Last night I received an email which said that Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine would no longer produce a print edition as of issue #64. It is disappointing but not surprising, especially considering I bought the digital version of issue #62. Mea culpa, all right. I'm just glad I sneaked into Andromeda’s (physical) pages before the end.
There are a dozen good reasons why a small publisher would go all digital in 2016; that it’s cheaper and it’s how a great many readers want to consume their fiction are sufficient on their own. Yet I can’t help but feel a little unsettled at the continuing demise of print*, and it has nothing – well, okay, almost nothing – to do with nostalgia.
The thing about a printed book or magazine is that it is a physical object. Once it is printed, it becomes an historical artefact, and history is humanity’s memory. It’s how we know where we have been, who we were, how we felt about our world at a given point. It also helps inform where we are headed. Printed words preserve that information. Sure, a book could get damaged or thrown out, but bookworms are typically hoarders as well. So there’s a good chance a printed book could be read in ten or twenty or a hundred years’ time.
Digital publications, on the other hand, have a shelf-life that’s only as long as the technology that supports them. When a website closes down, or an electronic platform becomes obsolete, the stories disappear along with them. And that means civilisation is at risk of developing mass amnesia. What are the chances there will still be functioning iPads or Kindles a century from now?
* All is not necessarily lost. Magazine readership is on the increase again, according to recent figures from research and data company, Roy Morgan. As a professional magazine editor of more than 15 years, it doesn’t surprise me. Smart publishers have at last figured out that trying to beat the internet at its own game is a losing strategy, and are now playing to magazines’ strengths – immersion and trustworthiness.