Newspapers, Magazines and Books! Oh My!
I enjoyed this piece in Fortune about the future of books and newspapers and magazines. The writer, Josh Quittner, starts out with a nice little anecdote about how his 12-year-old recently subscribed to Vogue.
Each month Clem was excited when Vogue arrived. She’d rip into the issue and scamper up the stairs to her chambre à coucher, with enough enthusiasm to do Anna Wintour proud. But after digesting each issue, Clem would reappear with it hours later — only now a zillion Post-its jutted from its pages, stegosaurus-like.
Over time, one by one, those stegosauri began to stack up, spines out, in her closet. One day I decided to take a peek at the dinosaur graveyard to see what my daughter was tagging so furiously. It turned out that she was trying to annotate each issue, sorting the material by outfits, accessories, footwear, and other categories for later reference. I noticed that the more issues she tagged, the more frustrated she became. This was a lot of work. So why was she doing it?
“Don’t you get it?” my wife observed. “She’s trying to turn the magazine into a computer.”
Et voilà! Of course she was.
