Our culture tends to have knee-jerk reactions. As eBooks have been on the rise, many people say the printed book will die. It is very true that paper mills are closing and that physical book sales are way down. But I predict that the printed page will continue for many years.
Moving from physical artifacts to digital artifacts is a major trend. It is so much cheaper to produce an eBook than to print a paper book. Physical books may become a luxury item. Ironically, companies that do very small print runs are on the rise. People still value something they can hold and smell.
Maybe posters will all turn digital, kind of like Times Square or Piccadilly Circus. A problem: the shoot-from-the-hip aspect is much harder to do digitally. (Have you tried to hire a hacker lately? I’d guess that it would be expensive to get someone to hack into a Times Square billboard.) People with some glue and 50 printed sheets can plaster a city center pretty quickly.
So don’t rule out the printed page – just yet.
