Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
This may be relevant:
Why newspaper markets are growing in China and India, while they decline in the US and UK
Where I live, newspapers are collapsing, with circulation down by half, and advertising revenue fallen much more sharply.
Re paper books in the US:
Strange as it may seem, we know of no reliable, publicly-available way to get comprehensive statistics for book sales . . .
My impression is that sales of bound books are holding up much better, in the US, than periodicals. Book shelf space, in stores, is way down, but a lot of that is due to Amazon selling loads of printed paper.
Is the US a leading indicator for the rest of the world? Don't know. |
I do think a decline world-wide will happen at some point in the future when the developing nations too move on to electronic media, but it's not happening now. From a universal perspective, a growth in print of even 15% in India and China (but not restricted to just those two nations) offsets the losses in the developed world purely by virtue of the larger populations in the developing world. With rising literacy, this can only grow for years to come.
Media conglomerates will cope just fine by setting up subsidiaries in the emerging markets. Local newspapers in the developed world will lack this ability to leverage global reach, but on the flip side local newspapers in the emerging markets couldn't be happier with their increasing circulations.
If one considers localised pockets like the developed countries, print is in decline. But looking at the overall picture, I don't think one would be wrong in stating that print is definitely still a growing medium.