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Sigh, the p-edition of PC Magazine will vanish: Yet another lesson for book publishers
November 19, 2008 | 8:25 am
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By David Rothman
With up to 600 pages, PC Magazine once looked like a small telephone book. It started up in 1982, and I could no more imagine it disappearing than I could the Empire State Building.
Early next year, however, PC Mag will exist only as an online publication.
The current Web site is here, complete with a headline from a John Dvorak commentary: Why Google must die. My friend made some clueful comments about Google’s shortcomings as a search engine—as opposed to wishing away such services—but the accidental irony couldn’t escape me.
Who and what killed PC Magazine’s print edition, beyond the current recession?
Another example of paper’s limits
First off, the limitations of paper did, and that’s another lesson for the IDPF standards-setters and book publishers who don’t want to venture into interbook linking and standardized annotations. PC Magazine to a great extent is for shoppers foraging for specifics on a hot new desktop, printer or monitor—the very stuff that Google helps dig up from many sources at once.
The Web serves as a more efficient conduit for product information or exchange of opinions than paper does. In addition, it has given birth to tiny but more precisely targeted specialty publications, including blogs like this one.
The real shocker of the moment
So the demise of the print edition—the January issue is the last—was and is inevitable. The real shocker of the moment is that Wikipedia’s item on PC Mag hasn’t been updated as of now (8:25 a.m., Washington, D.C. time)
Less free-PR for high-tech vendors at the grocery store: Would you believe, grocery and drug chains are publicity outlets for high-tech products. Indeed—through magazine cover stories displayed at newsstands. Now there’ll be one fewer cover to tout "The Best New PCs."
Also of interest: Pulp magazines struggle to survive in wired world, Simon Owens’ terrific SF-oriented piece on the PBS site—spotted by Paul Biba.
The copy-protection angle: From Wikipedia: "The publication also took on a series of editorial causes over the years, including copy protection (the magazine refused to grant its coveted Editors’ Choice award to any product that used copy protection)…" Crusades like this made PC Magazine more than a mere ad conduit.
Related: The printer’s devil—and the promise of e-books, by Lancelot Kirby.
Technorati Tags: PC Magazine,PC Mag
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Comments:
The problem here is that it’s not going to be relased for ebook reader but the web and that means the pig that cant fly scheme of LCD screen with limited battery life and all that, just as it have been the case for any major discontinuity of print publicatings, it’s just not promising good for the traditional Ebook industry since the profit becomes a lot more dependent on dayly service then the normal book publishers are used to, and not one of the fancy DRM schmes theyve invested so much in.
1) Playgirl
2) Christian Science Monitor
3) PC Magazine
NEXT!
I’m a long-term and long-time print subscriber to PC Magazine. What this means is that it will be one less magazine I’ll read and subscribe to. I hate nothing more than having to read for pleasure on my computer.
Actually, PC Magazine is not being discontinued; only its print edition is headed for the graveyard. The digital edition of the magazine (as opposed to the web site) will continue to be published, at least for now.
Greg: Exactly. Duly noted in the original post here. PCM will continue online. Thanks. David
The publishers are keeping the website name “PCmag.com” and the words “PC Magazine” still appear on the website, but I wonder if the word “magazine” will survive. A format consisting of a bundle of paper pages containing an assemblage of articles will probably be relegated to collector status in the coming decades. Thus, the term “magazine” might be invoked as often as the term “phonograph cylinder” in the future.
But I think the name “magazine” probably will endure by changing its meaning. It is already used to refer to television programs that present “a variety of topics, usually on current events, in a format that often includes interviews and commentary” according to the American Heritage Dictionary. Similarly, the term “magazine” might just shift meanings and become an alternative name for a website or for a package of electronic news and opinion articles.
The Christian Science Monitor newspaper also became an online only publication. Does it make sense to continue the use of the word “newspaper” when no “paper” is involved in the final presentation? Will the term “newspaper” shift its semantics or become obsolete?
These words were penned by Garson O’Toole; however no pen was involved in the process.
I think the internet has dramatically altered the way we use media, and our expectations of it, in ways that are no longer compatible with traditional print magazines and newspapers. Maybe not me specifically, nor most people in my generation or generations that preceded me, but definitely the younger generations who were born into an increasingly wired world and have come to take instant access to specific bits of information for granted.
Acting as devil’s advocate here, let me ask why it makes sense to read an entire article, never mind an entire publication, to acquire a single fact or statement of interest? We live in a bottom-line-it-for-me-baby society, in which cell phone texting and apps like Twitter train us to not only speak and write, but even think, in fragments. I’m not saying this is necessarily a good thing, and in fact I think our collective downward spiral into Attention Deficit Disorder is a very, very bad thing where art, literature and culture in general are concerned.
But there’s the world as we wish it was, and the world as it really is. For better or for worse the tribe has spoken, and what the tribe wants from its information sources is tags, Twitters and sound bytes, along with social media networks like Digg and Technorati to discern the most worthy information sources FOR us. In other words, whether we realize it or not we’re outsourcing the very process of critical thinking.
Oh, and in case it wasn’t clear from my previous post, my point is that it’s very easy to search online information sources for specific facts or bits of information, whereas a print article must be read all the way through to determine if it has specific facts or statements of interest to you.
Of course, reading the whole article will expose the reader to a more complete picture of whatever subject is at hand, and perhaps introduce new ideas or facts to the reader as well. This hunt-and-peck approach to reading and communication is not very conducive to enlarging minds or bodies of information.