The Future of Printed Books

• " don’t worry about the fate of print books. Heck, you’ll be neck deep in them"
  By Clive Thompson
• November 29, 2011 
• Wired December 2011

Illustration: David Schwen

Will the ebook kill off the print book?”
Every time I hear that question, I think about the “paperless office.” Back in the ’80s, the rise of word processors and email convinced a lot of people that paper would vanish. Why print anything when you could simply squirt documents around electronically?
We all know how that turned out. Paper use exploded; indeed, firms that adopted email used 40 percent more paper. That’s because even in a world of screens, paper offers unique ways to organize and share your thoughts, as Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper noted in The Myth of the Paperless Office. There’s also this technology truism to consider: When you make something easier to do, people do more of it. Now that every office worker has access to a computer and a printer, every office worker can design and distribute elaborate multicolor birthday flyers and spiral-bound presentations.
“Print-on-demand” publishing is about to do the same thing to books. It’ll keep them alive—by allowing them to be much weirder.
Print-on-demand devices, like the Espresso Book Machine, do just what their name implies: You feed them a digital file and in minutes you have a good-looking paperback with a color cover. (Print-on-demand companies like Lulu or Blurb even produce hardcover and photo books.)
In a precise parallel to the office-printing boom, print-on-demand is creating an odd new phenomenon that Blurb founder Eileen Gittens calls social publishing. Photo-and-storybook records of camping trips or corporate retreats are created as mementos for participants. There are technical manuals devoted to superniche software. And there are oceans of memoirs and poetry books, often printed in runs of one.
The full article at Wired magazine.