Vitality of paper

Alessandro Ludovico wrote in his book titled “Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing” that we have heard of offices without any paper but never seen any in person.

I have once thought that books and cancer are in a similar situation in that we have heard that they will be gone for decades but they are still with us. A look at an image on Twitter shared by U.S. news magazine Newsweek on Christmas Eve in 2012 made me highly suspicious that paper may really go extinct because a message came across as deeply dramatic and tragic: “#LAST PRINT ISSUE.” However, print editions have since continued to exist. Even 10 years later, they still do.

To everyone’s surprise, it was so long ago that people expected that print papers and books will be replaced by electronic devices. Scientists and futurists reiterated that libraries would turn into a repository of voice records whereas books will give way to optical gadgets. Partially, their outlook turned out to be right as seen in the cases of telegraph, microfilm, radio, TV and Internet.

Every time a new communications method came along to become available, people would shout, “Paper and books will become obsolete very soon!” Nevertheless, it is not the case. Look at the power of paper. In such a fast-changing world, methods of content delivery are extended to AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality) and beyond. I sometimes feel sorry for what I do as a paper book designer when such new inventions make a threatening debut. With it being said, paper will survive strenuously just as cancer cells do. It may be too early to pay condolences to the death of paper.