Will cats—see photo—be the only ones left to watch Seinfeld reruns someday?
“The average American consumer spent 3,530 hours with media in 2006–down 0.5% from 2005, according to the just-released estimates from the 21st edition of Veronis Suhler Stevenson’s Communications Industry Forecast,” reports MediaDailyNews.
One reason supplied? Digital media can more efficiently convey information. “For example, consumers typically watch broadcast or cable television at least 30 minutes per session, while they spend as little as five to seven minutes viewing consumer-generated video,” says a report quoted in the article.
Book angles
So what does this mean for p- and e-book? For one thing, editors had better sharpen their real and virtual pencils and help writers be succinct in books—well, at least in utilitarian and popular writings, as opposed to literary works. Good use of hyperlinks could help consumers go directly to facts of most interest.
But is that the only real answer? Is the signal-to-noise ratio of a YouTube mashup the same as that of one of a well-done PBS documentary—or a long but well-written and informative book? Perhaps schools and libraries need to do a better job of helping students make books (and detailed information) a part of their lives.
Where fiction enters the picture
At a time when some educators and librarians are suggesting that fiction is less valuable than nonfiction, we need novels more than ever—to engage young people in lengthy works. A forthcoming TeleBlog item, by Isabelle Fetherston, a librarian in Florida, will examine the importance of fiction in the library world.
The actual Forecast: Here—for $1,995. Or if you feel you don’t need in-depth info, you can be efficient and content yourself with just a news release from Veronis Suhler Stevenson.
An advertising angle: VSS and the related MediaDaily article discuss the impact of media trends on advertising. The decreased time with traditional media is not great news for traditional outlets. On the other hand, maybe this could mean more income for smaller sites. “In what would be a watershed moment in communications history,” says the release, “VSS predicts that Internet advertising—including pure-play websites and digital extensions of traditional media—will replace newspapers as the largest ad medium in 2011.”
Hmm. Could a little of the ad money now going to newspapers end up in e-books with geographically driven ads? Is it more than an accident that HarperCollins, which has experimented with ads in at least one online book, is part of the empire of Rupert Murdoch, the buyer of the Wall Street Journal? He’s a big believer in media convergence.
It’s fun to speculate; that’s all I’m doing here. For what it’s worth, however, Theresa Horner, HarperCollins senior director of e-books, recently offered an interesting quote to the Washington Post for a Sony Reader write-up. “When you’re able to do all your reading material in one place,” she said, “that’s when the idea of a reading device becomes much more appealing to the mass market.”
