In the world of board wargames specifically a company called GMT ( http://www.gmtgames.com/ ) is probably the largest. But my guess would be that they only have a handful of fulltime employees.

Since a historical boardgame consists of a lot of research and design and is then printed on cardboard and paper it is a good candidate for the “long tail” you mentioned. There are a lot of small companies and even one man operations. Some just do the research, design and layout work and then sell the result to the customer as a “print and play” product.

But ultimately it’s an enthusiast driven market. A few people at GMT are probably making a decent living but I doubt anybody is really making “good” money. They do it out of love for the hobby. Outside of GMT the dozens of small board wargame companies probably only support one or two people at a fairly subsistence level.

At the larger companies making general interest boardgames like Fantasy Flight ( http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/index.asp ) there may be more profit potential. These types of games even have a section at Barnes & Noble and often feature recognizable themes like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings which would require some hefty licensing.

Boardgames and board wargames are a lot like books in that they can be collected, preserved and played for decades. In fact, some of them come with hefty manuals that ARE books! The one area where they differ is that boardgames have a social element in that you need other people to actually play most of them.

For a good view into the world of boardgames in general you can check out this website: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/

Back when those sorts of board games were at the height of their popularity (the 1970s and 80s, I’d guess), huge corporations like Hasbro, for instance, were making lots of money from them. That era is presumably over.

But my guess is that today, there are still a lot of people making a lot of money from those sorts of games – just not huge companies. For instance, I’d bet there are a lot of one-man operations selling collectible games at inflated prices on eBay, for instance. And then you have all the small board game start-up companies who originally served a very small, niche customer base, but still made a nice living doing so. (I’m thinking about companies like Crainium, in Seattle.)

Granted, Crainium doesn’t make board wargames, but I’m sure you see what I mean. And interestingly, in the case of Crainium, as I’m sure you know, they somehow turned into a massively successful company, partly by partnering with companies like Starbucks.

As an interesting aside, Seattle has somehow turned into a hot spot of sorts for start-ups that produce board games and card games, and that’s definitely not an entrepreneurial trend we’re seeing anywhere else in the country – at least, not as far as I’m aware.

Anyway, yes: We are essentially making the exact same points. I guess I just tend to prefer looking at the print situation in a glass-half-full kind of light, because I really, really love print.

So, here’s my question for you: Are there, in fact, any small-ish companies out there that you know of that are making good money from producing and/or selling board wargames? Or not so much?

But print will, no doubt, live on in the enthusiast, hobbyist and collector markets. Heck, even hand illuminated manuscripts have not totally “died”. There are still a few guys out there creating them for rich collectors.

Here’s another example. I play board wargames. Board wargames were once a big deal back in the 60s and 70s before the advent of computers and video games. Now they are completely dead to the mainstream but still live on healthily in a tiny little niche market.

A board wargame I buy might sell 3000 copies over it’s entire lifetime at $100 a pop. Meanwhile the latest Call Of Duty video game had a mind-boggling $500,000,000 in sales in it’s first week of release.

What happened to the wargame hobby over the last 20 years with physical completely buried by a massive growth in digital is basically what will happen with all printed media over the next 20 years.

I actually find it really interesting that *that’s* specifically where our viewpoints differ: In your opinion (assuming I’m understanding you correctly), print dies when it becomes a niche product. But I don’t see it that way at all. In the pre-Internet and pre-globalization era, sure, a niche product was a niche product – full stop. But as any small yet still financially successful company with a web presence can tell you, there’s a ton of money to be made these days in niche products of all sorts.

That’s the Long Tail theory, which of course didn’t exist (and was barely possible, with the exception of a few successful mail-order companies) prior to the Internet. And one of the truly wonderful aspects of the Long Tail theory is that lots of people who buy and sell things online nevertheless desire products they can touch and hold. That’s one of the reasons Etsy is so successful, for instance.

Anyway, that’s just my proverbial two cents. I’m certainly not trying to prove you wrong – not at all. Still, it’s kind of interesting that while we agree on where print is heading, we seem to disagree on what that will eventually *mean* for the print side of the publishing industry.

Another factor in screen vs. print book evaluation is that both formats have migrated to digital technologies. In that adoptive cycle print is at an advantage as the commoditized product did not require fundamental development of imaging method, display strategy and end user device.

Finally there is an eerie interdependence of the affordances of the print and screen book. The different affordances of ownership, indexing, text parsing, library resources types and other attributes have a surprising complementary fit within a larger book transmission system. It may be that neither will flourish without the other.

Because until recently there was no tablet market, just an iPad market.

But mama mia! 1 in 5 U.S. adults owns an iPad? That’s a lot of iPads!

When considering a question like this you can’t just look at the current state of things. You have to look at the trend. Look at the rate of growth of digital media over the last 5 years and then project it into the future.

You also have to look at the habits of the younger generation. We older people have legacy behavior patterns that remain from the age of pure print.

But younger people have new norms. For them print is something that they only use when they are forced to; for instance when they buy college textbooks. The next generation won’t even be dealing with print for textbooks.

As the older generations who still think of printed magazines and newspapers as the norm and digital as the upstart age, retire and die the last remnants of print media will fade away also.

You may see magazines at the checkout lane for another ten years. But there is no doubt that they will eventually be replaced by a flashing display where you can plug in your pad or tablet and make an instant digital purchase.

Print’s not dead–not even close–and it never will be. Will it become even smaller than it is today? Almost without a doubt. Will it become more of a niche market? Almost certainly. But it’ll still be here, in one form or another, long after you and I are gone.

Meanwhile the paper industry has closed its water-based mill streams, advanced recycle material networks and planted two trees for everyone used. From the end user perspective paper books also have ecological advantage as they are not energy dependent, are not prone to obsolescence every few years and are not victimized by on-line ads for unsustainable consumption.

RFIF = RFID (or similar radio based ID system. Barcodes, old style or newer QR codes, which ‘scan’ implies to me, wont work as well at a distance.