Convergence, or is it Divergence?

The book market has long bubbled along with the underlying economy. Rivers were our first highways, advances in transportation made it possible to bring food and fuel to support cities. With population concentration, universal education was needed to facilitate inventions and manufacturing advances. Step by step the printed word became the connective tissue to build societies. Books, which had been the property of the well to do, were now finding their place with the emerging green sprouts of what would become the middle class.

As both printing and papermaking became more efficient and less expensive in the mid-19^th century, these advances made the emergence of the penny newspaper economically possible. Increasingly filled with advertisements that underwrote the cost of reporting, composition, printing and distribution, newspapers became one of the important sinews of literacy.

The printing model would be durable even as radios became standard fare in the 1930’s. In the late 1940’s, television entered the fray. Even so, newspapers held on as almost 90% of American households had at least one Motorola, Admiral or Dumont by 1960. It was that year America debated the impact of Nixon’s makeup man. They could think about it because they saw the debate on television.

With advent of the internet in the 1990’s newspapers entered a death spiral. News, over the past 400 years, had been selected, organized, and explained by those who worked within media. With the emergence of the internet, the observer could search for personally relevant data, giving them the capacity to aggregate facts that are particular to their interests or circumstance. As this became the norm, newspapers and other traditional media saw a loss of readership.

To protect their position, they have increasingly become interpreters of events and issues that their readers already acquired the facts through internet searches. Competitive with the media interpreters, analysts and commentators emerged to develop followings. Whether its sports, entertainment, politics or collectible paper, they have become silos where the interested live.

Those who have lived a long time, they know, remember and appreciate how newspapers captured their world. Those who are younger than 40 now rarely subscribe to receive printed copies.

As a site that follows the collectible paper field, we are left wondering how the future will look back at how we started our days, wanting and relying on paper copies that are one by one are now disappearing.

We grew up believing the future is better than the past. So far, I’ll say no, not yet.