But who will speak for the trees?
23rd July 2010
Seth Godin is one of those business-buzzword gurus who is famous chiefly for uttering trendy oracular aphorisms and selling books to fashionable corporate executives (and those who would be etc.). But even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.
It’s paper that makes the economics of the newspaper industry work (or not work). It’s paper that creates cost and slows things down and generates scarcity. And scarcity is what they sell.
It’s paper that makes the book industry what it is. As soon as you remove paper from the equation, the costs change, the timing changes, the barriers to entry change, the risk changes. And defenders of the status quo don’t like change.
Is there not enough paper in your life? Why are we wringing our hands about the demise of paper as the economic gating factor for ideas? In fact, some of the trees I know are delighted that we’ve found a better, faster, cheaper way to spread ideas.
If the demise of paper means that good people doing good work in important industries will have to find faster and better ways to do their jobs, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.