic interface including articles that are highlighted articles that show you the most recent things that are really notable as opposed to just mention some stories.

It’s beautiful and you can subscribe to the feed,they have that, they also have an incredible developer platform that lets developers create things on top of their work, they're developing prototypes that are unbelievable. They launched and they called it the Times Wire which is kind of a live stream of the stories in a stream format as opposed to a this is the most important story of the day. So, they’re doing a lot with it. I mean their iPhone act is incredible.

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